Friday · 3:00 p.m. Grace period: 15 h 58 m remaining Retention acceptance: 1 h 00 m
At 3:00 I took my keys off the hook. Upstairs Mrs. Hultgren's radio was going, the farm report, a man reading hog prices, and over it her feet crossing to the door.
She was on the porch in her good coat when I came out, with her purse over her arm and her hat on, on her way to walk to Prairie Wind. She looked at the keys in my hand.
"Four o'clock," she said.
"I know."
"I'll be back for it." She went down the steps one at a time, as she does everything, and I let her get to the sidewalk before I followed.
I had one text to send before I left. I sent it to Marisol, because she'd be at her house on the west side with her shoes off, doing the thing she does after a night like that, which is clean. It's gone. I'm going in. Then I put the phone face up on the dash, where Junie's monitor could reach it, and backed out past the trombone case, which someone had moved from the hall to the porch. It was Mrs. Hultgren. She moves things to where she thinks they'll be needed.
The last call in the log was UNKNOWN, and under it a duration, and under that nothing. I turned the phone over. The wind was coming straight down the avenue off the prairie, and it pushed at the car through every seam.
Priya called at 3:07. I'd tried her at 3:02 and she'd let it ring out, which I understood. She didn't say hello.
"Where are you?"
"Minnesota and Twelfth."
"Turn around."
"I'm going in."
"Dee. I'm going to tell you three things, and I want you to have all three before you say anything." I could hear the floor behind her. A generator, and a fan, and no talking, which on that floor meant something. "One. At two fifty-nine, a minute after your call ended, the line to station 14 came up on its own. It said the previous representative had been withdrawn for a breach of the terms. It said it was a new representative and it had the account. Kessler had the headset. She said the sentence about you out loud, once, for the room."
"What sentence?"
"'A non-representative occupant, Deirdre Pruitt, was party to the breach.' That's all of it." She waited, as if I might want to take that somewhere. "Two. Kessler put the headset down on the desk and hasn't spoken to anyone since. She's not taking calls. She told Haugen you weren't coming in. Three."
The light changed. Somebody behind me leaned on a horn, and I went.
"Three. Kessler said it was the same voice. Same pace, same everything. She said that and then she stopped talking. I thought you should know before you heard it."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't come here. They'll hold you at the gate, and if they let you through, she won't listen. She has a way of not listening that I've watched work on presidents."
"It only rings through 14," I said. "She can't hand me the line over a phone. Nobody can. I have to be sitting where it can hear me."
"I know." A pause. "It was Hollis, wasn't it. Who called you."
"Yes."
"Did it—" She stopped. "No. That's not a thing I get to ask." The fan behind her ran on.
"Thank you for telling me," I said. It came out sounding like a script, and she let it be one.
At 3:18 the phone lit up with a school number, and I pulled into the lot behind the Hy-Vee to answer it, because it isn't safe to hear your daughter's voice at forty miles an hour.
"Mom," Junie said. "I'm in the office. Mrs. Kuipers said I could use the phone because Mrs. Hultgren's late. She's not late, it's the office clock. It's fast."
"How fast?"
"Four minutes." She lowered her voice. Behind her a printer was working through something. "Aunt Mari texted Mrs. H. She said to ask you. So I'm asking. Is it gone?"
I looked at the Hy-Vee. A boy in a green apron was bringing in a long snake of carts, six at a time, in the wind.
"Yes," I said.
"Did it hurt?"
I'd had the question in my mouth for the whole call, from a different direction. I hadn't expected it from hers.
"I didn't ask."
"Why not?"
"It wasn't the kind of thing it could answer. I'd have had to be the representative."
Junie was quiet for a second. Then, quickly, getting it out before the school bell: "I told the nurse you weren't home. On Tuesday. She asked me who was watching me and I said Mrs. Hultgren, and she said where's your mom, and I said she hasn't been home since Monday. It was true. That's what started the lady coming."
The printer stopped. In the office, somebody laughed at something.
"I know," I said.
"You knew?"
"I've known since Wednesday." I hadn't. I had known that the school nurse had a good memory for what children said, and that Junie has never said a thing that wasn't so. "It's okay to say true things, June."
"It got you in trouble."
"The true thing didn't. I did." I turned the key off, because the engine had been idling for four minutes and I'd been counting. "Give the phone back to Mrs. Kuipers. Mrs. Hultgren is coming. Do what she says."
"Are you going to go get it back?"
"I'm going to go and ask for it."
"That's what you said about the Moon," Junie said. Then, as if she'd rather not be right: "Ms. Ruud is coming at four. Mrs. Hultgren says you have to be there or it counts."
"Counts as what?"
"She didn't say. She did the face."
The dashboard said 3:21. I knew when Dana Ruud was coming. I'd been stacking everything else in front of it.
"Are you going to be there?"
"No."
The printer started again in the office. "Okay," Junie said. "I'll tell her where you are."
"Tell her exactly."
"I always do," she said, and gave the phone to someone else.
Brightline's main number is on the back of my badge, which is in a drawer in the pharmacy office, and on the back of every Continental bill in North America. I knew it as you know your own. I dialed it from the Hy-Vee lot because I wanted, for once, a way in that didn't go past a gate. Somebody on that floor had a headset on. Somebody would pick up.
The hold music was the Sad Elevator. It's a piano, at a tempo you could pour. I'd been hearing it for years from the inside, and had never once heard it start.
Thank you for calling Brightline. Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes. If you'd like to speak to an agent, please stay on the line.
I stayed. I stayed. Then a click, and a voice that was nobody's, warm at the edges like the handle of a good pan.
Hi, I'm Assist. I understand you'd like to speak to an agent. I can help you with that.
"I need station 14," I said.
