Chapter 13 - A Phone Call He Will Not Make
The pad sat in the middle of the table where I’d left it. Daniel’s handwriting filled the top half of the page, pressed hard enough that I could see the indent from where I sat. The folder lay open beside it, the printed pages fanned just enough that the typed lines showed. Nobody had touched either one for a full minute.
Frank cleared his throat and looked at the wall phone by the refrigerator. Then he looked at his cell phone lying face-down next to his glasses.
“I could call Ray,” he said. “He handled this kind of paperwork for years. One call. He’d tell us what line matters.”
I felt Daniel go still before he moved. He was still standing on the left side of the table, his boots planted the same way they’d been since he walked in that morning. His hands rested on the back of the empty chair.
“No,” Daniel said.
Frank blinked. “It wouldn’t be telling the whole street. It’d be Ray.”
“I said no.” Daniel’s voice stayed low. He didn’t raise it, but his jaw tightened. “Not until we agree on the wording in here first. I bring one more voice in and it stops being ours.”
The refrigerator hummed behind us. The overhead light buzzed faintly. I watched Frank’s fingers tap once against his phone case, then stop.
He picked the phone up anyway and turned it over in his palm. The screen stayed dark. He didn’t unlock it. He just held it, like holding it was part of thinking.
“Son, there’s a clock on this,” Frank said. “You walk something in late or worded wrong, somebody else writes it for you.”
“I know what the clock is,” Daniel said. “That’s why I brought it home instead of writing it in the barracks.”
Josh shifted behind us. His sleeve brushed my shoulder as he leaned in closer to look at the pad. He’d been quiet through the last page, his arms crossed over his hoodie, but now he unfolded them and put both hands flat on the table edge.
“He’s right about waiting,” Josh said. He glanced at Frank, then back at Daniel. “If you call Ray now, we’ll start rewriting it to sound better for Ray. Let’s just finish what we started.”
Frank set the phone back down, a little harder than he meant to. It clicked against the wood. He left his hand over it for a second, then pulled his hand back and folded his arms over his plaid shirt.
I looked down at the pad again. The words were plain. Too plain, maybe, and that was the point. Name. Date. What happened in order. No extra explanation. My cardigan sleeve caught on the edge of the folder when I moved, and I smoothed it back.
My chest felt tight watching the two of them stare at each other across the table. Frank wanted to fix it the way he’d always fixed things, by calling somebody who knew somebody. Daniel wanted to carry it himself until he knew it was true.
I put my hand on the pad, not to move it, just to stop the shaking in my fingers.
“No call yet,” I said.
Frank turned to me. “Carol—”
“No call yet,” I said again, quieter. “We’re almost there. But we’re not copying this over until we hear it out loud once. All of it. The way he’d actually say it.”
Daniel looked at me. His shoulders dropped a fraction.
“Read it aloud?” Josh asked.
I nodded. “Once. Straight through. With the folder open so we can check it. If something sounds off, we fix it before it goes on the clean sheet.”
Frank exhaled through his nose and rubbed at his eyes where his glasses used to be. His glasses sat untouched by the phone. He didn’t reach for them.
“So we sit here and read,” he said.
“We sit here and read,” I said.
May you like
Daniel pulled the empty chair out and finally sat down. The legs scraped against the tile. He settled his weight and looked at the pad, then at the phone lying dark between Frank’s hand and the folder.
Nobody picked the phone up again. The draft waited. The kitchen stayed bright and too quiet, and I knew the next words out of any of our mouths would have to be the ones on that page.
