Maggie walks past the cereal display thinking about trying the latest Cheerios flavor when her phone starts buzzing in the front basket of her grocery cart. She doesn’t recognize the number but picks up anyway, she’s waiting for a call from an agent she hopes will take her on and is having trouble remembering his mobile. If she lets it go to voice-mail he may just forget about her, everyone knows how agents are, a million people trying to get a hold of them but returning calls to just a few. Who’s to say if it’s him and she doesn’t answer whether she’ll have let her best chance in months pass right on by.

Maggie can be like this — a bit pathetic when viewed from afar. Sometimes she mixes the trash with the recycling and scrimps on tips at the coffee shop when she’s paying with cash. Though she figures since most people don’t know about these behaviors, it doesn’t reflect on her too badly. Most of the time she lets people in front of her on the freeway with just a handwave, and she hardly ever uses her horn.

Maggie is an actress, or at least she still says she is. Mostly now she makes corporate videos of all kinds and the agent she’s been waiting on is her potential entree into the local law firm market. One video a quarter for potentially several dozen clients annually about things like sexual harassment avoidance and anti-discrimination training. Easy money, she says to people who ask her about it. Money she needs.

“Hello?” she says hopefully, as she tucks the phone under her chin, deciding against the Cheerios and grabbing a box of the cheaper store-brand frosted flakes instead. “Maggie Whiteside speaking.”

On the other end of the line isn’t the agent though; instead, a voice that sounds hard-pressed even to manage a whisper filters into Maggie’s ear. Old and female and broken in pieces, for a second Maggie thinks it’s her mother who’s calling this late October afternoon. Maggie’s mom moved out to the coast last winter to be closer to Maggie and her almost seven-year old daughter, Lucy, she wanted to see her granddaughter in person more than twice a year she said at the time. Plus her health wasn’t great — the doctors said if she didn’t take her medication she had at best fifteen years, with the pills probably no more than twenty, and she and Maggie needed to get past old demons.

“Fifteen years?” Maggie said at the time. “That’s over 80. Isn’t that pretty normal, Ma?”

“We Rosens are very long-lived,” her mother responded, invoking her maiden name. “Anything less than ninety-five is cause for concern.”

But since arriving in the Golden State, the former Mrs. Whiteside still doesn’t see Maggie and Lucy very often — as it turns out, she was mainly worried about who would take care of her only when she fell ill for good in ten to fifteen years, depending on if she took her pills or not. Even though Lucy loves visiting with “Gramma” and when the three of them are together they have such a good time. Oh, Maggie or her mom manages to call almost every Sunday, and Maggie’s mom occasionally shares texts about how her “illness” is supposedly progressing, but Maggie is only invited down to her mom’s place in Carlsbad once every few weeks at most, and too often when Lucy is in school. And her mom never drives up Maggie’s way. It’s too far, her mom always says — Maggie lives up in L.A., Long Beach really but L.A. sounds so much better, though lately she’s been thinking about moving down the coast where the schools will be better for Lucy. Laguna Niguel or San Clemente if they can find an affordable place. This gig with the law firms would definitely make that a possibility.

“Hi,” the voice on the phone says back, cracking on the “I.” “This is Dorothy Wells in Room 225. The toilet isn’t flushing and I need someone to come fix it.”

“Excuse me?” says Maggie.

The voice repeats itself but only louder: “This is Dorothy Wells at the St. Theresa home, Room 225. My toilet is stopped up and I really need someone to come take care of it. Right away.”

Maggie pulls the phone from her ear and looks down at the extension again while a twenty-something man pushing a cart in her direction but still far enough away looks annoyed that she hasn’t moved out of the way already. Nice biceps, mean eyes. She recognizes the number as from the vicinity of Chicago, her original haunting grounds. Maggie grew up in one of the sea of suburbs past O’Hare, though she snagged an original city area code for her cell when she got her first iPhone sophomore year in college. By then she’d moved out for good, to an apartment in the city with a roommate not far from the El stop at Belmont, her dad but not her mom always worrying whether it was safe or not. Lots of real auditions in those days, even if they were mostly for school productions. Maggie puts the phone back up to her ear.

“I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number,” she says, and the voice on the other end promptly turns apologetic, though still breaking on every third syllable or so. This woman is older than Maggie’s mother by at least a dozen years, Maggie thinks, right around the age of the pills/no pills fork in the road. “Oh, I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman says, sounding embarrassed. “You have a good day.” And before Maggie can say “you too” like she normally would, the woman hangs up.

Maggie shrugs, drops her phone back into the cart and pushes past the guy with the biceps. Then another young guy in flip-flops and shorts, who smiles at her as he grabs some hot dog buns from the other side of the aisle. She still gets those smiles from younger men now and then, they make her feel good even though she has to dye her hair more frequently than she cares to admit. The guys her age have mostly stopped with the pleasantries, they’re all married or divorced like Maggie or never going to be either, though that doesn’t mean she still doesn’t look on occasion. She went on a date just this past Saturday as a matter of fact, with Jason the senior accounts manager from the editing company she uses to help with final processing. They laughed over their Chardonnays about whether the date violated the policies that Maggie voices over in one of the harassment videos, even though he was the one who had asked her out. She pays him, he said to test the waters, perhaps he holds the door for her when otherwise he might not. Or maybe she expects something she shouldn’t, she flirted right back. At the end of the date she told him she would see him again despite the light blue work oxford and penny loafers he wore to the Italian place he’d picked out — he has kind brown eyes like a cocker spaniel.

Maggie’s ex Daniel in Phoenix has those eyes.

Her phone rattles in the basket again as she turns the corner at the end of the aisle past a display of buy-one-get-one potato chips. She looks down at the number — that same Chicago area extension again — and picks up, a bit irritated this time, she wants to keep the line clear for the agent.

“You’ve got the wrong number again,” she says, not even bothering with a “hello.” But the voice on the other end just goes into her speech, like she’s reading from one of Maggie’s scripts. The elderly are a protected class under California law, and may not be denied work opportunities solely because of their age. “Hi. This is Dorothy Wells at the St. Theresa home in Room 225,” the spiel goes. “The toilet isn’t flushing and I need someone to come fix it. Right away.” Though this time she sounds a bit more desperate, less matter-of-fact, and Maggie wonders if the thing is overflowing onto the floor. Whatever.

“Ma’am, I can’t help you. You’ve got the wrong number. What number are you trying to dial?”

