The Schedule
The packet was stapled in the top left corner. Three staples, actually, because it was thick.
Kristen slid it across the kitchen island toward me with two fingers, the way you’d push a menu across a restaurant table.
Across the top, in bold letters, it said:
CHILDCARE AND FAMILY SCHEDULE — APRIL THROUGH JULY.
Nathan stood beside her, smiling the way he used to smile when he was nine and had cleaned his room without being asked. Proud. Waiting for me to tell him what a good job he’d done.
I turned the first page.
Then the second.
Then I put my hand flat on the packet and looked up at my son.
“Before we go through this,” I said, “I should tell you where I’m moving.”
“Oh, good,” Kristen said. “Which one did you pick? The one on Birch Lane had a parking spot right by the—”
“Columbia,” I said. “Down by the river. It’s an hour and ten minutes from here. I signed the lease on Wednesday.”
Nobody said anything.
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs, Owen’s video game made a small explosion sound.
Nathan’s smile stayed on his face a second too long, like a light someone forgot to turn off.
Kristen’s hand was still resting on the corner of the packet. She didn’t move it.
The whole kitchen went silent.
And I stood there and let it.
My name is Marilyn Hale. I’m sixty-five years old. I was a librarian for thirty-four years. I was married to a man named Paul for thirty-nine. I have one son, Nathan, and two grandchildren I would walk into a fire for.
For two and a half years, I lived in my son’s guest room.
The hardest part wasn’t learning they wanted their space back.
It was learning they had already decided what my life would look like once I was gone.
And by the time they put that schedule in front of me, I had already made plans of my own.
Three weeks before that evening, I was halfway down the stairs with a basket of warm towels against my chest.
It was a Monday, around eight-thirty at night. The dishwasher was running. Owen’s science project, a volcano made of papier-mâché and too much glue, was drying on newspaper in the basement. Chloe was already asleep, her nightlight throwing little blue stars across the hallway ceiling.
That day I had picked Chloe up from school at 3:10. I had driven Owen to the dentist at four. I had made meatloaf, because Nathan likes meatloaf, and green beans, because Kristen says the kids need more green. I’d helped Owen spell “precipitation” eleven times. I’d folded two loads of laundry.
My knees ached. My right one clicks now on the stairs, like an old door.
This is what family does, I told myself. I said that to myself a lot in those days.
Then I heard Kristen’s voice from the living room.
“She should move out, Nathan. I think it’s time.”
I stopped on the seventh step. One hand on the banister. The towels warm against me.
I waited for my son to say something.
I waited for him to say, What are you talking about? or That’s my mother, or even just Let’s talk to her first.
There was a long pause. I could hear the TV murmuring. A commercial for car insurance.
Then Nathan said, “I know.”
Two words.
“But I can’t change my schedule until summer,” he went on. “We still need Mom on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“That’s fine,” Kristen said. “She can find something nearby.”
I stood very still.
I waited for one more sentence. Just one. We should ask her what she wants. She gave up her house for us. Anything.
Instead, the volume on the television went back up.
Some show about people buying houses on a beach.
I turned around and went back upstairs, very quietly, the way I used to walk past Nathan’s room when he was a baby and had finally fallen asleep.
In my room, I put the towels on the bed.
On the nightstand was the photograph of Paul from our thirty-fifth anniversary. We’d gone to Cape May. He’s squinting into the sun in that ridiculous straw hat, laughing at something I said. I don’t remember what I said. I wish I did.
Paul used to ask me a question almost every night when he came home from the hardware store. He’d hang up his jacket, kiss my cheek, and say:
“And what has Marilyn done for Marilyn today?”
It annoyed me when we were young. I’d say, “Marilyn made your dinner, that’s what Marilyn did.” And he’d laugh and say, “That’s for me. I asked what you did for you.”
Later, after the kids were grown, I started having answers. I read a whole novel on the porch. I took a watercolor class at the community center. I sat in the garden and did absolutely nothing for an hour.
He’d look so pleased. Like I’d brought him a present.
That night, I sat on the edge of the bed in my son’s guest room and tried to answer him.
What has Marilyn done for Marilyn today?
I sat there for a long time.
I couldn’t think of a single thing.
Paul died four years ago this February. A heart attack in the parking lot of the Weis Markets on Route 30. He’d gone out for milk. He was sixty-six.
