Where I'm Calling From

listened to their prayers, tucked in their covers, and turned out the light. It was nearly nine o’clock. He made himself a drink and watched something on TV until he heard Carol’s car pull into the drive.
    Around ten, while they were in bed together, the phone rang. He swore, but he didn’t get up to answer it.
    It kept ringing.
    “It might be important,” Carol said, sitting up. “It might be my sitter. She has this number.”
    “It’s my wife,” Carlyle said. “I know it’s her. She’s losing her mind. She’s going crazy. I’m not going to answer it.”
    “I have to go pretty soon anyway,” Carol said. “It was real sweet tonight, honey.” She touched his face. 
    It was the middle of the fall term.
    Mrs. Webster had been with him for nearly six weeks. During this time, Carlyle’s life had undergone a number of changes. For one thing, he was becoming reconciled to the fact that Eileen was gone and, as far as he could understand it, had no intention of coming back. He had stopped imagining that this might change. It was only late at night, on the nights he was not with Carol, that he wished for an end to the love he still had for Eileen and felt tormented as to why all of this had happened. But for the most part he and the children were happy; they thrived under Mrs. Webster’s attentions. Lately, she’d gotten into the routine of making their dinner and keeping it in the oven, warming, until his arrival home from school.
    He’d walk in the door to the smell of something good coming from the kitchen and find Keith and Sarah helping to set the dining-room table. Now and again he asked Mrs. Webster if she would care for overtime work on Saturdays. She agreed, as long as it wouldn’t entail her being at his house before noon.
    Saturday mornings, she said, she had things to do for Mr. Webster and herself. On these days, Carol would leave Dodge with Carlyle’s children, all of them under Mrs. Webster’s care, and Carol and he would drive to a restaurant out in the country for dinner. He believed his life was beginning again.
    Though he hadn’t heard from Eileen since that call six weeks ago, he found himself able to think about her now without either being angry or else feeling close to tears.
    At school, they were just leaving the medieval period and about to enter the Gothic. The Renaissance was still some time off, at least not until after the Christmas recess. It was during this time that Carlyle got sick. Overnight, it seemed, his chest tightened and his head began to hurt. The joints of his body became stiff. He felt dizzy when he moved around. The headache got worse. He woke up with it on a Sunday and thought of calling Mrs. Webster to ask her to come and take the children somewhere. They’d been sweet to him, bringing him glasses of juice and some soda pop. But he couldn’t take care of them.
    On the second morning of his illness, he was just able to get to the phone to call in sick. He gave his name, his school, department, and the nature of his illness to the person who answered the number. Then he recommended Mel Fisher as his substitute. Fisher was a man who painted abstract oils three or four days a week, sixteen hours a day, but who didn’t sell or even show his work.
    He was a friend of Carlyle’s. “Get Mel Fisher,” Carlyle told the woman on the other end of the line.
    “Fisher,” he whispered.
    He made it back to his bed, got under the covers, and went to sleep. In his sleep, he heard the pickup engine running outside, and then the backfire it made as the engine was turned off. Sometime later he heard Mrs. Webster’s voice outside the bedroom door.
    “Mr. Carlyle?”
    “Yes, Mrs. Webster.” His voice sounded strange to him. He kept his eyes shut. “I’m sick today. I called the school. I’m going to stay in bed today.”
    “I see. Don’t worry, then,” she said. “I’ll look after things at this end.”
    He shut his eyes. Directly, still in a state between sleeping and waking, he thought he heard his front door open and close. He listened. Out in the kitchen, he heard a man say something in a low voice, and a chair being pulled away from the table. Pretty soon he heard the voices of the children. Sometime later-he wasn’t sure how much time had passed—he heard Mrs. Webster outside his door.
    “Mr. Carlyle, should I call the doctor?”
    “No, that’s all right,” he said. “I think it’s just a bad cold. But I feel hot all over. I think I have too