I wondered whether Sarah had her cell phone with her. Of course, even if she did, there was no guarantee she had it turned on. I’d talked to her about this in the past. What good is having a cell phone with you if you don’t have it on, I told her. If we need to reach you in an emergency, and your phone is down at the bottom of your purse, where you can’t hear it even if it is on, well—

There was loud banging at the door. “Hang on, Dan,” I said. “I think that’s the ambulance.”

“So somebody else got hurt? One of the kids?”

“Just hang on.” I set down the receiver and ran to the front door, where I saw two uniformed attendants, a man and a woman. They were carrying leather bags and had radios that crackled clipped to their chests. I put on my friendliest smile.

“Hey,” I said. Like maybe they’d dropped by to ask for a donation to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Where was my checkbook?

The woman said, “Hello, sir. We have a report that someone’s fallen? Down the stairs?”

I laughed. “That was me. But I’m okay, really.”

The man said, “We should still have a look at you, just the same, make sure that you didn’t suffer any injuries.”

What I didn’t know until later was that Sarah did, in fact, have her cell phone with her, and was frantically trying to call the house from her car. She’d tried once in the parking lot at the paper, then again on Lakeshore as she headed for the ramp to the expressway. Trying to keep one eye on the road, one eye on the phone, pushing the “send” button, repeatedly getting busy signals, trying again. I’d left the phone off the hook, of course, expecting to get back on the line with Dan.

“No, no, really,” I protested to the ambulance attendants. “I’m okay. I wasn’t hurt.”

“The dispatcher said a young man, your son, called to say his father had fallen down the stairs.”

“Not fallen, exactly. More like arranged, I guess you’d say.”

The attendants glanced at each other. The man said, “Perhaps we could have a word with your son.”

“He’s downstairs playing video games,” I offered. They exchanged glances again. As if playing video games was not typical behavior from a boy who supposedly had just found his father dead at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe they didn’t have kids, couldn’t understand.

“You see, I was just goofing around,” I said. “It’s about their backpacks. They leave them at the top of the stairs—”

“You tripped on a backpack?” the woman attendant asked.

“No, but I could have. That was the point I was trying to make.”