I remember the young police officer at my door. I remember thinking, absurdly, that we’d still need milk.
At the reception after the funeral, in the fellowship hall at St. John’s, Nathan found me standing by the coffee urn holding a paper plate with nothing on it.
“Mom,” he said. “You can’t stay in that house by yourself.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You won’t. You hate the quiet. You’ve always hated the quiet.”
That was true. Paul filled up a room. Without him, our little house on Willow Road outside Lancaster felt like a church after everybody’s gone home.
“Come live with us,” Nathan said. “Kristen and I talked about it. The kids would love it. We’d love it. Honestly, Mom, we could really use the help. Kristen’s going back to full-time in the fall, and I’m traveling half the month. We’d all be helping each other.”
I said I’d think about it.
I thought about it for a year. I tried. I kept the garden going. I volunteered at the library two mornings a week. I joined a grief group in the basement of the Methodist church, where a kind man named Walt cried every single week about his wife’s tomato plants.
But the quiet got louder. And Nathan kept calling.
“Chloe asks about you every day.”
“Owen wants you to see his piano recital.”
“Mom, just come.”
So I did.
I sold the house on Willow Road for $318,000. The house was paid off. Paul and I made the last mortgage payment in 2016, and he framed the letter from the bank and hung it in the hallway like a diploma.
I sat at a long table at Conestoga Title on a gray Tuesday in October and signed the closing documents. The settlement agent, a young woman named Priya, kept sliding papers toward me and pointing with her pen. Sign here. Initial here. And here. After fees and commission, $296,412 was wired into my savings account at Keystone Community Bank.
I remember Priya saying, “Congratulations,” and me not knowing what to say back.
I put most of my furniture in a storage unit off Route 222. Paul’s brown leather armchair. My mother’s cedar chest. Our bed. The kitchen table where Nathan learned to read. Storage Plus, unit 114. $189 a month.
“Just until you figure out what you need,” Nathan said.
Two weeks after I moved in, Nathan sat me down at his kitchen island.
He was embarrassed. I could tell, because he rubbed the back of his neck the way Paul used to.
“Mom, this is awkward. When Kristen was on maternity leave with Chloe, we kind of let the credit cards get away from us. It’s about twenty-five thousand. The interest is killing us. Twenty-four percent. If you could lend it to us, we’d pay you back. By Christmas next year, latest. I promise.”
I wrote him a check that afternoon. Check number 1047. $25,000. In the memo line I wrote Loan — Nathan. Paul taught me that. Always write what it’s for.
Nathan hugged me so hard my glasses went crooked.
“You’re the best, Mom. Seriously. What would we do without you?”
That was a phrase I heard a lot in those first months.
What would we do without you?
At first, it was lovely. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy to tell this story as if they were cold from the start. They weren’t.
Chloe was four then. She taped drawings to my bedroom door every morning. Purple horses. Suns with faces. One of me with hair down to my feet and a crown on my head that said GRAMMA in letters that went backward.
Owen was seven, a serious little boy with his father’s big ears. He’d come into my room at bedtime holding a book against his chest.
“Grandma, will you do the voices?”
So I did the voices. The giant, the mouse, the queen. Every night.
Kristen hugged me in the kitchen that first week, her eyes wet.
“We wouldn’t know what to do without you, Marilyn. Really.”
I helped with the pickups on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like we’d agreed. On those days, Kristen worked late at the pharmaceutical company in King of Prussia where she managed clinical trials, and Nathan was on the road for his engineering firm.
Two days a week. That was the deal.
Somewhere along the way, gratitude turned into expectation.
I can’t tell you the exact day. That’s the thing about it. Nobody announces it.
It started with groceries. Mom, since you’re out anyway, could you grab milk? Then a list on the refrigerator, in Kristen’s tidy handwriting, that I somehow became responsible for. I paid with my own card most of the time. It seemed petty to ask for twelve dollars back for apples.
Then swim lessons on Saturdays. Then Owen’s allergist on Wednesdays. Then dropping off Nathan’s dry cleaning. Then the laundry, all of it, because I was “home anyway.”
Notes started appearing by the coffee maker.
