“You’ll let me know? When you find out for sure?”
“Mikey, I’ll let the father of my baby, of our baby know. Yes. Yes, I will.”
*****************************
Lori had a summer job as lifeguard at the town public pool. Although I didn’t like to visit her there, she pouted (of course) if I didn’t visit her at least once on her weekend shift. She felt she was missing out on weekend fun when she had to work a Saturday or a Sunday.
Two weeks after my rendezvous with Auntie Lee, I showed up at the pool and Lori frantically waved to me from her lifeguard chair.
“My phone!” she yelled. And she made the pantomime “phone sign” too just in case I didn’t hear her or understand. “My phone!” she said again when I got closer.
Nothing was more important to Lori than her phone. I was way down the list, so it wasn’t even close with me. I understood that. My first thought was that she lost it, my second was that it fell into the pool.
Both of those options were of Pompeii-like proportion in the disaster department of Lori’s life.
“I left my phone at home,” she hyperventilated when I got close enough.
“You don’t really need it for the next five hours, do you. You can’t use it while you’re supposed to be watching these kids swim. So relax, Lori.”
“I NEED my phone. Oh—you wouldn’t understand, would you? Like usual. I should have known. YOU have your phone, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m not working, and—”
She extended her hand from on high in the Lifeguard’s chair. “Phone!”
“What if a kid gets in trouble while you’re on the phone?”
“They’ll be in less trouble than you will be if you don’t give me your phone for a minute. Just a minute. Is that too much to ask? After ALL I do for you?”
I didn’t have the mental capacity to figure out WHAT she was doing for me besides being a royal pain in the ass. Breaking up with her was getting easier and easier than staying with her. The tipping point was tipping.
But—I handed her my phone. She punched in a few numbers and said: “Mom! I forgot my phone on the bathroom sink. Mike is coming right over to pick it up!”
She handed my phone back to me. “See. No casualties. Sometimes, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you think I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Did she just volunteer me to go see her mother—alone? As in alone so I could get lectured? Lori cleared up my question with three words:
“Phone. Go. Now.” She withdrew her attention from me, blew her whistle and screamed: “NO RUNNING! NO RUNNING!”
It was almost nice to have her angry attention on someone else. Poor kids.
On the drive over to her house, I thought of all the things I should have said to her. Some were real clever. Of course I didn’t think of them until I got in the car. I made a promise to myself to blurt out something I thought of without holding back the next time.
I rang the doorbell and that face, her mother’s face opened the door and said two words: “Kitchen table.”
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just hand it to me? I walked in and she shut the door.
I was going to grab the phone and slip out the back door and circle around the house and escape. But, Mrs. Branch had followed and stood there with arms folded when I picked up the phone.