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Ma’am? You’ve got the wrong number. This is 312-764—"

The line goes dead and Maggie shakes her head as she puts the phone down again. She inspects the potato chip display for the kind Lucy likes and feels a bit sorry for Dorothy in the St. Theresa home, she sounded all alone. Who knows, the lady’s room might not even be carpeted, she could slip on the toilet water and hurt herself. Maggie looked at a bunch of those places for her mom before she moved out here for good, one of them was just terrible, linoleum floors like it was some kind of sanitarium. That was when they were thinking it was cancer for sure and all the relatives were relying on Maggie to take care of things. You know how it is — Eunice is going to need full time care and Meryl is off in God-knows-where with Lorena and Maggie has a kid so she knows about this kind of stuff. Besides, the weather in California is so much better. But then it turned out it was just a couple of benign cysts that could be managed going forward with the pills and everything was fine until Maggie’s mom decided she’d move to the coast anyway. Lucy and her health and Maggie you’ve really become responsible can you help me find a place? After two days driving around Orange County and south all the way to La Jolla, Maggie’s mom settled on the over-55 community off the freeway not far from Legoland, the one with the streets named after farm crops and tennis courts painted over for pickleball. Sunny Acres, the place is called. Endive Street.

Maggie locates the chip variety she’s looking for and throws two bags into the cart. Might as well take advantage of the sale — if this agent comes through perhaps she can stop economizing so much, it’d be nice to buy Lucy a few extra things this year at Christmas. Then the Chicago lady is ringing again as Maggie goes over to inspect whether there’s any chicken breast for a good price. Lucy really likes breaded tenders, it’s been a couple weeks since they had them so there won’t be any complaints about the lack of variety. Maggie answers the phone testily, twice is understandable but three times means you just don’t care.

“Hey, come on! This is the third time you’ve called. You’ve got the wrong num—"

Dorothy from the St. Theresa home cuts Maggie off, the fear in her voice impossible for Maggie to miss. “But I really need help here!” she cries. “This is the number they gave us to get help! How do I get help?!”

Maggie’s anger leaves as quickly as it came on and she feels bad for having been so cross. This woman really is all alone, why does she have to dial an outside number to get someone to help her, these places and their linoleum tiles. But it isn’t Maggie’s problem, the agent could call any minute and there’s nothing Maggie can do from halfway across the country while trying to find some decently priced chicken. “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” Maggie says gently, as if she were explaining something to Lucy. “But you have the wrong number. I’m in California and I can’t do anything for you.” Maggie pulls the phone from her ear to hang up when it occurs to her that the woman has probably just dialed the wrong area code. Maggie shakes her head again, she hates being such a soft touch, then cradles the phone back between her shoulder and her ear, all the while picking through the chicken to find a pack that’s less than three pounds, it’s just her and Lucy for heaven’s sake, some of these packs are big enough to feed an army.

“Ma’am — Dorothy — I think you’ve dialed the wrong area code,” Maggie says. “Can you tell me the number you’re trying to reach?”

“What?”

“What number are you trying to reach? I think you’ve dialed the wrong area code.” Dorothy from the St. Theresa home gives Maggie the number but without the area code — it’s the same last seven digits — as Maggie locates a pack of chicken just north of a pound and a half. It’s way more than she and Lucy need, but better than all the gigantic packs that resemble the mean-eyed guy’s biceps under cellophane. She tosses the chicken into her cart, narrowly avoiding crushing one of the bags of chips, then asks Dorothy from the St. Theresa home whether she’s on the room phone or her cell.

“I’m on the room phone,” the woman responds. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Maggie. Maggie Whiteside. Now, can you tell me the area code listed on the phone?”

The woman’s tone turns whiney, like Lucy’s when she isn’t getting what she wants. “Why do you care about the area code? It’s three-one-two, just like it’s always been.” Then she says it again, but pronounces the numbers carefully, with obvious uncertainty. “Three. . . one. . . two, that’s right, isn’t it?”

Maggie’s shoulders slump as she realizes what’s going on. This woman’s knowledge of area codes was formed early and augmented only later, and now it seems as broken as her voice. For a second Maggie thinks of her own mom and wonders if this is where she’s headed, pills or no pills, she and Lucy should really drive down there and cook dinner sometime soon. Lucy would love it because Gramma would probably give her some kind of toy as a reward for a tooth Lucy recently lost, and it’d be nice to be all together. Then Maggie feels the phone buzz in her hand as another call comes in, though this time she recognizes the area code as L.A. when she looks down at it. That’s right. The agent said he went to USC. She puts the phone back up to her ear.

“Ma’am. I’m sorry but I’ve got to go. I have an important call coming in on the other line.”

The woman’s voice turns frantic. “But who’s going to help me? I really need help!”

“Ma’am — Dorothy — just calm down. You dialed the wrong area code. Look down on your room phone and you’ll see the right area code to dial, ok?”

“Please! Please help me!”

“I’m sorry, Dorothy. Just dial the right area code and everything will be fine.” Maggie hangs up and presses the phone icon to catch the agent’s call, as a middle-aged Hispanic guy wearing a bloody butcher’s apron and carrying a tray of fresh chicken packs raises his eyebrows at her so she’ll step out of his way. She moves aside and waits expectantly for her phone to connect the call. Too late — it’s gone to voicemail. Dammit, she thinks. Goddammit. She counts slowly to three to give the message apparatus a chance to clear before dialing the number back, hopefully the agent hasn’t moved on to something else yet, after all she’s money to him just like he’s money to her. But the number barely rings before she’s listening to the agent tell her in his middling baritone that he’s sorry he missed her call but leave a message and he’ll be back to her as soon as he can. Maggie places the phone down in the cart and sighs, closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them the Hispanic man is finishing up with the chicken as Dorothy from the St. Theresa home is rattling in the basket yet again. Maggie asks the man whether he has anything in there that’s less than a pound.

“No comprendo,” he says, “no hablan ingles,” and Maggie gives out a little laugh, it’s just not her day. She looks down at her buzzing phone then shifts her gaze to the contents of her cart, they’re out of barbecue sauce, she remembers, Lucy won’t eat the chicken tenders without it. And Maggie’s mom likes it too, maybe she’ll finally come up and spend the night instead of them driving all the way down there. Maggie pushes her cart past the Hispanic man and the chicken display, towards the aisle for the salad dressing and sauces; only then does she answer her phone.

“Hello, Dorothy,” she says. “This is Maggie Whiteside again. Let me see if I can help you with your problem.” Maggie turns into the aisle she needs, one of the wheels on her cart starting to wobble funny, hoping that Lucy’s favorite brand of barbecue sauce will perhaps be on sale.

***

A few days go by and Maggie still hasn’t connected with that agent, she called him back again as soon as she was done with Dorothy from the St. Theresa home and left a lengthy voicemail. Too lengthy, she thought at the time, she had the distinct feeling upon hanging up that she sounded kind of needy. No one wants someone who’s needy, whether it’s on a date or for a job, needy people create tension and discomfort, even if everyone’s been there at one time or another. Who wants to be reminded of themselves at their worst, there just isn’t time for that kind of reflection these days. Everyone is go, go, go all the time.