M — Chloe needs the pink leotard washed for Thurs. Thx! K
Mom, can you call the plumber about the downstairs toilet? Number’s on the fridge. — N
Texts arrived in the middle of my watercolor class at the community center. Always the same few words.
Any chance you could…
Quick favor…
Sorry to ask but…
And I always said yes. Because I loved them. Because I was there. Because saying no felt like I was taking back the help I’d promised.
Eventually I started canceling my own plans before anyone even asked.
The weekend that should have told me everything was June’s birthday.
June Albright and I worked side by side at the Lancaster Public Library for twenty-two years. She’s the kind of friend who will tell you your new haircut makes you look like a Muppet and then drive two hours to bring you soup when you’re sick. She turned sixty-five last summer and rented a little cottage in Lewes, Delaware, for a long weekend. Just four of us old library girls.
“Marilyn, you’re coming. I don’t care what you have to do. You’re coming.”
I’d been looking forward to it for three months. I bought a new swimsuit. Navy blue, with a little skirt. I hadn’t bought a swimsuit since 2011.
On the Thursday before, my phone buzzed during dinner.
It was Kristen, from her office.
Ugh, so the sitter canceled for Sat swim + Chloe’s birthday party thing. Any chance you could do Saturday? I know you had that beach thing. So sorry!!!
I looked at that message for a long time.
That beach thing.
Then I texted back: Of course. Don’t worry about it.
I called June that night.
“You’re kidding me,” she said.
“It’s just one weekend.”
“Marilyn. It’s never just one weekend. Not with you.”
I didn’t answer.
“When’s the last time you did something that wasn’t for somebody else?” June asked.
I told her I had to go, Chloe needed a bath.
The swimsuit is still in its bag in my dresser drawer, the tags still on.
There were other things.
A dentist appointment for a cracked crown that I moved three times because three different Tuesdays got “a little crazy.” By the time I finally went, it had gotten worse, and Dr. Lisowski said I needed a full crown instead of a filling. $1,380. My dental plan covered half.
Another watercolor class. And another. Eventually I stopped signing up.
In my room hung a little whiteboard Nathan had bought me “to help keep track of things.” When I first got it, I’d written my own things on it. Library volunteer, Wed. Call June. Paint the river!
By that Monday night, the night I heard them from the stairs, it was filled almost entirely with other people’s names.
Owen — piano 4:30.
Chloe — pink leotard!!
Dry cleaning.
Allergist — bring EpiPen form.
Owen science fair — buy glue.
Not one thing on it belonged to me.
I sat on the bed and looked at it for a long time.
Then I got up, picked up the little felt eraser, and wiped the whole thing clean.
Every name. Every time. Every exclamation point.
Then I sat down and looked at that empty white square until I fell asleep.
The next morning, I woke up at 6:15 like always.
Normally I’d go downstairs, start the big coffee pot, make oatmeal for Owen and the special frozen waffles Chloe likes, cut up strawberries, pack two lunches, and sign whatever permission slip was sitting on the counter.
That morning, I made one cup of coffee.
Just one. In the little pour-over cone I’d brought from Willow Road, the one Paul gave me for Christmas in 2009.
I took it to the chair by the window in the family room. The sun was just coming up over the neighbor’s fence. A cardinal was sitting on the bird feeder Owen and I built from a kit.
I sat there and drank my coffee while it was still hot.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a hot cup of coffee in that house. Usually I’d make it and then forget it on the counter while I chased a shoe or a library book, and by the time I came back it was cold, and I’d drink it anyway.
At 7:05, Kristen came downstairs in her work clothes, her hair still wet. She went to the pantry, opened it, and frowned.
“Did you get Chloe’s granola bars?”
“No,” I said. “They’re on the list on the refrigerator.”
She turned around and looked at me. Really looked, like she was noticing there was a person in the chair.
“Are you going shopping today?”
“Not today.”
She stood there for a second. I could see her doing the math in her head. Meetings. Traffic. The 8:30 call.
“Okay,” she said slowly.
She grabbed a box of crackers out of the pantry, shoved it into Chloe’s backpack, grabbed her keys off the hook, and left. The door shut a little harder than it needed to.
Nothing dramatic happened.
Nobody yelled. Nobody cried.
But I remember exactly how warm that coffee cup felt between my hands.
I kept doing everything I’d actually promised.
