She hung up, set the ringer to vibrate, and put the phone in her pocket. The way she said the message was ok. It sounded nice and like she wasn’t a crazy lady, but it had come out too fast. He’ll just think I’m in the middle of something and that I figured he’d have his voicemail on. He’ll think I’m busy and that’s why I was talking so  fast.

She tried to do some work, but she knew he’d call back, since it had been almost a year since she’d called him. She knew that when she called him too much he was unlikely to respond, but she knew, she really knew, that since she hadn’t been abusing their connection—you know, Adam—that he would probably call her back.

No, he would definitely call her back, since she hadn’t been calling him all the time. It had been a year, and she deserved to be called back.

He called back. Her phone started vibrating while she was thinking. It was a bad sign that he’d called back so quickly.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

“I guess I had some questions about Adam.”

“Yeah, I got your message.”

“Well, so, here’s the thing. My car is damaged from a deer accident, and I don’t have enough money to get my car fixed and pay for Adam’s day care this month. And, also, I work in the city, so I’ve been taking the train to work and a woman from my church has been driving him to day care, and so I really do need my car.”

The guy sighed on the other line and said, “I told you a long time ago that I didn’t have any money, and if the reason you wanted to have this kid was to get money from me, it wasn’t going to work, Jillian. Don’t you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember. I guess I just thought you might be interested in the welfare of your son.”

“Well, I just don’t have anything.”

Jillian began to feel that rage again that she got when she talked to him. Somehow she always forgot about it. That feeling like she just wanted to get her hands on him and sink her fingers into his skin and pop out his eyeballs and mash his genitals and rip off his fingers and shove them up his nose and into his brain to try to get him to be a decent person and act like they had some kind of humane, caring understanding.

“So, what am I supposed to do, leave him at home all day? Bring him to work? Or should I just take him out back and shoot him in the face with a shotgun?” she asked.