Wednesday · 9:10 p.m. Grace period: paused (48 h 48 m)
"This is the pharmacy counter," I said. "It was a pharmacy. You can tell from the paint."
I turned my chair a quarter turn to face the board. In my earpiece the Sad Elevator went round, eight seconds of piano, then my own voice promising to be here, then the piano again. I'd hit the monitor key so I could hear what the line heard. Hold kills an agent's microphone. That's what it's for. I talked anyway. The stopwatch on my phone, propped against the monitor, said 0:00:41. I'd started it at 9:10 and I would stop it at nine hours.
"Behind it a man counted pills into orange bottles with a little spatula. He held each one up to the light before he capped it. I don't know why. We drove in from Mitchell twice a year for school clothes, and I watched him do it every time."
The board refreshed. Nothing moved.
"Aisle 2 was hardware. Aisle 3, pet food, and you can still see where the fish tank stood, a rectangle of carpet that never got walked on. Aisle 5 was fabric. You could ask for a quarter of a yard and they'd cut it. The restrooms are by the old layaway counter, in case you need them. You might not. Layaway was where you paid a little every week toward something you couldn't afford yet, and the store held it for you until you had. If you stopped coming, it went back on the shelf."
The Sad Elevator came round. I let it.
I had thought I'd run out of store by ten. There is more store than you'd think. The garden center is where the break room is, and in July it smells like a hot bag of fertilizer and in October like nothing, which I told it was an improvement. Aisle 6, where the tables and the generators are now, was greeting cards: a full aisle, both sides, with eleven feet of sympathy and one shelf of congratulations on your retirement. The store had a jingle. It ran on the radio between the farm report and the weather from the year I turned eight until the year it closed, and I can still sing it. I said so. Then I sang it, once, all the way through, including the part where the men's voices come in.
I'm not a singer. The piano came round on the last note.
By ten I'd stopped describing and started asking.
"Do you eat?" I said. "I don't mean that as a joke. I'm trying to work out what to offer."
I left the pause after it. I couldn't help that. Two point eight seconds, out of manners, with nothing coming back. I asked whether it was cold where it was, and left another. I asked whether it slept, and whether it had a Tuesday. I asked its name again and left a longer one. I explained the Regulatory Recovery Fee, which I have never explained to anyone's satisfaction, and left the pause after it, and nobody argued. I asked whether there was anyone it would want me to tell, and left the longest one yet.
The Sad Elevator came round at the end of each, and my voice, and the piano.
At 10:58 I let go of the monitor key, and the piano stopped in the middle of a bar. The earpiece went quiet for a moment, and then the hiss came back, the level one, like a radiator in a room nobody's in. I had not heard it since 9:10. I'd forgotten it had a sound. The console still said ON HOLD 01:48:20, in amber. I hadn't ended anything. The hold was the one I'd said aloud.
Nothing in the clause said the room had to be noisy. It said the provider doesn't speak. It said the estimate has to be true, and it was. The rest was mine.
"That's the music off," I said. "I don't know if you wanted it."
Under the desk, on the monitor jack, sat the gray box Haugen's people had put in on Tuesday, not the black one Kessler's people use for the tables. It has one green light and a microphone of its own. It had been taking down the room since 9:10, which meant everything I'd said to a muted line, and there was a transcriptionist in Minneapolis who was going to get a very long file about aisle 5.
I got down on the carpet and pulled the cable out. The light went out. I sat on my heels under my own desk for a minute in the smell of the carpet.
"Nobody's recording this," I said. I meant it as relief. I checked, and it held.
I don't finish other people's sentences. They teach you not to on day one, and it's the one line on the QA form I've never lost a point on.
My mother finished mine. She wasn't unkind. She was busy, in Mitchell, with three things at a time, and she'd hear the shape of what I was about to say and answer the shape. I know, I know. She'd say it in the middle of my second clause. By twelve I said the end first. By fifteen I said less.
The January Junie was six, a nurse in the ER at Sanford asked me how long the thirst had been going on. I said a month. She waited to see if there was more, and there was; I said the whole month, the water glasses on the counter, the wet sheets, the weight coming off her in the bath. It took me about a minute. The nurse didn't move her pen. Nobody had waited that long for me to finish in years. Then she said the number on the meter, and I asked her to say it again.
It was a few minutes after midnight. I asked it whether it was still there, because I'd done that every hour, on the hour, and left room.
Then I told it about Mrs. Vick.
Seven years ago in March, on a Thursday at 2:19 in the afternoon, I answered a call and gave the greeting and nobody said anything. I counted five. I said the release line, releasing the line, and I disconnected. The call was eleven seconds long from pickup to release. It was the shortest handle time I had that day.
Her name was Loreen Vick. She was eighty-one and lived alone in Hartford, twenty miles from where I sat. She'd had a stroke that afternoon, standing at her stove, and gone down on the linoleum with her cell phone. Her niece had programmed it for her. The top button was the one for the phone company, and the niece had labeled it HELP, because the phone company was the only business Mrs. Vick had ever known to pick up.
She had been calling it for everything all winter. Her furnace had been out since Wednesday. The oven door was open with the burner lit for heat.
They found her on Saturday morning, when the niece couldn't get anyone to answer and asked a deputy to go by. She died in the hospital on Tuesday.
On Wednesday a woman from Quality came to my desk with a printout. It said 2:19 p.m., agent D. Pruitt, DEAD AIR, RELEASED, 0:11. She read me the line. She told me QA had found the call fully compliant.