Tuesday and Thursday pickups. 3:10 at Chloe’s elementary school. 3:35 at Owen’s. I was there every time, parked in the same spot under the same oak tree, with snacks in the cup holder.
But I stopped offering the extra things.
When the laundry basket filled up, I washed my own clothes and left the rest.
When the plumber note appeared by the coffee maker, I left it there.
When a text came during my afternoon walk asking if I could run to CVS for Owen’s prescription, I wrote back: I can’t today, honey. Sorry.
That was it. I can’t today. I didn’t make up an excuse. I didn’t explain.
It was the hardest sentence I’d typed in two years.
By Wednesday, Nathan was sitting at the kitchen island at ten o’clock at night, frowning at a stack of school forms.
“Mom, do you know where Chloe’s immunization record is?”
“In the blue folder in the desk drawer.”
“Which desk drawer?”
“The left one. Second from the top.”
He found it. He looked up at me.
“You usually do these.”
“I know.”
He waited, like he expected me to take the pen out of his hand.
I didn’t.
“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “Okay.”
He filled them out himself. It took him forty minutes. He spelled the pediatrician’s name wrong and had to cross it out.
On Wednesday night, I heard Kristen in the laundry room, banging the dryer door, saying something sharp to Nathan that I didn’t catch except for the word suddenly.
By Thursday, Kristen asked if we could talk.
“Just the two of us,” she said. “After the kids are in bed?”
At eight-thirty, she sat across from me in the living room. She was still in her work slacks. She kept smoothing a wrinkle out of them with the flat of her hand, over and over, though it wasn’t going anywhere.
She looked tired. I want to say that, too. Kristen is not a cruel woman. She’s a woman who manages forty people and three clinical trials and two children and a husband who’s gone half the month. She’s a woman who once cried in her car in my driveway on Willow Road because she’d forgotten Owen’s first-grade play.
But that night, I could see she had practiced what she was going to say.
“Marilyn, we’ve been thinking. We think it would be better for everyone if you found your own place. The kids are getting older. Owen really needs his own space for homework. And honestly, we all need a little more room to breathe.”
She stopped. Waited for me to cry, I think. Or argue.
“I agree,” I said.
She blinked.
“You—do?”
“I do.”
Her shoulders came down about two inches. I watched the relief spread across her face like warm water.
“Oh, good. Oh, Marilyn, I’m so glad. I was so worried about how you’d take it.”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay. Great. That’s great.”
Then I asked, “What about the school pickups?”
“Oh, those can stay exactly the same,” she said quickly. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. We’ll figure out the details later.”
I nodded.
But I already knew what later meant.
Later meant another schedule, designed in a room I wasn’t in, by people who’d already decided where my life would fit.
On Friday morning, I drove to Keystone Community Bank on Lancaster Avenue.
I’m not sure why. I just knew I needed to look at something real. Something with numbers on it.
Gloria Esposito has been at that branch for almost twenty years. She handled Paul’s accounts after he died. She’s a short, round woman with reading glasses on a sparkly chain and a framed picture of her six grandchildren on her desk.
“Marilyn! I haven’t seen you in ages. Sit, sit.”
“Gloria, I’d like to see my statements. The last two and a half years. All of it.”
She looked at me over her glasses. She didn’t ask why. Good bankers don’t.
She turned her monitor toward me and printed things out while we talked.
I’ll tell you what I learned that morning, sitting in that little glass office with the hum of the copy machine behind me.
My county library pension paid $2,310 a month. My Social Security paid $1,640. Paul’s life insurance, $150,000, was still mostly sitting in a money market account he’d set up himself, because Paul trusted nothing he couldn’t call on the phone.
My savings from the house sale was still there, mostly. $258,000 and change.
But Gloria had highlighted some lines for me, because I’d asked her to show me where the money went.
Groceries. Weis, Giant, Costco. Averaging $410 a month on my debit card for thirty months.
Target. Kohl’s. Children’s shoes. A winter coat for Owen. A birthday party at a trampoline park for Chloe, $380, because Kristen’s card had been “flagged for fraud” that week.
Storage Plus, unit 114. $189 a month. Thirty months. $5,670 to keep my husband’s armchair in the dark.
And check number 1047. $25,000. Loan — Nathan. Cleared on October 30, two and a half years ago.