So she sits on her periwinkle Tommy Bahama blanket at Huntington trying to enjoy the sun and not call the agent, her phone teasing her from its spot on top of a Little Mermaid satchel filled with beach toys. Maggie still totes Lucy’s sand-sculpting gear to the ocean on their Saturday outings, even though Lucy hardly plays with the stuff anymore. Instead, Lucy usually finds an actual playmate to hang with, this time some boy whose back is marked with a chocolate brown egg-shaped birthmark on skin that otherwise is the color of sandalwood. The boy tosses Lucy the frisbee they’ve been playing with and she bungles the catch; she’ll have to go into the water to retrieve it, though thankfully the waves aren’t much today, there’s just a scattering of surfers near the break, from the looks of it almost all beginners.

“Careful, Lucy!” Maggie calls to her all the same. “Not too far out!” Lucy looks back at Maggie and waves to let her know everything’s fine.

Maggie’s mom was supposed to be here, they’d planned the outing not long after the calls with Dorothy from the St. Theresa home. That whole experience had been unsettling to Maggie, coming face to face with the woman’s dementia, there was even another call after the fourth one, in which the woman misdialed one final time. Though at least that last time Dorothy Wells recognized Maggie’s voice when she picked up and apologized for having done it again — dialed the wrong area code that is. She had to be specific because on the fourth call she’d completely lost the thread and started talking about her bodily functions and her propensity for terrible bowel cramps she never remembered getting when she was younger, was there any way Maggie could bring some real Pepto when she came to visit next? They only had the generic kind at the St. Theresa home and it tasted quite foul. And while Maggie was at it, it’d be nice if she brought the old mohair blanket — you know, the brown and sky blue one in the cabinet above the washing machines. Dorothy got cold here a lot when she was watching television, and while they were always offering her blankets, she misses the mohair one, even if it is kind of itchy.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Dorothy Wells then said in a moment of lucidity.

“I’m sorry I don’t,” Maggie replied. “Like I said before, you dialed the wrong number.”

Shortly after listening to all this and then leaving the too long voicemail for the agent, Maggie dialed her mom. Maggie told her she just wanted to say hi it had been a while but Maggie knew she was really making sure her mom hadn’t yet turned into Dorothy from the St. Theresa home — that when Maggie called, her mom knew it was Maggie and not some other person whose number minus the area code Maggie shared. Which was irrational, she knew, but that was part of the package of being Maggie. Her fears could chase her into dark corners sometimes and she could only get out of them by giving in for the moment and feeling in her bones how silly she was being.

So she and her mom got to talking and arranged this beach trip, they both agreed it had been way too long since Lucy had last seen Gramma. Six weeks, Maggie said, and her mom replied, no, has it really been that long? She was sorry but she had just been so busy with all the activities around here, she was teaching water aerobics three times a week, had she told Maggie that? They use foam weights in addition to all the step movements, it’s surprisingly exhilarating to have all the other people paying attention to her, they see her as some kind of expert. Your dad stopped listening to her the way her class does the last few years, she was always having to repeat things to him just to get him to respond.

“I think it was more of a two-way street than that, Ma,” Maggie said in response to that. To which her mom replied, “more like no U-turns allowed, young lady.”

And now Maggie’s mom hasn’t shown up, even after Maggie left a couple messages, and Maggie thinks she’s just avoiding the meeting because of those old demons she talked about when she first moved here. Maggie tries not to think of those anymore, the California sun helps a lot with that at least, even if it didn’t do too much for Maggie’s acting career. Maggie has more important things to concern herself with now than the fights she and her mom used to have, or so she tells herself. Like how to pay for everything mostly on her own, though, to Daniel’s credit, the child support appears in Maggie’s checking account every third Monday right when it’s supposed to.

A lot of Maggie’s battles with her mom superficially related to Maggie’s decision to become an actress, something that seems so long ago now as barely even to register on Maggie. The arguments always started and ended the same, beginning with Maggie’s mom asking passive aggressively how things were going with Maggie’s “chosen career,” and then concluding with one or more of: Maggie could have been anything; why did they pay so much for college if she was just going to go traipsing from place to place hoping someone would discover her while working reception; or, her mom’s go-to when she couldn’t think of anything else, flattering notices in the college paper are a lot different than making it in Hollywood.

The in-between was where the pain was, none of which had anything to do with Maggie’s youthful decision-making. From her mom’s side, the acting was just the latest in a string of disappointments, while from Maggie’s she never settled on what it was, she always just felt like an intrusion to her mom. A project her mom never wanted to be a part of, an extra appendage perhaps, rather than a full-grown limb. And while Maggie knows her judgment probably isn’t entirely fair — there were lots of good times mixed in there — she’s never been able to shake the feeling that her mom never really wanted her around.

Maggie doesn’t remember all the terrible things they said to each other as a result of all this, but some of them still stick in her mind as she looks out at the surfers, wondering how many years it might be until Lucy slams her bedroom door and blames Maggie for her miserable life. The one Maggie is recalling right now was the night before she left for California for good, before she knew she was pregnant with Lucy, when smack in the middle of her last dinner at the old house she looked at her mom and told her she’d wasted her life on Maggie’s dad.

“Well, at least I wasted it on something,” was Maggie’s mom’s withering reply. “You haven’t gotten a call back in over six months.”

Maggie looks back towards the sand, a twinge of concern arising when she doesn’t see Lucy right away. Then she spots her and the boy a little further away from the water digging a trench with a third kid, a black boy with an outie belly button, and the sight of the three of them so carefree gets Maggie to thinking she should try her mom one more time, they have to start getting along, if only for Lucy’s sake. Maggie’s tired of having to fib to Lucy, Gramma wants to see them she’s just really busy on the weekends. Or Gramma’s out of town sweetie, she didn’t get to travel much when Maggie was growing up and is now making up for it. Anything but the actual truth — Mommy and Gramma just don’t get along, haven’t for a long time, even when the three of us are together playing Chutes and Ladders having such a good time those demons are always lurking in the background.

Maggie reaches over to the Little Mermaid bag and grabs her phone to dial her mom, it’s getting ridiculous that she hasn’t even heard from her. She swipes to the “Favorites” to tap her mom’s number when she sees she’s missed a couple of calls because of the poor signal at the beach, including one from her mom. Crap, she thinks, that’s what she gets for sticking with this budget cell phone plan. She’s been meaning to switch providers, having bad reception at the beach in California is like having bad pizza in Chicago, Jason quipped on their date when she complained about it. That had made Maggie laugh and was another reason she was going to let Jason take her out again — him remembering she was from Chicago, that is — though when he asked her to go tonight she had to say no because she couldn’t find a sitter for Lucy.

