TUlip 8-3005

I

What a beautiful fall day. The weather had just turned the slightest bit cool, and the leaves were beginning to blush those lovely shades of red and gold. It was the perfect day for my favorite pastime: yard sales!

Little Clifton was talking a blue streak these days, and when I asked if he wanted to go shopping, he ran to grab his favorite boots and tugged them on as fast as his little hands would let him. I wasn’t even dressed yet, and he was already standing at the door. I loved it when he got so excited, so my shower would have to wait until we return from the days adventures.

Our first stop didn’t turn up much that interested my son, but I picked up a few things I was fairly sure I’d regret buying in a few days: an old set of mixing bowls, and a telescope he might enjoy in a few years. One item, though, was a must-have. It was a gravy boat that would complete my set of Desert Rose serving pieces. All that for ten dollars. What a deal! Still, there was nothing for my son, so it was on to the next place on my list.

The next stop was an estate sale, a bit more upscale than my usual haunts of garages and front yards. The minute we walked into the house, he saw it: a small black rotary phone. It wasn’t a toy. It was a real telephone, from the fifties at least, with a frayed cord still attached.

In a world full of cell phones, I had no idea how my son even knew what it was. I was certain he had never seen a phone like that in his life. It belonged to the days when Arkansas lived and died by Southwestern Bell, the days of party lines and exchanges that began with words when you gave someone your number.

In the center of the dial was a small round card, and typed on it in faded, old-fashioned letters was the number: TUlip 8-3005.

I stopped in my tracks. TUlip 8-3005. 888-3005. My Momma and Daddy’s number.

How on earth had this phone ended up here? We’d had that very phone when I was a child. That, and the fact that my son would not leave it alone, had me handing over the five dollars they were asking.

It was heavy for a little boy to hold, but he refused to let go. He sat in his car seat with the phone planted squarely on his lap. I don’t know how he knew how to dial it, but he started right away, spinning the dial and jabbering the way four-year-olds do, asking questions and pausing as if waiting for answers. It made me smile to see how happy he was with our unusual find. But I could not shake the sight of my childhood phone number sitting right there in the center of that dial.

When we got home, I couldn’t pry the phone out of his little hands long enough to unbuckle him from his car seat. I promised that as soon as we were inside, I would give his new treasure right back. He started to cry.

“Hunny is waiting for me to call her back,” he said.

My heart nearly stopped. Hunny was what everyone called my mother, and what someday, much later, they would call me. She had died shortly after Clifton was born, and I couldn’t remember ever once saying that name to him. First the phone number, and now this. What in the world was going on? My son had always been intuitive far beyond his years, but this?

That night I couldn’t get the receiver away from him, so I finally gave in and set the phone on his nightstand. He lay there clutching the receiver, chattering away to his Hunny about his day. Every so often he would go quiet for several seconds, as if listening, and then answer what I could only assume was a question from the grandmother on the other end of the line.

I sat with him until he wore himself out and drifted off, the receiver slipping from his tiny fingers. I gently set it back in its cradle, more confused than ever about what was happening.

When I woke the next morning, it was Saturday, and I had my adorable son with me for the day. I made his favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs with cheese, and went to wake him. He was sitting up in his little bed holding the receiver, talking away to his Hunny.

“Yes, my momma says I am always a good boy.” He stopped and listened for a while. Then: “No, if I do that, Momma will be mad. Really mad. Hunny, don’t be mad. I will get it for you. No, I won’t tell Momma.”

Then he saw me and stopped talking. I asked him what it was I would be mad about.

My sweet little boy said, “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret with my Hunny.”

II

I knelt beside the bed. “Clifton, baby, what does Hunny want you to get?”

He pressed the receiver against his chest, the way you’d hide a puppy under your shirt. “She said you’d ask.”

The eggs went cold on the table. He didn’t eat a bite.

While he watched cartoons, I carried the phone into the kitchen and turned it over in my hands. Heavy black Bakelite, chipped at the base. The cord came out the back and ran about a foot before it ended in a little bundle of copper wires, green with age and bent like fingers. It had never been plugged into anything. There was nothing in my house it could have been plugged into.

I lifted the receiver anyway.

No dial tone. I hadn’t expected one. What I heard instead was a hiss, soft and wide, the sound of a line left open. And under the hiss, so faint I thought at first it was my own pulse, someone breathing. Slow. Patient. The way you breathe when you’re trying not to be heard.

I knew that sound. I had grown up on a party line. Four families shared ours, and Momma had rules about it. If you picked up and somebody was already talking, you set it down quiet. You never listened in. And you never, ever answered that phone if it was not our ring. I remember now, our ring was two longs and a short. Others on our party line had other rings, three longs, one long and one short and then two longs. We had a four party line.

