Twenty five missed calls. All from Daniel. The first one at six forty two in the morning. The last one at eight fifty.
Eleven text messages.
Mom call me.
Mom something’s wrong with the bank.
MOM. Call me NOW.
The mortgage bounced. What did you do??
Mom please.
And there was a voicemail. Two minutes and fourteen seconds long.
I put on my robe. I sat down on the edge of my bed. I played it.
His voice was completely different from the night before. The laughter was gone. The slur was gone. He sounded like he had when he was nine years old and broke Mrs. Kaminski’s window with a baseball and came home white as a sheet.
“Mom. Mom, please call me. Please.” He took a shaky breath. “The bank declined everything. The mortgage payment bounced. The school’s auto pay bounced, they sent an email. My business card got declined at the gas station this morning, I had to put gas on Claire’s card, and hers is almost maxed. Claire is losing her mind. She’s crying in the bathroom. Gordon and Patricia are still here, Mom. They stayed over. They’re downstairs right now. What’s going on? What did you do?”
A pause. I could hear him breathing.
“Is this about last night? Is that what this is? Mom, I was drinking, okay? Claire’s family was there, it was a lot of pressure, I didn’t mean any of it. Just… please. Please call me back. Please fix it.”
The message ended.
I listened to it once. Just once.
Then I put the phone face down on my nightstand.
I thought about standing on that porch in the snow. About Sophie on the stairs with her cocoa. About fourteen plates on a white tablecloth. About Claire’s voice, so close to the phone, laughing about my turkey.
Please fix it.
He didn’t say he was sorry. Not really. He said he was drinking, and there was pressure, and he didn’t mean it. But he didn’t say, I’m sorry I left you in the snow. He didn’t say, I’m sorry I told my son you were a stranger.
He just wanted me to fix it.
I got up. I walked into my kitchen. The turkey was still sitting on the counter where I’d left it, still covered in foil. The red gift bag was still beside it.
I put the turkey in the refrigerator.
Then I made myself a cup of coffee, and I stood at my window and drank it slowly, and I watched the sun come up over the Hendersons’ snowman, which had fallen over in the night and was lying face down in the snow.
Ruth knocked on my back door around ten.
Ruth Abramowitz has lived next door for twenty three years. She’s seventy six, a retired court stenographer, five feet tall and fierce as a terrier. She was widowed the year before Richard, and we’d held each other up through a lot of bad nights.
She was holding a plate of rugelach and wearing a sweatshirt that said I SURVIVED ANOTHER MEETING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL.
“Merry Christmas,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be home. Your car’s been here since last night. I figured you’d be at Daniel’s.”
“I’m not at Daniel’s.”
She looked at my face. Then she came inside without being asked and set the rugelach on the counter.
“Sit,” she said. “Tell me.”
So I told her. All of it. The porch, the plates, wrong house, the phone call. The legal pad with the number at the bottom. The twenty five missed calls.
Ruth listened without interrupting, which for Ruth is a miracle. When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
“Four hundred and twelve thousand,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Dollars.”
“Yes, Ruth.”
“Margaret.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Your roof has been leaking for three years. You told me you couldn’t afford a new one.”
“I couldn’t. Not with everything else.”
“You’ve been putting off your eye surgery.”
“I know.”
“You’ve turned down the tulip trip four years running.” She put her glasses back on. “I thought you just didn’t like tulips.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Then, without any warning at all, the laugh turned into something else, and I put my face in my hands at my own kitchen table and cried the way I hadn’t cried since Richard’s funeral.
Ruth didn’t say anything. She got up and stood behind my chair and put her arms around my shoulders and held on.
When I was done, she handed me a dish towel because the tissue box was empty.
“What did he say on the voicemail?” she asked.
“He asked me to fix it.”
“Did he apologize?”
“He said he was drinking.”
Ruth made a sound in her throat. “My Harold used to say that. ‘I was drinking.’ Like it was the weather. Like it just happened to him.”
“He’s my son, Ruth.”
“I know he is, honey.” She sat back down across from me. “And you’re his mother. Not his bank.”
I didn’t call Daniel back that day.
Instead, Ruth and I heated up my turkey in her oven, because she said mine ran cold. She made her sweet potato kugel. Her nephew Benjy came over with his wife and their new baby, and we all sat around Ruth’s little table with the plastic tablecloth that had cartoon reindeer on it.
Benjy had seconds of my turkey. Then thirds.
“Mrs. Whitmore,” he said, with his mouth full, “this is the best turkey I have ever eaten in my life.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Ruth said.
“I’m serious. What do you put on it?”
“Butter,” I said. “And sage. And thirty years of practice.”
