“And call me the second you get out,” Mel insists.

“Can’t.”

“Oh! That’s right. You can’t call me because I don’t have a phone. I can’t call you. This so completely sucks.”

“I’ll come to your house as soon as I can,” Rose promises.

“How will you know whether Uncle Daniel is there when you can’t call me? This is not going to work.”

Anxiety, a classic symptom when the addict fears losing her source.

“How about I come to the playhouse and hide there until you tell me the coast is clear?”

“How can I tell you when I don’t have a phone!” Mel is almost shouting.

“I’ll put a pillow in the window so you’ll know I’m there. When Daniel is gone, you come get me. How does that sound?”

Mel clearly isn’t impressed with the pillow idea. Rose watches as the girl tries to put together an argument against it.

At length, Mel blows out a long derisive breath. “Before cell phones, did you guys have to be all Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew all the time?”

“All the time,” Rose says.

“Talk about early childhood mortification,” Mel says, but she lets Rose pry the phone from her warm living hand.

CHAPTER 15

“Did you get the Kleenex box?” Rose asks.

“I had to go to three stores,” Mel says as she leans over the arm of the sofa to retrieve a plastic bag. From it she takes a square box of tissues. The box is tan with an intricate black repeating pattern.

“Perfect,” Rose says. “You are a girl in a million. Empty it out, but don’t mess up the tissues.”

While Mel busies herself with that, Rose goes to the pillaged art supplies box and digs around in its disheveled contents. Armed with a #12 X-Acto knife and a roll of packing tape, she returns to the couch.

“Okay, put it in,” she tells Mel.

Her task of tissue deployment complete, Mel has picked up her cell phone again.

“Do I have to talk you down one more time?” Rose asks.

“I can quit anytime I want,” Mel says. She puts her phone into the empty tissue box.

“Hold it snug against the side,” Rose says. When Mel has the phone and box stabilized, Rose presses her fingertips along the cardboard until she feels an indentation. In that soft spot, she inserts the X-Acto knife. The tip of the blade clicks against a hard surface. “Got it on the first try,” she crows. “You can take the phone out now.”

Holding the box between her knees, Rose cuts a neat square about the size of the tip of her finger where she’d marked the cardboard with the blade. “Put it back in,” she says, handing the tissue box to her granddaughter.