The Call

and then that day the phone rang and my father dropped his fork on his plate and said, “who’s that?” as if any of us knew and I said, “I’ll get it” and I jumped up while he put his elbows on the table and clasped his fingers together in front of him and turned his head in anger towards the window where our two dogs stood looking in with their noses puffing the glass and my mother sitting there so erect with her food in front of her like a chore and I picked up the phone and it was my sister because she had moved away and had another child and I was always such a smart ass and would not get my mother like she kept asking me to but then finally I heard something in her voice that took over and I held the phone out and all I could say was “mom” and she leapt up, clutching her napkin in her hand, and she took the phone and I backed away to watch these next events unfold, that still unfold all these years later so slowly in my mind: the phone shaking in my mother’s hand, her other hand down at her side, still clutching the napkin, it trembling too, my brother looking up, my father now looking at me, and just as I start to shrug, my mother saying, “no, no, no, no, no...” louder and louder as she pounds her fist against her leg, over and over again and the sound of my father’s chair screeching as he pushes himself away from the table and for some reason I keep looking at that bit of napkin being squeezed so hard in her fist until all of a sudden, like a siren in the night, that awful scream none of us will ever forget as she falls to the floor as my father rushes over, as the base of the phone slips off the counter, following the cord until it crashes onto the tile beside her, the sound of her now moaning in that heap as my father reaches down for the phone as if that was something he should do.