Where I'm Calling From

for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.
    In the driveway in the dark, he’d let one fall as he fumbled with the door.
    The front door was permanently locked since the night his key had broken off inside it. He went around to the back. There was a wreath on the patio door. He rapped on the glass. Vera was in her bathrobe. She looked out at him and frowned.
    She opened the door a little.
    Burt said, “I want to apologize to you for last night. I want to apologize to the kids, too.”
    Vera said, “They’re not here.”
    She stood in the doorway and he stood on the patio next to the philodendron plant. He pulled at some lint on his sleeve.
    She said, “I can’t take any more. You tried to burn the house down.”
    “I did not.”
    “You did. Everybody here was a witness.”
    He said, “Can I come in and talk about it?”
    She drew the robe together at her throat and moved back inside.
    She said, “I have to go somewhere in an hour.”
    He looked around. The tree blinked on and off. There was a pile of colored tissue paper and shiny boxes at one end of the sofa. A turkey carcass sat on a platter in the center of the dining-room table, the leathery remains in a bed of parsley as if in a horrible nest. A cone of ash filled the fireplace. There were some empty Shasta cola cans in there too. A trail of smoke stains rose up to the bricks to the mantel, where the wood that stopped them was scorched black.
    He turned around and went back to the kitchen.
    He said, “What time did your friend leave last night?”
    She said, “If you’re going to start that, you can go right now.”
    He pulled a chair out and sat down at the kitchen table in front of the big ashtray. He closed his eyes and opened them. He moved the curtain aside and looked out at the backyard. He saw a bicycle without a front wheel standing upside down. He saw weeds growing along the redwood fence.
    She ran water into a saucepan. “Do you remember Thanksgiving?” she said. “I said then that was the last holiday you were going to wreck for us. Eating bacon and eggs instead of turkey at ten o’clock at night.”
    “I know it,” he said. “I said I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry isn’t good enough.”
    The pilot light was out again. She was at the stove trying to get the gas going under the pan of water.
    “Don’t burn yourself,” he said. “Don’t catch yourself on fire.”
    He considered her robe catching fire, him jumping up from the table, throwing her down onto the floor and rolling her over and over into the living room, where he would cover her with his body. Or should he run to the bedroom for a blanket?
    “Vera?”
    She looked at him.
    “Do you have anything to drink? I could use a drink this morning.”
    “There’s some vodka in the freezer.”
    “When did you start keeping vodka in the freezer?”
    “Don’t ask.”
    “Okay,” he said, “I won’t ask.”
    He got out the vodka and poured some into a cup he found on the counter.
    She said, “Are you just going to drink it like that, out of a cup?” She said, “Jesus, Burt. What’d you want to talk about, anyway? I told you I have someplace to go. I have a flute lesson at one o’clock.”
    “Are you still taking flute?”
    “I just said so. What is it? Tell me what’s on your mind, and then I have to get ready.”
    “I wanted to say I was sorry.”
    She said, “You said that.”
    He said, “If you have any juice, I’ll mix it with this vodka.”
    She opened the refrigerator and moved things around.
    “There’s cranapple juice,” she said.
    “That’s fine,” he said.
    “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said.
    He drank the cup of cranapple juice and vodka. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the big ashtray that always sat on the kitchen table. He studied the butts in it. Some of them were Vera’s brand, and some of them weren’t. Some even were lavender-colored. He got up and dumped it all under the sink.
    The ashtray was not really an ashtray. It was a big dish of stoneware they’d bought from a bearded potter on the mall in Santa Clara. He rinsed it out and dried it. He put it back on the table. And then he ground out his cigarette in it.
    The water on the stove began to bubble just as the phone began to ring.
    He heard her open the bathroom door and call to him through the living room. “Answer that! I’m about to get