If A Stranger Approaches You: Stories - Plot & Excerpts
It was always him. He was the only one who would let the phone ring that long. He was the only one who called her in the morning while she was getting ready for work. “Babe,” he’d say, as if he were out of breath, but not as if she’d surprised him by answering. “What do you want?” she’d ask. To this, he’d say nothing. She pictured him in his little white sports car with the roof down, his silver hair gleaming in the sunlight, his red tie lapping the wind over his shoulder, his cell phone held to an ear, maybe one elbow resting on the car door, arm extended, driving with his knee as he sometimes liked to do. Even in the winter she pictured this, although he lived even farther north than she did, and the winter was a bad one. “Don’t call me again, Conrad,” she’d say. But then she’d hold the phone to her ear a long time, listening to him breathe, waiting for him to say something he never got around to saying. When Karen was a child she’d been told a cautionary urban legend by her grandmother about a man who’d rested his elbow on the open window of his car, and it had been lopped off by a passing station wagon—torn right off at the shoulder.
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