She goes to check the voice-mail from her mom and finds an additional message there, a long one, with a Chicago area location. The St. Theresa Home, probably, and Maggie just shakes her head and laughs. That poor old lady, Maggie thinks, as she presses on what she thinks is the voice-mail from her mom but really is the one from Chicago. She brings the phone to her ear as Lucy and the black boy work on burying the third boy’s legs in the trench, his long brown hair blowing in the sea breeze just above his birth mark.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Whiteside. This is Carlos Gutierrez at the St. Theresa home in Des Plaines and I’m hoping you can help—”

Maggie pulls the phone away from her ear and sees the mistake she’s made, presses the pause button on the voice-mail. Why the heck are they calling her, she wonders, as she watches someone she assumes is the black boy’s mother approach the three kids. She’s wearing an exquisite lime green one-piece and has a figure to die for, the way Maggie still hopes she looks but isn’t too sure about. She lost the weight after Lucy was born pretty quickly, within a few months tops, but not so fast that Daniel hadn’t already started to lose interest. Late evenings at work, even later phone calls from the road. They were a lousy match — Maggie will concede that without much of a fight, something else Maggie’s mom used to harangue her about. Marrying someone you met while you were in college was usually a mistake, she said not so kindheartedly when Maggie shared the news of the divorce, men’s physical maturity lagged years behind the emotional kind. Just look at her and your father, at least they’d had the chance to grow up a bit after school, even if he had crapped out on her for good when he turned fifty-seven. They’d made a decent life together and he wasn’t the first man to lose his way when he hit his fifties.

“He cheated on you for years, Ma,” Maggie said to that one. “You just chose to look the other way.”

Maggie watches as the beautiful black woman hands her son a bag of snacks of some kind, then offers extras to Lucy and the boy with the birthmark. The latter reaches up with one arm to grab the treat so as not to disturb the burying job, while Lucy takes hers and turns to look at Maggie. Their eyes meet and Lucy runs over to where Maggie is sitting, holding the snack bag out in front of her. Fruit gummies, the same kind Maggie’s mom was supposed to bring.

“Is it ok if I have these?” Lucy says, handing over the bag of treats; Maggie inspects the package to make sure it’s ok and then returns it, exchanges a hi wave with the black boy’s mom, who is crouching down and brushing some sand out of her son’s hair.

“Sure, sweetie,” Maggie says to Lucy. “Who are your friends?”

“Peter is the one we’re burying and Nathan is the other one. They go to school together in Seal Beach. Can I have them over some time? They’re really nice.”

“We’ll see, sweetie. Why don’t you just enjoy yourself for now and we’ll talk it over later. Is that lady Nathan’s mom?”

Lucy tears open the package of gummies and shoves a few into her mouth. In between bites she answers Maggie’s question. “Yes. Her name is Lois. She says she has more of these if we want seconds.” Lucy points at the phone, which Maggie is still holding in her hand. “Who were you talking to? Gramma?”

Maggie shakes her head. “No. Just a wrong number.”

“Is Gramma not coming?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know.”

Lucy crams the last of the gummies into her mouth, chewing through a frown, and hands the empty wrapper to Maggie. “What’s the matter with Gramma anyway?” she says, and then turns and scampers back over the sand to her new found friends.

It’s a good question, Maggie thinks, though she knows Lucy meant it about Maggie’s mom’s alleged disease, and not anything else. Still, it’s one best answered not sitting on the beach, where doling out fault is made so much more difficult by the surroundings. The sun and the waves have a tendency to wash everything out, smoothing the rough edges on any blame like the wind on the sand. But Maggie tries anyway — if she’s not careful, before she knows it the six weeks will become six months and Lucy will grow up without her grandmother. She goes over things in her mind and thinks the current state of affairs is more her mom’s fault than her own, Maggie was just a stupid kid when she said all those terrible things. But that’s probably just because her mom hasn’t shown up today and Maggie is pissed about that, give her a minute and she could flip the other way around, it’s not as if she forgot about telling her mom just a couple months ago to “leave her the hell alone.” Though, of course, that was before this agent opportunity come up and Maggie was worried she was going to have to ask her mom for money. Besides, Maggie thought her mom understood that whatever Maggie might have said never was intended to include Lucy, the three of them could still get together whenever. Maggie just didn’t want to be one on one with her mom right then and Maggie thought the same was true vice versa for her mom.

She looks out at the kids again, trying to figure exactly what she should say to her mom for not showing up, when she remembers the interrupted voice-mail from the St. Theresa home. Instead of pressing play again, she reads the transcription, which other than missing some punctuation is pretty good, this technology is really getting quite advanced. What will they think of next, she wonders, maybe they’ll come up with some way to help the Dorothy Wellses of the world with their problems before they dial the wrong number over and over again.

Or the Maggie Whitesides, she muses.

She reads the transcription, shielding the screen with her hand from the glare of the mid-day sun.

Good afternoon Ms. Whiteside sorry to be bothering you on a weekend but this is Carlos Gutierrez at the St. Theresa home in Des Plaines and I’m hoping you can help me. I’m calling because there’s been another incident and we’re going to have to move Mrs. Wells into full time monitored care and the numbers we had on file for her weren’t helpful. We checked her phone log and saw all the calls to this number and after talking to her are thinking you should take over decision-making about her I don’t mean to alarm you or anything like that and I suspect you know this already, but Dorothy is really not able to be on her own at all anymore, and we just want to talk to someone close to her about that. I’m here the rest of the afternoon and will wait for your call you can reach me directly at this number. Thank you.

Good grief, Maggie thinks, that poor lady, how bad do things have to be for her for the St. Theresa home to be calling a total stranger? But then according to the message Carlos Gutierrez doesn’t think Maggie’s a stranger, for all he knows Maggie is Dorothy Wells’s last lifeline to the outside world. And perhaps she is — she and all the other people Dorothy Wells has mistakenly called over the last however long, there’s probably a whole raft of them scattered across the country depending on what number the woman was trying to dial. Though it seems from Mr. Gutierrez’s message that perhaps only Maggie was dumb enough to answer the call instead of letting it roll into voice-mail and oblivion, if only she could have remembered that the agent had an L.A. area code none of this would ever have happened.

She looks down at the voice-mail transcription again, thinking she can just ignore it, but then decides they’ll keep bugging her until she responds. She knows this from a nursing home training video she produced two years ago, lots of discussion about regulations regarding “responsible parties” and under what circumstances they must be consulted. Admittedly this was in California, not Illinois, though she imagines there can’t be too much of a difference. That’s become one of her specialties, doing videos that apply to more than one state — multi-state in the lingo of the trade — though you have to be careful not to mix the Mississippis with the Connecticuts of the world. Even though they have more in common than you might think, the customers who buy Maggie’s videos just don’t believe it.

Christ, she sure has traveled a long way from playing Luisa in Fantasticks at summer stock at Ravinia the year before graduation.

She presses the phone icon on the voice-mail to return Carlos Gutierrez’s call; the children turn back to playing Frisbee. It looks like some kind of keep-away game, two on one, Lucy is paired with the black boy while the birthmarked kid runs between them. Carlos Gutierrez picks up the phone on the second ring.

“Hello. Carlos Gutierrez speaking,” he says. His voice is thin, officious, about what you’d expect from a place that might have a linoleum floor. Maggie clears her throat and puts on her best video voice. She thinks that impresses people, and at least Jason tells her she’s right about that.

“Hello, Mr. Gutierrez. This is Maggie Whiteside returning your call.”