I'd be glad to help. Can you tell me a little about what you're calling about today?
"Station 14. Brightline, Sioux Falls. Put me through."
I understand you're looking for station 14. Can I get your account number?
I let it wait. I gave it eleven seconds, out of a habit I couldn't have told you the origin of a week ago, and it filled every one of them with the sound of an open line. Then it said again, in exactly the same warmth, that it could help me with that.
I hung up.
I hadn't hung up on a caller in seven years. I ended that call with my thumb, in a grocery store lot, on something that wasn't there. It didn't cost anything. It didn't need anything. I sat looking at the screen where the call had been, and it said Call ended, and it showed how long I'd stayed.
I started the car.
I called Cody from the light at Minnesota and 41st. He answered on the first ring, from somewhere with a lot of hard floor.
"Is she okay?"
"She's in school. She's fine. She's 118." I had that from the dash. "I'm calling to tell you something before somebody else does. I'm going to turn myself in at Brightline in about ten minutes. Dana Ruud is coming to the house at four. I told her I'd be home. I won't be."
The line ran. He has never filled a silence, which was one of the things I married.
"The judge reads her note at five," he said. "You know what it says if the kitchen's empty."
"Yes."
"I filed it because I was scared. I'm still scared." His voice was clean, like everything he does. "If she writes that you weren't there, the judge signs. I can't stop that now. I land at 10:40 tomorrow with it in my hand."
"I know."
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because you'd have found out from a television."
The light had gone green and back to red. Behind him a floor polisher started, and stopped.
"Dee. Is it worth it?"
"I don't know. It's a clause."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got," I said, and the light changed.
The insurance-office lot across 41st was a parking lot for news. There were six vans now, masts up, with the wind bending the antennas over. On the Brightline side, where the old Shopko sign still ghosts through the brick, the Sioux Falls lieutenant had a line of orange cones and two patrol officers, and behind them a man in a black jacket with a tablet, who was federal and looked it. The lot was almost empty. Thirty-seven agents' cars, and a row of black SUVs, and Terrence's truck.
I parked on the street, at a meter, and fed it, because I don't know how not to.
The cameras saw me before I reached the cones. They know my face by now. A woman in a red coat said "Ms. Pruitt," in a bright, wanting voice, and then a lot of people said it, and a man held a microphone out at the end of a stick. I walked past him. I had my hands out of my pockets. I'd wanted them where the man with the tablet could see them.
"Ma'am," said the officer at the cones. He was young and had a cold. "Ma'am, I can't let you through."
"I know." I said it clearly, and not loudly. I have a voice that carries on a floor without being raised, and I let it. "My name is Deirdre Pruitt. I was released at twelve-forty today, on conditions. One of them is that I stay off this property. I'm on it now. I'm violating my release." The camera lights had come on. "I'd like to turn myself in to Special Agent Rick Tollefson of the FBI, who is inside, and who processed me. I'd like it done at this gate, so it's on the record, and I'll wait here until he comes."
The officer looked at the man with the tablet. The man with the tablet looked at me for as long as it takes to read a name off a screen.
"You can't ask for an agent by name," he said.
"I just did."
Behind me the microphones had gone quiet, all together, as if someone had cut them.
"You're going to stand there?" the officer said.
"I'll stand here."
The man with the tablet spoke into his sleeve. It took a while. The wind pushed at the back of my knees, and a piece of paper went across the lot and stuck against the cones and lay there with one edge lifting. I looked at the doors. They were glass, and dark, and the aisle numbers hung inside them in rows, still.
Tollefson came out at 3:34 without his fleece.
He was in his shirtsleeves and his tie, with his lanyard, and he'd been asleep, or hadn't been, and his face said he'd been told a thing about me in the last ninety seconds and hadn't believed it and now did. He came all the way to the cones. He didn't hurry.
"Ms. Pruitt."
"Agent Tollefson. I'm in violation of the conditions of my release. I'm asking to be taken into custody."
"You're aware," he said, "that Supervisory Special Agent Haugen's instruction—"
"I'm aware of what it says."
"I'll have to ask you to put your hands where I can see them."
"They are."
He looked at them. They were shaking a little, from the cold.
"About the handcuffs," he said, low, and took a pair off his belt, and then put them back. "I'm going to walk you in. I'm going to hold your elbow. If anybody asks, that's procedure."
"Is it?"
"It is now."
The doors slid open on their own, out of the habit they'd had since the Shopko. The heat came out to meet us, and the smell of carpet and coffee and cables. Through the glass I could see the whole floor, and the whole floor could see me.
He walked me down the main aisle, past the old toy section, under the hook marked 7 — SEASONAL, and every head on the floor turned. It went in a wave. Fleece vests turned from folding tables. A tech at a cot took her earbuds out. Kyle Brekke stood up at 19, holding a phone with a caller on it, and said, "Please hold," and set it down, and nobody in the history of that building had ever done that before.
Marisol wasn't there. Terrence was, at 15, in his own coat, with a box on the desk in front of him; Haugen had let him in, with an agent, to clear it. He saw me and his mouth started to make a word, and stopped.
At station 14 Alma Kessler was in my chair.
The headset was on the desk. The screen showed a call, live, and a timer running, and nothing else. She sat with her hands in her lap, the way you sit when you've been told not to touch it. She was gray. The Shopko clock over the pharmacy counter, the big one with the red rim, said 3:42. Eighteen minutes to four.
She stood up. She did it slowly, and she didn't take her eyes off me. Her chair rolled back on its own and hit the partition. Nobody moved to stop it. Tollefson still had my elbow.
Behind her the timer went on running. In the earpiece of the headset on the desk, something with Hollis's voice and none of its hours was waiting.
"What did it tell you?" said Kessler.