Where I'm Calling From

doesn’t look at me. Instead, she goes into the kitchen and puts some plates and utensils into a paper sack. But when she comes back through the living room I stand up, and we hug each other. Jill says, “It’s okay.” What’s okay, I wonder. As far as I can see, nothing’s okay. But she holds me and keeps patting my shoulder. I can smell the pet shampoo on her. She comes home from work wearing the stuff. It’s everywhere. Even when we’re in bed together.
    She gives me a final pat. Then we go out to the car and drive across town to my mother’s.
    I like where I live. I didn’t when I first moved here. There was nothing to do at night, and I was lonely. Then I met Jill. Pretty soon, after a few weeks, she brought her things over and started living with me. We didn’t set any long-term goals.
    We were happy and we had a life together. We told each other we’d finally got lucky. But my mother didn’t have anything going in her life. So she wrote me and said she’d decided on moving here. I wrote her back and said I didn’t think it was such a good idea. The weather’s terrible in the winter, I said.
    They’re building a prison a few miles from town, I told her. The place is bumper-to-bumper tourists all summer, I said. But she acted as if she never got my letters, and came anyway. Then, after she’d been in town a little less than a month, she told me she hated the place. She acted as if it were my fault she’d moved here and my fault she found everything so disagreeable. She started calling me up and telling me how crummy the place was. “Laying guilt trips,” Jill called it. She told me the bus service was terrible and the drivers unfriendly. As for the people at the Senior Citizens—well, she didn’t want to play casino.
    “They can go to hell,” she said, “and take their card games with them.” The clerks at the supermarket were surly, the guys in the service station didn’t give a damn about her or her car. And she’d made up her mind about the man she rented from, Larry Hadlock. King Larry, she called him. “He thinks he’s superior to everyone because he has some shacks for rent and a few dollars. I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on him.”
    It was too hot for her when she arrived, in August, and in September it started to rain. It rained almost every day for weeks. In October it turned cold. There was snow in November and December. But long before that she began to put the bad mouth on the place and the people to the extent that I didn’t want to hear about it anymore, and I told her so finally. She cried, and I hugged her and thought that was the end of it. But a few days later she started in again, same stuff. Just before Christmas she called to see when I was coming by with her presents. She hadn’t put up a tree and didn’t intend to, she said. Then she said something else. She said if this weather didn’t improve she was going to kill herself.
    “Don’t talk crazy,” I said.
    She said, “I mean it, honey. I don’t want to see this place again except from my coffin. I hate this g.d. place. I don’t know why I moved here. I wish I could just die and get it over with.”
    I remember hanging on to the phone and watching a man high up on a pole doing something to a power line. Snow whirled around his head. As I watched, he leaned out from the pole, supported only by his safety belt. Suppose he falls, I thought. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to say next. I had to say something. But I was filled with unworthy feelings, thoughts no son should admit to. “You’re my mother,” I said finally. “What can I do to help?”
    “Honey, you can’t do anything,” she said. “The time for doing anything has come and gone. It’s too late to do anything. I wanted to like it here. I thought we’d go on picnics and take drives together. But none of that happened. You’re always busy. You’re off working, you and Jill. You’re never at home. Or else if you are at home you have the phone off the hook all day. Anyway, I never see you,” she said.
    “That’s not true,” I said. And it wasn’t. But she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. Maybe she hadn’t.
    “Besides,” she said, “this weather’s killing me. It’s too damned cold here. Why didn’t you tell me this was the North Pole? If you had, I’d never have come. I want to go back to California, honey. I can get out and go places there. I don’t know anywhere to go here. There are people back