“You could always just call him, you know.”I slipped my phone self-consciously back into my pocket. Yes, I checked it occasionally, just in case I had gotten a text but didn’t hear the ringtone. Maybe I checked it often. And just maybe I had gotten into the habit of staring at it mournfully every other second of every waking moment of the day. What of it?“Mom,” I reminded her with frustration. “Nobody calls anybody anymore.” To give her credit, my mother was reasonably well up to date on the real world, despite the fact that she and my dad were older than the parents of most kids my age. She was a technical writer, so she was computer savvy, and she did text and send pics. But some things, she would never get. Like the fact that it was perfectly okay to go around with your bra straps showing, but that it was not okay — under any circumstances — to wear jeans with an elastic waistband.“Of course not,” she teased. “Why would you call, when you can take six times as long sending short little typed messages back and forth with no nuance or context?”“I cannot just call him,”