“Who?”

“Maggie Whiteside. You called me just a bit ago? I’m afraid there’s been—” Then Carlos Gutierrez interrupts Maggie and starts explaining things, much to Maggie’s dismay. She wants to get this good Samaritan stuff over with, she needs to call her mom back so she can hear whatever excuse is forthcoming today. Water aerobics and those stupid foam weights, perhaps. And then she can call that agent, the hell with sounding needy. She needs an answer from him, needs to know whether she really is going to have to broach the topic of money with her mom.

“Oh yes, yes,” Carlos Gutierrez is saying. “Thank goodness you called, such an unfortunate situation. Dorothy has really taken a turn these past couple months and like I said in my voice-mail, we’re going to have to move her into full-time monitored care. She’s upset about it to the extent she understands it, which I’m not sure she really does, but it’s for the best. Now, because her power of attorney doesn’t specifically name you, I need you to fill out some forms and get them notarized and then I can send to our lawyer. Thankfully, Dorothy signed an open power, so we should be ok on that. I can send you what we need today, can you tell me your email?”

“What?” Maggie says, which really is all she can manage. She is dumb-struck, and instead of saying anything further, she looks out at the kids and sees that Lucy is now the odd one out.

“Your e-mail,” says Carlos Gutierrez. “You have one don’t you? It’s all very simple, but we have to have the forms and your notarized signature before we can move forward. Dorothy says hi by the way. She has a lot of bad days but then some good ones every now and then where she seems just fine and remembers all sorts of things, including your number believe it or not. When we asked her about it, she recited it just like that.”

“You’re kidding,” Maggie says, still drawing a blank, as Lucy wrestles the frisbee from the black boy, then prances around in front of him in her pink flowered bikini like she’s some kind of fashion model.

“No, I’m not,” Carlos Gutierrez continues. “Now if you can just tell me your email we should be able to get this process taken care of in a week or two, hopefully before Thanksgiving. Dorothy was in really bad shape the other day though I’m sure you know that from talking to her. She went to the bathroom on the floor again and we think tried to cover it up by stopping up her toilet with tissues. The thing ran all over the place. By the time we got in there—”

Maggie stops listening and holds the phone away from her ear for a second, this really is happening, isn’t it. How on earth? Doesn’t matter, she has to end it now, no matter how alone Dorothy Wells might be, Maggie needs to call the agent and then her mom in one order or another. She gathers herself back together, sitting straight on her blanket and putting her video voice back on again.

“Mr. Gutierrez,” she says. “I’m afraid there’s been a terrible mistake. I can’t help you.”

“You can’t? Why not? We asked Dorothy and she said that Maggie was responsible for her now, you’d helped her out the other day when her toilet was overflowing and that you were going to be in this week to bring her mohair blank—”

“Mr. Gutierrez,” Maggie interrupts. “I don’t even know Dorothy.”

“You don’t?”

“No. She kept dialing me by mistake and I was just trying to be nice. She dialed the wrong area code.”

“The wrong area code,” Carlos Gutierrez repeats.

“Yes. I grew up in Chicago and she dialed three-one-two, which is my number, and I think she was supposed to dial eight-four-seven. From the sounds of it, I think three-one-two is the only area code she remembers anymore. I live in California now. I’m actually calling you from the beach.”

There’s a short silence before Carlos Gutierrez starts laughing a little bit, sounding like Maggie did the other day in the grocery store. Life is a messed up thing, his chuckle says to Maggie, even for twiggy-sounding nursing home bureaucrats in the Chicagoland area.

“Oh boy,” Mr. Gutierrez says. “At least that saves me the lecture I was planning on giving you.”

“Lecture?”

“Yeah — you’d be surprised how often family tries to avoid responsibility for people like Dorothy and I have a standard speech I give when that happens. I just assumed you were related in some way given the number of calls. You really don’t know Dorothy? She seemed so certain about it.”

“Swear to God, Mr. Gutierrez. She kept calling me while I was in the grocery store and she just sounded so. . . .you know. So I tried to help her out."

Maggie listens as, halfway across the country, Carlos Gutierrez heaves a great sigh. Then some ruffling of papers before he gets on with it and moves towards a good-bye. “You’re a good person, Ms. Whiteside,” he starts off with.

“I am?” Maggie watches as one of the beginner surfers behind the kids gets going for a bit then wipes out. Mr. Gutierrez continues. “I think most people would have just let Dorothy go to their voice-mail or ignored the calls entirely, let alone call me back. So, yes, you’re a good person. I’m impressed.”

“Well, I don’t think you’d say that if you knew me better,” Maggie says smartly, thinking she is making Carlos Gutierrez smile. “I doubt that very much, Ms. Whiteside,” he replies. “But good luck to you anyway and sorry to have bothered you. Have a good rest of your day, ok?” And just like Dorothy Wells, before Maggie can respond “you too” like she normally would Carlos Gutierrez hangs up the phone.

You’re a good person. The words hang over Maggie, making her feel cold, despite the warmth of her surroundings. She reaches over to grab an extra towel from beneath the Little Mermaid satchel and wraps it around her bare feet and legs, looks out at the water at Lucy and the boys. They’ve quit the keep-away game and are now throwing the frisbee around in a triangle in the shallows, the surfers forming a nice backdrop behind them. Lucy flings the yellow disc effortlessly, like someone much older, and Maggie wonders where she learned to play so well. A vague thought that maybe it was Maggie’s mom enters Maggie’s mind, she seems to recall the two of them practicing when they got together the time before last. Maggie’s mom was a terrific athlete when she was young, unlike Maggie, who only played soccer because her mom made her, and even then skipped out on it as soon as the car was out of sight.

You’re a good person. No, she’s not. She’s nice and soft and can care about strangers when the moment strikes her, but good? It doesn’t even seem like that agent thinks so, no good person would ever have called her mother “nothin’ but a whore” in front of a roomful of company, even if Maggie was only nineteen at the time.

Maggie winces at the memory of this and turns back to her phone, to the other voice-mail sitting there waiting. Rather than read the transcription she presses the button to listen, she needs to hear today’s excuse directly and not some computer translation. If only to make herself feel better for a moment about all those demons, it isn’t as if there wasn’t a reason for the name-calling, right? But the attempt at exonerating herself fails and all she can think is that she and her mom are never going to get this right, are they, they will keep doing this dance until the day Maggie’s mom dies.

Hi, Mags, this is Mom, the message begins, the invocation of Maggie’s childhood nickname filling her with a familiar irritation. Which in a flash turns to guilt as she listens to the remainder of the message, her mom’s voice hollow over the sound of the surf: I’m sorry I missed your calls and that I didn’t call sooner but I’m afraid I wont be making the beach today. I don’t want to upset you but I haven’t been feeling well lately and I went to the doctor a couple days ago and they did some tests and, well, you remember those cysts? Turns out they weren’t benign after all. I have to go up to UCLA later today, but maybe you and Lucy have time to come down here before I leave. Traffic shouldn’t be so bad on a Saturday, and Huntington’s a lot closer than Long Beach. Sorry again, I know Lucy was looking forward to it. Talk to you soon, hopefully. Bye.

