He picked up the receiver and eased himself through the door and out into the hallway, the cord trailing behind him. “Hello?” he said. “Joanie?”

“Hi,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound like hers at all so that when she asked, “How’re you doing?” he thought it was some sort of trick, some stranger playing a gag on him—one of the kids, even, from the upstairs extension.

“Fine,” he said, and everything seemed to fall back in place. Joanie. It was Joanie on the other end of the line.

“Fine? It’s been weeks—weeks now, Fitz—and all you can say is fine?”

“Well, it’s, I don’t know—what do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say you miss me, miss your son. Couldn’t you even call? Or what, write a letter? You don’t have time for a letter?”

“I did call.”

“Once.”

“Okay, I told you, right, that we’re not allowed to use the phone for long-distance? Because of the financial situation here?”

Her voice came right back at him and there was no feeling in it, no feeling at all. “You couldn’t go to a pay phone? What happened, did somebody come in the dead of night and steal all the pay phones in town? What about the one on the wall in the back hallway of the bar—what about that one?”

This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. Actually, he didn’t want to have any conversation at all right now because everything kept shifting on him, the whole room, the whole house, all these objects that couldn’t manage to keep still. He wasn’t having a flashback, he wasn’t tripping, and if he was drunk he hadn’t been drunk long enough or in a determined-enough way to give himself the D.T.’s—so what was this? Life? Life without the sacrament, without Joanie, without Corey.

She said something he didn’t catch and then she said, “You there?”

He listened to the breath of the phone. After a minute—a pause—he said, “So what do you want?”

“What do I want? Are you kidding me? Are you drunk? Are you tripping? Don’t tell me you’re tripping, don’t tell me that.”

“I’m not tripping.”

He heard her take in a deep breath, as if she were armoring herself, putting up the defenses so she could troop out into the field and give battle. “You told me you’d be here two weeks after the Fourth. That was over a month ago.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”

“And you ask me what I want? I want you home, with me and Corey, your son—remember him?”

“I am home.”

“Don’t give me that shit. Tell me, how’s your little slut? Has she fried her brains yet?”

He didn’t respond to this. The phone receiver—what was it, plastic?—felt as ungainly as a redwood tree, two thousand years old and hairy with bark, pressed flat to the side of his head.

“What about Ken?” he said. “Don’t you want to hear about Ken?”