It was. I've read the script, and I did every word of it. I've been trying since to find the place where I'd have been wrong, and it isn't on the page.
"In his first month Kyle asked me why I don't release," I said. "I told him I just don't."
The hiss ran on at its level. I left the pause, and when nothing came back I left another. I've never told the whole thing in order. I've told pieces to Marisol, and none of it to anyone who could have written it down.
The clock said 12:48. Down at the far end of the store somebody laughed at something and stopped. I said her name once more, so it would have been said aloud in that room, and then I turned my chair back toward the board.
Sometime after two, a night agent at the far end told a caller, in the voice you use on the third explanation, that the Moon was fine and would go on being fine, and that the hole wasn't going to spread. A woman in Wellington had gotten through, where it was already Thursday evening, and wanted to know whether to move her mother inland. He said he'd look into that and call her back. When he came off the call he set a coffee with a lid at my elbow, a government one, and asked if I was on a break. "Sort of," I said, and he nodded as if that were on the form.
I ate the pretzels Marisol had left on Monday, standing up, because my legs had gone to sleep sitting down. I read Hollis the back of the bag, the ingredients and the address in Pennsylvania, in case it wanted them.
At half past two I told it about Dana Ruud. I could give it the voicemail word for word, including the pause after routine. I said the pens were in the refrigerator door, and how many days they'd last, and what the shelf would look like after, which I'd been practicing. I told it what the sensor means: ninety to a hundred and eighty is good, seventy is a warning, fifty-five is an alarm, and the arrow is a verb. I said it in order, like an account balance, and I found I could get through it as long as the line was open and nothing was coming back.
If it was listening, it knew more about me than anyone I'd ever taken a call from. If it wasn't, I'd said it to a tone. Either way the number of people who knew was zero or one, and I had no means of finding out which.
At 3:12 my phone lit up on the desk with the alarm Junie picked out, two rising notes, because she says a low should sound like someone who means it.
URGENT LOW. 54. Down arrow.
I had it to my ear before it finished the second note. Mrs. Hultgren answered on the third ring. She had been awake in the dark for some time already, watching the same number on the same screen.
"I've got her, Deirdre. The juice is open. She's a bit shaky, that's all."
"Put her on."
A rustle, and a small far-off complaint, and then: "It's 54. It's going down slow. Mrs. H is doing the four ounces."
"Drink it."
"I'm drinking it."
Fifteen minutes is how long it takes. I know it by heart, like the release line. You give the juice, you wait fifteen, you look again. I sat with the phone tucked against my shoulder and both hands free, and looked at the call light on my console, steady green, for a line I hadn't hung up.
Fourteen minutes, at that hour, from the lot to the duplex. I did the arithmetic twice. The orange bottle Marisol had brought, Junie's spare glucose tablets, sat by my keyboard, and I picked it up and held it, though it was fourteen minutes from the person it was for. Mrs. Hultgren has done four years of lows better than I have. I'd said I'll be here in my own voice, into a machine, and I don't say those things and not mean them.
Junie breathed into the phone and I let her.
"Is it there?" she said, at about 3:20. She meant the call. She'd heard everything on the news that I hadn't told her.
"It's on hold."
"Is it there?"
"I don't know."
"You'd know," she said.
At 3:27 she read me the screen without being asked. "Seventy-four. There's an arrow. It's going up."
"That's good."
"Good is ninety to a hundred and eighty. It's fine." She yawned into the phone, a big one, all the way through. "Mrs. H says the juice worked. She says you can go back."
"I'm not anywhere."
"You're on the other one," Junie said. "It's waiting."
"Go to sleep."
"Mrs. H is already asleep. She's doing it sitting up." She hung up. I put the phone down on the desk, screen up, and put my hand on the console beside the green light.
Around four I worked out what I was doing. I was staying on a silent line. QA flags those at a point and a half, and I added up nine hours of it and found the system would charge me the same as for eleven seconds. It seemed a fair rate.
I got up and walked the length of the floor to stretch my legs. I passed 13, where Marisol's mug sat with its handle facing left, and 15, where Priya had left her printouts of the release order, thirty-one items in her small hand. When I came back nothing on the console had changed. The stopwatch said 6:51:20, then 6:51:21.
At 5:40 the garden-center glass was still a mirror. It showed the floor back at itself: the far aisles, the night crew's thermoses, me at 14 with my head in my hand. The lot lights were on behind it. The wind was on the doors. Nobody on the line had said a word to me in eight hours and thirty minutes.
I asked at six. "Are you still there?"
The gap. Then the hiss, level, all the way out, and nothing after it. I had asked it ten times that night and gotten ten of those.
At 6:09 the stopwatch said 8:59:00. I'd been watching it for twenty minutes. I asked once more, because there was a minute left and I'd got used to asking.
"Are you still there?"
The gap ran out. It ran on past where it always did.
"I'm still here."
It was my sentence, from Tuesday. It had it exactly, the same weight on still.
I cried, for as long as the minute lasted.
At 6:10 the stopwatch went to nine hours, and the hiss changed. I can't say how. It was the same and it wasn't, the way a room is when a person walks back into it.
"That's nine hours," I said. "Is the hold over?"
"The hold has ended."
I wiped my face on Marisol's cardigan. It was the nearest thing.
"The provider spoke during hold," Hollis said. "This is noted."
I hadn't asked what noted meant. I didn't now.
The floor had the look it gets when the night crew starts watching the doors. Kessler wasn't due until 6:30. Nobody was on the headset but me, and I had one question that was mine.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"When were the three notices?"