Maggie stands up, the towel falling to the sand, starts waving wildly at Lucy. They’ve got to get going, who knows, there may not be a lot of time. She catches Lucy’s eye right as the birthmarked kid lets the frisbee fly in her direction, distracting Lucy just enough so that she misses the throw, which probably is high anyway. Everyone turns and watches as the disc sails into the waves by one of the surfers bringing his board in, the top of his wetsuit already unzipped halfway down. “Lucy!” Maggie is yelling, “Lucy!”, as she crosses the span between them, the sand feeling like ground pumice under her yellow-painted toes.

***

A couple weeks later Maggie and Lucy are driving on the Five in Maggie’s Prius to meet Maggie’s mom at the chemo center she’s chosen near Torrey Pines. Maggie never did hear from that agent, though with a connection from Jason she secured a different job, the papers for which are laying on the front seat beside her. Supposedly if she does good work on this one — for a mid-size SoCal hardware store chain — she has a chance at a big contract with either Albertson’s or Von’s, she can’t remember which. The grocery stores are even more lucrative than the law firms because of the number of outlets, Jason says. It’s not as many videos as the lawyers but they use them more often, and Maggie has gotten good at negotiating a per use kicker in exchange for lowering the up-front fee.

So she’s a little distracted thinking about the details of the new job as she and Lucy pass the idled cooling towers of San Onofre and then the peaks of the Santa Anas. Lucy is in the back in her car seat making a drawing for Maggie’s mom to go along with the flowers Maggie is bringing, which are sitting on top of the hardware store papers. This will be the third time they’ve seen Maggie’s mom since the diagnosis, though the first two were just short lunches in connection with doctor appointments. Her mom mainly wanted a second pair of ears at the visits, she wasn’t concentrating so well since receiving the news. And engaging from time to time in suicidal ideation, she confessed, she’d read online that it’s pretty common among stage IV cancer patients.

“Imagining you’re dying and knowing you are are two different things,” she explained to Maggie out of Lucy’s earshot at the first of the two lunches. “Who would have thunk it, right ?”

It was all Maggie could do to laugh at that, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with gallows humor, even when it isn’t very funny.

Oddly enough, they didn’t get together that first day at the beach, despite Maggie dragging Lucy away from her new friends and into the car intending to head down south towards Carlsbad right away. By the time Maggie picked up the message, her mom was already on her way up to UCLA to get a second opinion and Maggie couldn’t get a hold of her until the next morning. And when Maggie and her mom finally did speak, they somehow got into a fight again, even after they both spent time crying on the phone and promising to be better to each other. “I’ll let bygones be bygones if you will,” her Mom said, and then Maggie stupidly replied that she’d been willing to do that “for years,” thinking her Mom would appreciate the sentiment. But that just led into a rehash of who started what, and before she knew it, Maggie was hanging up the phone.

“Mommy?” Lucy pipes up from the back seat as they hit the early afternoon traffic after Pendleton. And then again, because Maggie is still doing the numbers in her head about the new job and moving down the coast as soon as possible not just for Lucy but also to make things easier with her mom, whose first chemo treatment starts in about an hour. They can’t keep driving down from Long Beach — it takes over two hours, sometimes almost three. They’ll probably save enough in gas alone to make it worth their while, and if she’s lucky, Jason can help her find a decent post-production studio near Torrey Pines and she can kill two birds with one stone.

“Mommy?” Lucy says for a third time.

“Yes? Sorry, sweetie, I was thinking about something.”

“That’s ok — how do you say what’s wrong with Gramma again?”

Maggie makes eye contact with Lucy in the rear view mirror. She’s turning seven in a few weeks, and Maggie can’t help but wonder if her mom will still be around for when Lucy turns eight. “Why do you want to know?”

“It’s in my picture. It’s a battle between Gramma and her cancer and Gramma’s winning, but I want to give it the right name. It’s serious carci . . carci-noma right?”

“Close, sweetie. Serous. Like serious, but without the I sound. S-e-r-o-u-s.”

“S-e-r-o-u-s,” Lucy repeats, writing it down with a marker that looks to be green. And then says the whole thing slowly, enunciating each syllable, though she leaves out the “IV” and adds a final “d” to the word “stage” along with a “ck” this time in the middle of “carcinoma” like “car sick”: “Staged . . . ser-ous. . . car-sick-no-ma. Look, Mommy. I’ve drawn her cancer like a dragon and Gramma is a fighting princess on a horse. See?” Lucy holds the picture up smiling her gap-toothed grin but Maggie can’t see it in the mirror. Lucy’s always doing that in the car, proffering things from the back seat out of Maggie’s field of vision, not just pictures but videos and Lego creations and even a burnt French fry once in the bottom of a McDonald’s paper bag. Maggie’s about to tell Lucy to finish up her drawing Mommy will look at it later she has to concentrate on the road, when the phone rings, the amplified sound from the car speakers giving Maggie a start. She looks at the Prius display screen and sees that the number is from Chicago, the computer identifying it as the St. Theresa home. Good Christ. She reaches out and presses the hang-up icon on the screen, she’s never really mastered using the buttons on the steering wheel, as Lucy asks who’s calling.

“Is it Gramma?” Lucy inquires.

“No, sweetie. Just a wrong number.”

“Oh. I was hoping it was Gramma. I like talking on the phone to her in the car. It’s like magic.”

Maggie catches Lucy’s eye in the rear view mirror again. “Magic?” Maggie says. “How so?” Before Lucy can respond the phone is ringing once more, the same number from Chicago. What was that woman’s name, Maggie thinks, Darlene? Doris? She reaches forward to press the hang-up button again, but Lucy says something that causes her to stop short.

“It might be important, Mommy – are you sure it isn’t Gramma?”

“Yes – I’m sure. It’s some old folks’ home in Chicago. A woman from there dialed me up by mistake a bunch of times a couple weeks ago. I’m guessing it’s her again.”

“An old folks’ home? You mean like where Gramma lives?

“Not quite the same, I think. I don’t know for sure.”

“Then why don’t you answer it? Maybe the lady needs your help like Gramma.”

Maggie signals to switch lanes to get out from behind a cement truck she’s been trailing too long as the phone continues to ring. She hates driving behind the big trucks, who doesn’t, but it’s especially nerve-wracking when Lucy is in the car and not watching a video on her iPad like today. The constant questions from the back seat throw Maggie off her game, and she finds herself sometimes coming up too quickly on the vehicle in front of her, which makes her particularly uncomfortable when it’s some kind of truck.

Maggie executes the lane change neatly as they pass the first of the Carlsbad exits, glances at her watch to make sure they aren’t going to be late — it’ll be close but things should be fine. By then the call from the St. Theresa home has gone to voice-mail, and she tells Lucy that the lady in Chicago has lots of people to help her, she doesn’t need Mommy. Lucy makes a small harrumphing noise, sounding unimpressed.

