Where I'm Calling From

about enough left here for one shooter all around. Then let’s go eat. Let’s go to the new place.”
    “He’s depressed,” Terri said. “Mel, why don’t you take a pill?”
    Mel shook his head. “I’ve taken everything there is.”
    “We all need a pill now and then,” I said.
    “Some people are born needing them,” Terri said.
    She was using her finger to rub at something on the table. Then she stopped rubbing.
    “I think I want to call my kids,” Mel said. “Is that all right with everybody? I’ll call my kids,” he said.
    Terri said, “What if Marjorie answers the phone? You guys, you’ve heard us on the subject of Marjorie?
    Honey, you know you don’t want to talk to Marjorie. It’ll make you feel even worse.”
    “I don’t want to talk to Marjorie,” Mel said. “But I want to talk to my kids.”
    “There isn’t a day goes by that Mel doesn’t say he wishes she’d get married again. Or else die,” Terri said. “For one thing,” Terri said, “she’s bankrupting us. Mel says it’s just to spite him that she won’t get married again. She has a boyfriend who lives with her and the kids, so Mel is supporting the boyfriend too.”
    “She’s allergic to bees,” Mel said. “If I’m not praying she’ll get married again, I’m praying she’ll get herself stung to death by a swarm of fucking bees.”
    “Shame on you,” Laura said.
    “Bzzzzzzz,” Mel said, turning his fingers into bees and buzzing them at Terri’s throat. Then he let his hands drop all the way to his sides.
    “She’s vicious,” Mel said. “Sometimes I think I’ll go up there dressed like a beekeeper. You know, that hat that’s like a helmet with the plate that comes-down over your face, the big gloves, and the padded coat? I’ll knock on the door and let loose a hive of bees in the house. But first I’d make sure the kids were out, of course.”
    He crossed one leg over the other. It seemed to take him a lot of time to do it. Then he put both feet on the floor and leaned forward, elbows on the table, his chin cupped in his hands.
    “Maybe I won’t call the kids, after all. Maybe it isn’t such a hot idea. Maybe we’ll just go eat. How does that sound?”
    “Sounds fine to me,” I said. “Eat or not eat. Or keep drinking. I could head right on out into the sunset.”
    “What does that mean, honey?” Laura said.
    “It just means what I said,” I said. “It means I could just keep going. That’s all it means.”
    “I could eat something myself,” Laura said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life. Is there something to nibble on?”
    “I’ll put out some cheese and crackers,” Terri said.
    But Terri just sat there. She did not get up to get anything.
    Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table.
    “Gin’s gone,” Mel said.
    Terri said, “Now what?”
    I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

Distance

    ‘She’s in Milan for Christmas and wants to know what it was like when she was a kid. Always that on the rare occasions when he sees her.
    Tell me, she says. Tell me what it was like then. She sips Strega, waits, eyes him closely.
    She is a cool, slim, attractive girl, a survivor from top to bottom.
    That was a long time ago. That was twenty years ago, he says. They’re in his apartment on the Via Fabroni near the Cascina Gardens.
    You can remember, she says. Go on, tell me.
    What do you want to hear? he asks. What can I tell you? I could tell you about something that happened when you were a baby. It involves you, he says. But only in a minor way.
    Tell me, she says. But first get us another drink, so you won’t have to interrupt half way through.
    He comes back from the kitchen with drinks, settles into his chair, begins.
    They were kids themselves, but they were crazy in love, this eighteen-year-old boy and his seventeen-year-old girl friend when they married.
    Not all that long afterward they had a daughter.
    The baby came along in late November during a severe cold spell that just happened to coincide with the peak of the waterfowl season in that part of the country. The boy loved to hunt, you see, that’s part of it.
    The boy and girl, husband and wife now, father and mother, lived in a three-room apartment under a dentist’s office. Each night they cleaned the upstairs office in exchange for their rent and