I was toting the mop and bucket we’d used to clean the schoolroom, so Mother was the first through the door and first to the phone. As I walked back to the little pantry off the kitchen that doubled as a broom closet, I could easily hear her end of the conversation. The phone was in her bedroom, right inside the door, but our apartment was so small that to have a private conversation, you had to shut the bedroom door. And Mother’s voice was rising every time she spoke, in a mixture of anger and bewilderment and fear. I came back from the kitchen in time to see her silhouetted in the bedroom door. She was batting at the air the way she did when she got angry or frustrated or frightened—like a bird that flies into a building and then can’t find its way out. That could only mean she had Eddie’s girlfriend on the other end of the line. “Eddie’s girlfriend” was all we ever called her, because she never gave a name, not even a fake one. We could never remember exactly when the crank calls began, just some time after school had ended, but the mystery woman had been calling all summer, two or three times a week.