I asked her why once. She was drying dishes, and she kept drying the same plate long after it was dry. “Because not everybody on the line,” she said, “is somebody.” How could someone on our party line not be “somebody”. It was a strange answer but I learned early in my childhood you NEVER questioned my momma, ever! And she stressed that we never answered the phone after dark. I didn’t understand why, didn’t people need to talk with us after dark. But I obeyed the rule, until…

I was seven the one time I broke that rule. The phone rang after midnight, and I got to it before anyone else woke. A woman said my name, sweet as pie, and asked if I would unlatch the back door for her, because she was cold and she had come such a long way. I was halfway down the hall when Momma caught me by the back of my nightgown. She didn’t say a word. She walked to the phone and cut the cord with her sewing shears. The next week Southwestern Bell sent a man out to give us a new number.

TUlip 8-3005 had been the old one.

Somehow, for twenty-five years, I had forgotten that.

I hung up. My hand was shaking so badly the receiver rattled in its cradle.

That afternoon I put the phone on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the Christmas tablecloths. Clifton didn’t cry. He didn’t fuss. He just looked at the closet door and said, “That’s okay, Momma. Hunny knows where it is.”

I woke at 2:14 by the clock on my nightstand. Something had woken me, and for a few seconds I lay there trying to name it.

Then it came again from down the hall. Not the chirp of a cell phone. The real thing. A bell, two hard metal clangs, then silence, then one more shorter one. A sound I had not heard in twenty-five years.

The closet door was shut. Clifton’s door was open.

He was sitting up in bed in the dark with the black phone in his lap, holding the receiver out to me in both hands. The cord hung down on his lap, its frayed end lying in a little curl on the bedspread, connected to nothing.

“It’s for you, Momma.”

I don’t know why I took it. I think some part of me still hoped it might be her.

“There’s my girl.”

It was her voice. God help me, it was exactly her voice: the gravel from forty years of Pall Malls, the way she leaned on “girl” like it had two syllables. I sank down onto the edge of the bed.

“Momma?”

“You’ve done so good with him, Sugar. He’s a sweet boy. He listens.” A pause. A hiss. “Not like you.”

Cold crawled up the back of my neck.

“Did he get it yet?” she asked. “The key. He says you keep it up high, on the hook by the back door. He’s going to need a chair.”

“What do you want with my son?”

The voice laughed, and it wasn’t Momma’s laugh. It wasn’t anybody’s. It was a dozen voices on a party line all laughing at once, picked up from a long way off, and under it a woman whispering my nick name, sweet as pie, the way she had when I was seven. Sugar…

“You never did let me in,” it said.

I slammed the receiver down. Clifton looked up at me with his big blue eyes and said, very quietly, “Now Hunny’s mad. She told me that things went bad when Hunny was mad.”

At first light I put the phone in a garbage bag, drove it to the county dump, and watched it go into the compactor. I took the back door key off its hook, zipped it inside my purse, and kept my purse on the dresser in my bedroom with the door locked. For two nights I slept on the floor of my son’s room.

Nothing rang. By Tuesday I had almost convinced myself I’d dreamed it all: the grief, the old number, a little boy with a big imagination. By Wednesday I was back in my own bed.

At 3:07, my cell phone woke me.

The caller ID didn’t say Unknown. It said 888-3005.

I answered. I couldn’t stop myself from doing so.

Hiss. That party line hiss. Then a voice, thin and far away and frantic, worn down the way Momma’s had been in those last weeks at the hospital.

“Sugar? Sugar, can you hear me? Oh, thank God. I’ve been ringing and ringing that old line, and it won’t let me through. It’s been holding the line, baby.”

“Momma?”

“Listen to me. Whatever that baby’s been talking to, it isn’t me. It was never me. It’s been on that line since you were little, waiting on somebody small enough to open the door.” Her voice broke apart into static and came back. “Where is he? Sugar, where is Clifton right now?”

I was out of bed before she finished. My bedroom door, which I had locked, stood open. My purse was not on the dresser. It lay in the hallway, unzipped, everything spilled across the carpet. Lipstick, receipts, my wallet. No key.

Clifton’s bed was empty, the covers thrown back.

Downstairs, a kitchen chair had been dragged across the linoleum and pushed up against the back door. The deadbolt was turned. The door stood open to the dark, and the October wind came in smelling of dead leaves.

On the back step sat the black phone. Clean. Whole. The receiver lay beside it, off the hook.

I picked it up, my cell still pressed to my other ear, still hissing, and I listened.

Far away, down the long, dark line, I heard my son. He was chattering the way four-year-olds do, asking questions and pausing, as if waiting for answers.

And somebody was answering him.