“Then why did she call you again?” Lucy asks.

“I don’t think she meant to. She’s . . .” Maggie’ voice trails off.

“She’s what?”

Maggie sighs, wondering if she should just explain things to Lucy. She decides against it and tells Lucy it’s nothing to worry about, not because Lucy won’t understand — she’s smart that way — but because there isn’t any need for Lucy to worry about dementia on top of stage IV serous carcinoma. Even at only almost seven Lucy is already deep into Google, and Maggie has found herself answering all sorts of depressing questions the last couple of weeks about five-year survival rates and the like. The last thing Lucy needs – either one of them needs – is a discussion about what can happen to old people’s minds, even if Maggie’s mom did bring up at the second of the two lunches — this time in Lucy’s earshot — how the doctors said that the “brain fog” of chemo sometimes could last as long as a year.

“What’s brain fog?” Lucy asked Maggie’s mom. “Is that like a cloud in your brain?”

“Why, yes it is, Lucy-goose,” Maggie’s Mom replied, using her pet name for Lucy. “It makes it hard to remember things. And hard to keep your mind straight.”

Lucy fingered the remnants of a bacon grilled cheese, looking a bit forlorn for a second, then cracked a smile. “A cloud in your brain,” she said. “Sometimes clouds come with rainbows, you know.”

They drive along in silence for a few minutes, Lucy looking out the window, her cheek pressed against the side of the car seat each time Maggie checks and glances back there. The respite allows Maggie to turn back to the numbers she was going over, she’s thinking they can easily afford a new place with the monthly payments from the grocery store job if she gets it. Maybe she’ll finally understand how television actors feel, she thinks wistfully, when the residuals check comes in each month with a nice tidy sum. A little surprise that maybe you haven’t really done anything for. And as for the hardware chain contract, that should sustain them for the next few months easy, provided nothing out of the ordinary comes up. All in all they should be able to avoid having to ask her mom for any money, though how do you do that when someone’s dying of cancer anyway, thank goodness Maggie won’t have to confront that, it would probably get ugly.

The phone rings again as they pass the race track at Del Mar, just a few more exits now until they get to the one for the chemo center. Lucy needles Maggie to answer. “She’s just going to keep calling,” Lucy says, sounding much older than her years, and Maggie buzzes her lips. Lucy is right, why didn’t she just block the number after the call with that bureaucrat a couple weeks back. Though at least the memory of that call makes Maggie smile, when she shared it with Jason in their talk about the hardware store deal he said that had to be one in a million.

“What – the guy thinking I was some kind of relative?” Maggie asked.

“No,” Jason replied. “The woman remembering your number.” Maggie laughed and said they really did need to get together for Chardonnays again soon.

One more ring and Lucy is whining in the back seat. “Maah-meeeee. Aren’t you gonna’ answer it?“

“Ok, ok,” Maggie says, and presses the green button on the screen to answer the call, though she doesn’t let whoever’s on the other end of the line say anything before she starts talking. “Hi – you have the wrong number,” she says. “This is Maggie Whiteside in California again.”

Nothing much is forthcoming from the car speaker, though Maggie thinks she hears some shallow breathing. She snaps her fingers. Dorothy. Dorothy Wells, that’s the woman’s name. “Hello? Is anyone there? Is this Dorothy Wells?” The use of the name seems to rouse the caller, and now Maggie can definitely hear what sounds like wheezing over the line. She peeks in the rear view mirror to check on Lucy, hoping she’s distracted by the orange McLaren they are overtaking, a typical middle-aged man behind the wheel, how California is that, a Prius zooming by a mid-life crisis on the Five. But Lucy is rapt, leaning forward in her chair, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth like when she’s concentrating on something on her iPad. It was a mistake to answer, Maggie thinks as she leaves the McClaren behind, it might lead somewhere awful, there aren’t any rainbows inside Dorothy Wells’s brain, that’s for sure. She reaches forward to hang up, Lucy will just have to understand, right as Dorothy Wells’s creaky voice emerges from the speakers.

“Hel-lo? Who is this?” And then again when Maggie doesn’t respond immediately, though a little stronger. “Hello?”

“Answer her, Mommy,” Lucy says; Maggie clears her throat and identifies herself, girding for the worst. She speaks louder than she normally does, hoping that will help the situation.

“Hello, Dorothy!” Maggie says, practically shouting. “This is Maggie Whiteside in California! You’ve dialed the wrong number again!”

“Maggie White. . .who?”

“We spoke a couple weeks ago? You keep calling me by mistake! You need to dial a different area code!”

A short pause ensues, and Maggie thinks the whole thing is about to go south. More rambling about bodily functions and medications and requests for Maggie to bring this or that when she comes to visit. And then the explanations Maggie was hoping to avoid with Lucy. But to Maggie’s surprise, after clearing her throat, Dorothy Wells sounds just fine when she speaks again, more than that, she sounds like she doesn’t belong in a nursing home at all.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember that,” Dorothy Wells says. “I take it we don’t know each other?”

Maggie continues to shout. “That’s right! Like I said, I live in California!”

Dorothy Wells laughs. It’s a good laugh, even if it is a little bitter, filling the car with cheer and warmth, in the rear view mirror Maggie can see it makes Lucy smile. “Oh dear,” Dorothy Wells says. “I’m really sorry. I have this number written down by my phone as an important one to contact when I need something. I’m having some trouble with my bed, nothing major. They’re moving me to a different room tomorrow so I suppose it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Reflexively, Maggie almost says yes, I heard about that, but then thinks that will just cause an extended conversation. Best to just let her go and block her later, though maybe Maggie can venture getting the area code changed on that number Dorothy Wells has written down. Maggie’s about to mention that when Lucy chimes in from the back seat, as Maggie flicks her turn signal on to exit the freeway for the chemo place.

“Hi, Dorothy!” Lucy says. “How are you?”

“Who’s that?”

“My name’s Lucy! I’m sitting in the back seat of our car!”

Another pause from Dorothy Wells, and Maggie worries that now things will deteriorate, they’ve been lucky so far. Good days and bad days, the guy who called her from the St. Theresa home said, though probably it’s more like good moments and bad moments. That’s how the doctor described the “brain fog” when it was just Maggie and her Mom in his office, and Lucy was waiting outside with her markers. Senile dementia probably isn’t too much different. But Dorothy Wells is just fine still and, after saying hello to Lucy, asks her how old she is. Her voice is clear as a bell, no cracking or breaking, though she has that flat Chicago accent that Maggie worked hard to get rid of in college because she thought it made her sound pedestrian on stage.

“I’m almost seven!” Lucy shouts out enthusiastically. “How old are you?!”

“You know, you don’t have to yell,” Dorothy Wells says. “Hearing’s one thing I can still do fine. And didn’t your mommy tell you it isn’t polite to ask a lady how old she is?”

