Where I'm Calling From

for us to come eat with her. “My icebox is defrosting,” she tells me. “I have to fry up this chicken before it rots.” She says we should bring our own plates and some knives and forks. She’s packed most of her dishes and kitchen things. “Come on and eat with me one last time,” she says. “You and Jill.”
    I hang up the phone and stand at the window for a minute longer, wishing I could figure this thing out.
    But I can’t. So finally I turn to Jill and say, “Let’s go to my mother’s for a good-bye meal.”
    Jill is at the table with a Sears catalogue in front of her, trying to find us some curtains. But she’s been listening. She makes a face. “Do we have to?” she says. She bends down the corner of a page and closes the catalogue. She sighs. “God, we been over there to eat two or three times in this last month alone. Is she ever actually going to leave?”
    Jill always says what’s on her mind. She’s thirty-five years old, wears her hair short, and grooms dogs for a living. Before she became a groomer, something she likes, she used to be a housewife and mother.
    Then all hell broke loose. Her two children were kidnapped by her first husband and taken to live in Australia. Her second husband, who drank, left her with a broken eardrum before he drove their car through a bridge into the Elwha River. He didn’t have life insurance, not to mention property-damage insurance. Jill had to borrow money to bury him, and then—can you beat it?—she was presented with a bill for the bridge repair. Plus, she had her own medical bills. She can tell this story now. She’s bounced back. But she has run out of patience with my mother. I’ve run out of patience, too. But I don’t see my options.
    “She’s leaving day after tomorrow,” I say. “Hey, Jill, don’t do any favors. Do you want to come with me or not?” I tell her it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I’ll say she has a migraine. It’s not like I’ve never told a lie before.
    “I’m coming,” she says. And like that she gets up and goes into the bathroom, where she likes to pout.
    We’ve been together since last August, about the time my mother picked to move up here to Longview from California. Jill tried to make the best of it. But my mother pulling into town just when we were trying to get our act together was nothing either of us had bargained for. Jill said it reminded her of the situation with her first husband’s mother. “She was a clinger,” Jill said. “You know what I mean? I thought I was going to suffocate.
    It’s fair to say that my mother sees Jill as an intruder. As far as she’s concerned, Jill is just another girl in a series of girls who have appeared in my life since my wife left me. Someone, to her mind, likely to take away affection, attention, maybe even some money that might otherwise come to her. But someone deserving of respect? No way. I remember—how can I forget it?—she called my wife a whore before we were married, and then called her a whore fifteen years later, after she left me for someone else.
    Jill and my mother act friendly enough when they find themselves together. They hug each other when they say hello or good-bye. They talk about shopping specials. But Jill dreads the time she has to spend in my mother’s company. She claims my mother bums her out. She says my mother is negative about everything and everybody and ought to find an outlet, like other people in her age bracket. Crocheting, maybe, or card games at the Senior Citizens Center, or else going to church. Something, anyway, so that she’ll leave us in peace. But my mother had her own way of solving things. She announced she was moving back to California. The hell with everything and everybody in this town. What a place to live!
    She wouldn’t continue to live in this town if they gave her the place and six more like it.
    Within a day or two of deciding to move, she’d packed her things into boxes. That was last January. Or maybe it was February. Anyway, last winter sometime. Now it’s the end of June. Boxes have been sitting around inside her house for months. You have to walk around them or step over them to get from one room to another. This is no way for anyone’s mother to live.
    After a while, ten minutes or so, Jill comes out of the bathroom. I’ve found a roach and am trying to smoke that and drink a bottle of ginger ale while I watch one of the neighbors change the oil in his car. Jill