Christmas had come and gone twice since then.
“That’s a lot of groceries,” Gloria said gently.
“It is.”
“Marilyn, I’m not going to tell you what to do with your money. It’s your money. But you know you’re allowed to say no, right?”
I laughed. It came out a little cracked.
“I’m learning.”
Gloria added it all up on a yellow sticky note in her round handwriting and slid it over to me.
$48,214. Not counting the loan.
I didn’t feel angry. That surprised me. I’d chosen almost every one of those purchases. Nobody forced my hand.
I just felt like someone who’d been walking in the rain for two years and only just noticed she was soaked.
Before I left, Gloria asked, “Are you buying something?”
“Renting,” I said. “I think.”
“Well,” she said, “whatever you pick, pick it for you.”
On Saturday morning, Nathan sent five apartment listings to the family group chat.
He’d put a lot of work into it. Pictures, prices, square footage. He’d even written little notes under each one, the way he used to label his Lego bins when he was eight.
Birch Lane — 1BR, $1,550, 6 min from school!
The Pointe at Exton — 1BR, $1,690, pool, 12 min
Westtown Gardens — senior community, $1,480, 15 min
Every single one of them was less than twenty minutes from their house.
His message at the bottom said:
These would be super convenient for the kids!
I read the word convenient twice.
Then a third time.
Kristen had already reacted with a heart.
Nobody had asked what I wanted. Nobody had asked if I wanted to stay in West Chester at all, a town where I knew exactly four people and three of them were the parents in the school pickup line.
I put the phone face-down on my nightstand next to Paul’s picture.
Then I picked it back up and opened a different window. A listing I’d saved months ago, during one particularly lonely afternoon in January when the kids were at school and Kristen had texted me four times about a missing permission slip and I’d sat in my car in the Giant parking lot and searched for “apartments near water.”
Riverbend Commons. Columbia, Pennsylvania.
A small apartment community right on the Susquehanna. One hour and ten minutes from my son’s house. Twenty-five minutes from Willow Road, from June, from the library, from the cemetery where Paul is buried under the big sycamore.
There was a garden. A book club. A pottery studio.
It wasn’t on Nathan’s list.
I’d saved it and never looked at it again. I’d been embarrassed, I think. Like I’d been caught daydreaming.
That night, I looked at the pictures for an hour.
On Monday morning, I called the leasing office.
A woman answered on the second ring. Warm voice. A slight drawl, like she’d grown up farther south.
“Riverbend Commons, this is Donna.”
“Hello. My name is Marilyn Hale. I saw a listing for a one-bedroom on your website. I don’t know if it’s still available. I’m sixty-five, I’m a widow, and I’m not sure what I’m doing.”
There was a little pause, and then Donna laughed. Not at me. With me.
“Honey, half the people here said exactly that on the phone. When can you come see it?”
I drove out on Wednesday, after the morning school drop-off I’d promised to cover for Kristen. I took the long way, Route 30 west, past the outlets and the farm stands and the Amish buggy signs. The sky got wider the farther I drove.
Riverbend Commons sat on a gentle hill above the river. Three low brick buildings with white trim and green doors, a walking path that ran down toward the water, a gazebo with a little bench.
Donna met me in the parking lot. She was about my age, with short silver hair, red glasses, and a cardigan covered in little embroidered bees.
“You must be Marilyn. Come on, let me show you the good stuff first.”
She walked me around the side of the main building.
There were raised garden beds, a dozen of them, made of cedar, with little hand-painted signs stuck in the dirt. Bernadette’s Tomatoes. Keep Out, Squirrels! Herb Garden — Take What You Need.
Beside them stood a set of wooden shelves holding handmade pottery. Mugs, bowls, little plates. All of them a little uneven. One bowl leaned so badly it looked like it was trying to lie down.
“That’s Walter’s,” Donna said, pointing at it. “He’s eighty-one. He’s been in the class for a year and he still can’t get them straight. He doesn’t care. He gives them away for birthdays.”
“The pottery class,” I said. “When is it?”
“Tuesday evenings. Six to eight. Lou teaches it. He used to teach art at Hempfield High School.”
Tuesday.
The same day I had spent the last two and a half years sitting in the school pickup line under the oak tree, with goldfish crackers in the cup holder.
