Where I'm Calling From

who’d buy it? With my luck, I probably have an incurable disease.” And, naturally, the investment thing hadn’t worked out. When I asked him about it over the phone, all he said was that it hadn’t materialized. His tax refund didn’t make it, either—the I.R.S. had some kind of lien on his return. “When it rains it pours,” he said. “I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
    “I understand,” I said. And I did. But it didn’t make it any easier. Anyway, one thing and the other, I didn’t get my money from him, and neither did my mother. I had to keep on sending her money every month.
    I was sore, yes. Who wouldn’t be?
    My heart went out to him, and I wished trouble hadn’t knocked on his door. But my own back was against the wall now. At least, though, whatever happens to him from here on, he won’t come back to me for more money—seeing as how he still owes me. Nobody would do that to you. That’s how I figured, anyway. But that’s how little I knew.
    I kept my nose to the grindstone. I got up early every morning and went to work and worked hard all day. When I came home I plopped into the big chair and just sat there. I was so tired it took me a while to get around to unlacing my shoes. Then I just went on sitting there. I was too tired to even get up and turn on the TV.
    I was sorry about my brother’s troubles. But I had troubles of my own. In addition to my mother, I had several other people on my payroll. I had a former wife I was sending money to every month. I had to do that. I didn’t want to, but the court said I had to. And I had a daughter with two kids in Bellingham, and I had to send her something every month. Her kids had to eat, didn’t they? She was living with a swine who wouldn’t even look for work, a guy who couldn’t hold a job if they handed him one. The time or two he did find something, he overslept, or his car broke down on the way in to work, or else he’d just be let go, no explanation, and that was that.
    Once, long ago, when I used to think like a man about these things, I threatened to kill that guy. But that’s neither here nor there. Besides, I was drinking in those days. In any case, the bastard is still hanging around.
    My daughter would write these letters and say how they were living on oatmeal, she and her kids. (I guess he was starving, too, but she knew better than to mention that guy’s name in her letters to me.) She’d tell me that if I could just carry her until summer things would pick up for her. Things would turn around for her, she was sure, in the summer. If nothing else worked out—but she was sure it would; she had several irons in the fire—she could always get a job in the fish cannery that was not far from where she lived. She’d wear rubber boots and rubber clothes and gloves and pack salmon into cans. Or else she might sell root beer from a vending stand beside the road to people who lined up in their cars at the border, waiting to get into Canada. People sitting in their cars in the middle of summer were going to be thirsty, right? They were going to be crying out for cold drinks. Anyway, one thing or the other, whatever line of work she decided on, she’d do fine in the summer. She just had to make it until then, and that’s where I came in.
    My daughter said she knew she had to change her life. She wanted to stand on her own two feet like everyone else. She wanted to quit looking at herself as a victim. “I’m not a victim,” she said to me over the phone one night. “I’m just a young woman with two kids and a son-of-a bitch bum who lives with me. No different from lots of other women. I’m not afraid of hard work. Just give me a chance. That’s all I ask of the world.” She said she could do without for herself. But until her break came, until opportunity knocked, it was the kids she worried about. The kids were always asking her when Grandpop was going to visit, she said. Right this minute they were drawing pictures of the swing sets and swimming pool at the motel I’d stayed in when I’d visited a year ago. But summer was the thing, she said. If she could make it until summer, her troubles would be over. Things would change then—she knew they would.
    And with a little help from me she could make it. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Dad.” That’s what she said. It nearly broke my heart. Sure I had to help her. I was glad to be even halfway in a position to help her. I