Page 62 of Across His Line

“Do you want me to send you anything?” I ask. “For groceries. I’ve got a little coming in from—”

“Tessa.”

“I’m just saying,” I offer. This woman has given me more than I know how to return. “I have it.”

“I know you have it.” She sighs. I can hear her settle back in her kitchen chair. “Honey, I need you to stop trying to be forty. You’re eighteen,” she says. “You’re supposed to be spending money on stupid things. Shoes. Pizza at two in the morning. Concert tickets. You’re not supposed to be paying my bills.”

“I like paying your bills.”

“That’s what worries me.”

I’m already doing the math anyway. I can’t help it. If she won’t take it for groceries, I can put money toward the electric without telling her.

“Keep your money,” she says, like she can hear me thinking it. “I mean it.”

“Okay.”

She doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me either. We let it go. And then she’s quiet for a second.

“Your mama asked for your number again,” she says. “She called Thursday.”

I sit very still on my bed.

“I didn’t give it to her. I told her I’d ask you.” A pause. “Is it all right if I give it to her?”

I look at the wall. “You asked me first?”

I don’t mean for it to come out like that. Small. Surprised. Like a little girl.

“Well, of course I asked you first,” my grandma says. “It’s your number.”

It’s such a small thing. It’s nothing. It’s a phone number. But I sit there on my bed with the phone against my ear, and my eyes sting, and I don’t know why.

I think it’s because nobody has ever cared. My whole life, things about me got decided in other rooms. Where I lived. Who I lived with. Whether my mom was coming. People moved me around like I meant nothing and told me where I was going afterward. And here’s my grandma, protecting me from my own mother.

“Yes,” I say. “You can give it to her.”

I don’t say it because I’m ready. I’m not. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.

I say it because if she’s trying, I want to know what trying looks like. And if she isn’t, I want to know that, too.

My mom calls that same night.

I’m at my desk with my micro notes, and my phone lights up with a number I don’t know, from the area code I grew up in, and I know before I pick it up.

I let it ring three times. I pick up on the fourth.

“Hello?”

“Hi, baby.”

It goes through my whole body. Not her voice. The word. Baby. Like she’s been calling me that every night for four months and I just haven’t been home to hear it.

“Hi, Mom.”

She sounds okay, but I listen closely. Her words are coming out in the right order. She isn’t too fast or too slow. There’s no slur sitting under the edges. She sounds tired, and a little careful, like someone walking on ice, but she sounds like herself. The self I remember from the good stretches. The one who used to braid my hair before school and sing along to the radio wrong on purpose to make me laugh.

We talk about nothing. College. My dorm. The weather. My classes. She asks what I’m studying, and I tell her business, and she says, “Oh, that’s smart, you were always smart,” and I say thank you, and we both go quiet, because neither of us knows what comes after all of the catch-up. She was never good at knowing what to do with me.