"Hey, Charlie?" Gina whispered loudly. "Your cell phone is ringing."
I pressed my lips together and looked up at her. "Cell phone?" I said innocently. "I don't bring my cell phone to work."
She rolled her eyes. "It's cool, I won't tell Finn."
"Finn already knows," the owner drawled from behind me. I stiffened and turned around to stare at him. He shrugged. "Your mother," he said. "I get it."
"Thanks," I breathed.
Gina looked perturbed. "Well, it keeps going off. The voicemail alert or something? That little thing?"
"Thanks," I said again, reddening right up to the roots of my hair. "Sorry about that."
"Don't let Jackson see," Finn counseled. "He's still stuck in the Stone Age. You know we have a landline at home?" He chuckled. "Who does that?"
"My mother," I said. "She has an answering machine too. With tape in it."
Finn laughed harder, and I felt a little better as I headed back to my locker. Maybe I didn't have to work so hard to keep up the appearance of the perfect front end manager because clearly, nobody believed my act in the first place.
I pulled my phone down from my locker and grimaced at the screen.
"What the fuck, Jameson?" I breathed.
I should have blocked the number. That's what I should've done, but I couldn't bring myself to do, no matter how many times my finger hovered over that screen. Deleting his number made it so permanent, and even though I knew it was permanent, it still felt something like acknowledging a death or something.
I hesitated, wavering in place for second. Did I want to know what he was saying? He was probably making promises, telling me to believe in chance, that luck brought us together, and that we should just follow our gut. All of his usual refrains, that made no sense in the real world. He didn't live in the real world, but I did, and there was no room for chance out here.
I had just made my mind to put my phone back when it buzzed in my hand again and I've let out a startled yet little yelp and it dropped it to the floor.
"Dammit, Jameson," I hissed, suddenly flooded with irritation. Stop calling. It's over."
And then, miraculously. He did.
The phone fell silent in my hands and for a second I felt like I had performed some kind of magic trick. But when it didn't start ringing again, I stared at it, waiting. I stared at it a little longer.
It still didn't ring.
"Oh," I said aloud. "Okay then." When I set it back down again my locker, it felt like some kind of connection had severed. I felt adrift as I moved back to the front end of the restaurant, like a balloon floating away from a crowd.
Through a haze, I heard the front end phone ring and moved to go answer it, but Gina beat me.
"Of course," Gina said smoothly into the phone, then turned and smiled at me brightly. "Jameson Tellar for you," she said, with a sly smile.
He was calling at work now? "Tell him I'm not interested," I said crisply, quite proud of myself.
She held the receiver closer to her ear, and her expression changed. "He says it's an emergency," she said in a lowered voice.
I winced. "No. It's not,"
Gina listened for a second, and her lips screwed up in concentration. "Charlie?" she whispered over the sound of the voice on the other end. "I think I hear your son?"
I snatched the phone from her hand. I held the phone to my ear and immediately heard the distinct sound of Malcolm's wails. My blood turned to ice. "What the fuck are you doing with Malcolm?" I shouted into the receiver.
"Charlie," Jameson said, and I'd never heard his voice so strange. "Charlie you need to come home right now. Your Mom -"
"What the hell happened to my mom?" I said, feeling that the world was opening up. "Are you in my house? How the fuck are you here?"
"I had a bad feeling," he said as if that was any kind of explanation for him just showing up again. Tears were falling freely down my cheeks as he spoke. "Your Mom, Charlie. She had an accident."