The Call She Already Finished

February eleventh. Simone finished the call before I even sat down. I caught the end of it, not the words, just the particular tone that means family, the one where your voice gets slightly flatter and slightly warmer at the same time, which sounds contradictory but is not. She set her phone face-down on the table and exhaled through her nose, and I put my mug down and we sat there for a minute without saying anything useful.

I had been thinking about calling my grandmother all week and had not done it. Not for any bad reason. The week just kept moving and the right quiet moment kept not arriving, and then it was end of shift on a Wednesday and I was in the break room watching steam come off my tea and thinking about the particular sound of a phone ringing in a house I haven't been inside in two years. February has a way of surfacing exactly this category of thought. I don't know if it's the light or the particular flatness of the month or just that there is nothing distracting enough happening to keep the background noise down.

Looking at the tea like it has answers.

Simone looked at me at some point, I was mid-sip, and said something like 'you should call whoever you're thinking about.' She didn't ask who. Just named the posture, I guess. She does that.

She looked at me like she already knew what I was about to not say.

I texted my grandmother on the bus home instead of calling, which was a coward's move but still counts. She texted back a photo of something she was making for dinner, which is her version of a full response. I put my phone in my bag and watched the stop lights change through the window the rest of the way home. The cord was in its usual spot on the windowsill when I got in. The apartment was quiet. February, doing what it does.