Where I'm Calling From

anything she’s forgetting. Salt and pepper! “Sit down,” she says.
    We draw our chairs up to the table, and Jill takes the plates out of the sack and hands them around the table to us. “Where are you going to live when you go back?” she says. “Do you have a place lined up?”
    My mother passes the chicken to Jill and says, “I wrote that lady I rented from before. She wrote back and said she had a nice first-floor place I could have. It’s close to the bus stop and there’s lots of stores in the area. There’s a bank and a Safeway. It’s the nicest place. I don’t know why I left there.” She says that and helps herself to some coleslaw.
    “Why’d you leave then?” Jill says. “If it was so nice and all.” She picks up her drumstick, looks at it, and takes a bite of the meat.
    “I’ll tell you why. There was an old alcoholic woman who lived next door to me. She drank from morning to night. The walls were so thin I could hear her munching ice cubes all day. She had to use a walker to get around, but that still didn’t stop her. I’d hear that walker scrape, scrape against the floor from morning to night. That and her icebox door closing.” She shakes her head at all she had to put up with. “I had to get out of there. Scrape, scrape all day. I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t live like that.
    This time I told the manager I didn’t want to be next to any alcoholics. And I didn’t want anything on the second floor. The second floor looks out on the parking lot. Nothing to see from there.” She waits for Jill to say something more. But Jill doesn’t comment. My mother looks over at me.
    I’m eating like a wolf and don’t say anything, either. In any case, there’s nothing more to say on the subject. I keep chewing and look over at the boxes stacked against the fridge. Then I help myself to more coleslaw.
    Pretty soon I finish and push my chair back. Larry Hadlock pulls up in back of the house, next to my car, and takes a lawn mower out of his pickup. I watch him through the window behind the table. He doesn’t look in our direction.
    “What’s he want?” my mother says and stops eating.
    “He’s going to cut your grass, it looks like,” I say.
    “It doesn’t need cutting,” she says. “He cut it last week. What’s there for him to cut?”
    “It’s for the new tenant,” Jill says. “Whoever that turns out to be.”
    My mother takes this in and then goes back to eating.
    Larry Hadlock starts his mower and begins to cut the grass. I know him a little. He lowered the rent twenty-five a month when I told him it was my mother. He is a widower—a big fellow, mid-sixties. An unhappy man with a good sense of humor. His arms are covered with white hair, and white hair stands out from under his cap. He looks like a magazine illustration of a farmer. But he isn’t a farmer. He is a retired construction worker who’s saved a little money. For a while, in the beginning, I let myself imagine that he and my mother might take some meals together and become friends.
    “There’s the king,” my mother says. “King Larry. Not everyone has as much money as he does and can live in a big house and charge other people high rents. Well, I hope I never see his cheap old face again once I leave here. Eat the rest of this chicken,” she says to me. But I shake my head and light a cigarette.
    Larry pushes his mower past the window.
    “You won’t have to look at it much longer,” Jill says.
    “I’m sure glad of that, Jill. But I know he won’t give me my deposit back.”
    “How do you know that?” I say.
    “I just know,” she says. “I’ve had dealings with his kind before. They’re out for all they can get.”
    Jill says, “It won’t be long now and you won’t have to have anything more to do with him.”
    “I’ll be so glad.”
    “But it’ll be somebody just like him,” Jill says. “I don’t want to think that, Jill,” my mother says.
    She makes coffee while Jill clears the table. I rinse the cups. Then I pour coffee, and we step around a box marked “Knickknacks” and take our cups into the living room.
    Larry Hadlock is at the side of the house. Traffic moves slowly on the street out in front, and the sun has started down over the trees. I can hear the commotion the mower makes. Some crows leave the phone line and settle onto the newly cut grass in the front yard.
    “I’m going to miss you, honey,” my mother says. Then she says, “I’ll miss you,