“Book club’s every other Thursday,” Donna went on. “This month they’re arguing about a novel where nobody likes the ending. They’ll love you if you’re a reader.”
“I was a librarian for thirty-four years.”
Donna stopped walking and looked at me.
“Oh, they’re going to love you,” she said.
The apartment was on the second floor of the building closest to the river. Unit 2C. There was an elevator, which my right knee was grateful for.
Donna unlocked the door and pushed it open, and then stepped back to let me go first.
Afternoon sunlight was stretched across the hardwood floor in long golden stripes.
It wasn’t big. A living room, a bedroom, a small bathroom with a walk-in shower and a grab bar. A kitchen with white cabinets and enough room for a small round table, the kind where two people could sit with their knees almost touching.
At the far end of the living room, there was a sliding door and a narrow balcony.
I walked out onto it.
Through the trees, past the walking path, I could see a stretch of the Susquehanna. Wide and brown and slow, catching the light. A heron stood in the shallows near the bank like a little gray statue.
I imagined Paul’s brown leather armchair right there beside the sliding door, facing the water.
I imagined drinking my coffee in it. Hot.
Donna came and stood beside me.
“Rent’s $1,425 a month,” she said quietly. “Heat and water included. Twelve-month lease. Security deposit is one month’s rent. There’s a fifty-dollar application fee, but I’ve been known to lose that paperwork for people I like.”
I didn’t say anything.
She looked at me.
“Can you picture yourself living here?”
I looked at the river. At the heron. At the stripe of sun on the floor where my mother’s cedar chest could go.
For the first time in a very long while, I could.
“Yes,” I said. “I really can.”
When I got back to West Chester that evening, there was a cardboard box sitting outside my bedroom door.
It was a liquor store box. Tito’s Handmade Vodka, it said on the side.
Inside were my watercolor brushes in their roll-up canvas case. The little brass reading lamp from my nightstand on Willow Road. Two framed photographs: one of Paul and me at our wedding in 1983, and one of my parents on their front porch in Ephrata.
I stood in the hallway and looked down at it.
Kristen came out of Owen’s room carrying a stack of folders.
“Oh, you’re back. I hope you don’t mind. I started clearing a few things from your corner by the window. We want to set up a homework station for Owen there. A desk and a lamp. He really needs a quiet spot.”
“You packed my things.”
“Just a few. The stuff that was on the shelf. I was careful with the pictures.”
“You could have asked me first.”
She looked genuinely surprised.
“I thought I was helping.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did know. That was the strange part. She really did think she was helping. She’d been thinking that way for so long, organizing my life into the spaces left over from hers, that she couldn’t see it anymore.
She stood there a second longer, like she was waiting for me to say it was fine.
I didn’t say it was fine.
I picked up the box and carried it into my room.
This time, I didn’t unpack it.
I signed the lease the following Wednesday.
I drove back out to Columbia alone. Donna had the papers ready at the round table in her office, along with a plate of shortbread cookies Bernadette had made.
“Bernadette heard we might have a librarian,” Donna said. “She’s been baking since Monday.”
The lease was nine pages. I read every one. Paul would have wanted that. Start date: April 1. Term: twelve months. Monthly rent: $1,425, due on the first. Pets: one cat allowed with a $300 deposit. I don’t have a cat. But I read that line twice and thought, Maybe.
I wrote a check for the security deposit and the first month’s rent. $2,850. My hand was steady. Gloria would have been proud.
Then Donna handed me a pen, and I signed my name on the last page.
Marilyn J. Hale.
Donna signed underneath and put the lease in a cream-colored envelope with Riverbend Commons printed in green on the flap, along with two brass keys on a ring shaped like a little fish.
“Welcome home, Marilyn.”
I held the envelope in both hands.
It was the first document I had signed entirely for myself in years.
Not a permission slip. Not a school form. Not a check with someone else’s name in the memo line.
Mine.
I slipped it into my handbag and sat in my car in the parking lot for twenty minutes, looking at the river, before I could make myself drive back.
I called June from a rest stop on the way home.
“Marilyn? Is everything okay?”
“I signed a lease.”
There was a long pause.
“Where?”
“Columbia. By the river. Twenty-five minutes from you.”
June started screaming. Really screaming, so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear. A man filling up his truck at the next pump looked over at me.