Maggie looks back in the rear view mirror at Lucy, who’s grinning with her mouth open, about to laugh. “It’s ok, sweetie,” Maggie says. “You can answer.” Lucy nods. “I don’t remember,” she says coyly. “She might have.”

Dorothy Wells laughs again, a couple chuckles and then a small cough at the end as a concession to her age. Thankfully it doesn’t devolve into some kind of fit and she keeps on talking in her remarkably strong voice. “Well, I’m kind of old-fashioned anyway, “ she says. “But since you ask, I’m 78.”

“That’s older than my gramma,” Lucy says. “She’s 67. We’re on our way to visit her right now. I’m bringing her a drawing.”

“Oh? What kind of drawing?” Maggie meets Lucy’s eyes in the mirror and shakes her head and mouths the word “no,” hoping Lucy gets it. It’s one thing to have a little chat with Dorothy Wells but quite another to start talking to her about cancer. Lucy seems to understand and says it’s a marker drawing of her gramma and a dinosaur without any further details. Dorothy Wells almost squeals with delight, or as much as someone her age can still squeal, Maggie thinks. “Oooooh. I’d love that kind of drawing if my granddaughter made it for me.”

“Well, maybe I can make one for you someday.”

“You’d do that for me?”

Lucy nods without saying anything, as she sometimes does when she’s talking on the phone in the car. Just like she tries to show Maggie all those things that there’s no way for Maggie to see. “She can’t see you nodding, sweetie,” Maggie says, and Lucy sits up in her seat and returns to shouting.

“I can send you an e-mail with one! Would that be ok, Mommy?”

Maggie squirms a bit at that and gives Lucy a couple “we’ll sees.” By then she’s turning into the hospital parking lot, pulling up to the ticket dispenser and rolling down her window. As she waits for the stub to spit out, she tells Lucy to say goodbye.

“But I don’t have Dorothy’s e-mail to send that picture!” Lucy moans, and before Maggie can say anything Dorothy Wells intercedes.

“That’s ok, Lucy. I’ll give it to your mommy, ok?”

“Ok,” Lucy says, a bit glumly, but quickly perking up as she sees where they are. “Bye, Dorothy! We’re going to see my gramma now!”

“Bye, Lucy. It was nice to meet you!” Maggie grabs the ticket and pulls forward into the parking lot, thinking of what she should say about the e-mail, there’s no way that’s happening. Thankfully, Dorothy Wells makes up something to cover for them both, much better than Maggie would have done, she sucks at things like that. She and her Mom both, half the time Maggie thinks if they could just dream up some things to say instead of being so blunt all the time there wouldn’t be so much acrimony.

Bluntness only works if you really love someone, it pops into her head, because there’s such a solid foundation beneath. And that’s what she and her Mom have never had, a solid foundation.

“Maggie?” Dorothy Wells is saying. “You call me back about that e-mail when you’re not driving, ok? And thank you so much for taking my call — I’ll try not to do it again.” Then that phrase again, it must be in fashion at the St. Theresa home. “You’re a good person. You have a good rest of your day now.” And this time lets Maggie say “you too” before hanging up the phone.

The display screen on the Prius goes dark as Maggie pulls into a tight spot beneath one of the eucalyptuses that ring the outside of the parking lot. “That was amazing,” she says, more to herself than Lucy, and Lucy asks what was amazing. “That call. It was like she was an entirely different person.” “A nice person,” Lucy says dreamily, as Maggie turns off the engine. She notes the time on her phone and sees they’ve made it with ten minutes to spare, then checks to see if she missed any calls. She doesn’t see anything other than the voice-mail from Dorothy Wells so she puts her phone away in her purse, grabs the flowers and exits the car. She still can’t get over how different Dorothy Wells was this time, maybe there’s hope for Maggie and her mom yet. If the veil of dementia can lift for Dorothy Wells to have a cogent conversation, then surely stage IV serous carcinoma can produce harmony between Maggie and her mom.

Maggie goes around back to help Lucy out of her car seat. “Don’t forget your drawing, sweetie,” she says after undoing all the buckles, and Lucy retrieves the picture from the floor, hands it to Maggie to hold along with the rest of the things. It’s weirder than Maggie would have imagined, a green dragon cowering beneath Maggie’s mom’s orange wrath. Probably because the cancer dragon has big goofy eyes, and Maggie’s mom and her horse are the ones breathing fire. That, and the giant letters that spell “STAGED SEROUS CARSICKNOMA” that are bursting from the dragon’s belly, as Maggie’s mom plunges in her sword.

“That’s so great, sweetie,” Maggie says, shutting Lucy’s door. Lucy mumbles a thank you and zips up her jacket, which is a pretty shade of coral, and reaches up to grab Maggie’s hand. It’s cooler than when they left Long Beach — the chemo center is near the cliffs by the ocean and there’s a bit of fog rolling in behind the low buildings. Maggie finds herself wishing for her own coat as she leads Lucy across the parking lot, the cold of the coast after two o’clock in mid-November is even more California than that guy in the McLaren on the Five. “Come on, Lucy, let’s get inside,” she says, and together they jog the last bit to the entrance, where a workman with a ladder is putting up some Christmas decorations. Just inside is an information desk, manned by an older gentleman wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a Santa hat, along with a name tag that says “Hi, I’m Sam” in alternating green and red marker. He’s fat enough to play the part, Maggie thinks, but his cheeks aren’t rosy and he doesn’t have a beard. Still, he smiles at both of them sympathetically, they’re smart to put someone like this up here, he takes the edge off, a Nurse Ratched type would just make everyone even more ill at ease.

“A little early for that, no?” Maggie says, nodding at the hat. “I’m just starting to think about what I’m making for Thanksgiving.”

“Never too early for Christmas,” Sam the Santa replies. “How can I help you?”

Lucy puts her hands on the desk. “We’re here to see my gramma,” she says forthrightly. “She’s having chemotherapy today.” Sam the Santa leans forward in his chair. “That’s a big word for a little girl. How do you know such a big word?”

“I’m not so little, and I know lots of big words.”

“I’ll bet you do.” Sam the Santa turns back to Maggie. “Chemo check-in is on three. The elevators are just behind me and to the left, though you all look like you can take the stairs, which are right there also. Elevators are pretty slow.” He reaches below the desk and pulls out a small package wrapped in cellophane, places it on the front of the desk by a trivia calendar. November 13 — on this day in 1942 the battle of Guadalcanal began. World Kindness Day is also celebrated today. The packet contains a few crayons and a notepad-sized coloring book, the front cover of which is a ready-to-be-filled-in picture of a smiling nurse helping an equally cheery older man in a lounger with an IV in his arm. Cancer Isn’t Scary, the caption reads. “Ok?” he says to Maggie with raised eyebrows, who nods as he pushes the package forward towards Lucy. “How about a little coloring set?” he says to Lucy, who smiles eagerly, grabs the gift and starts to run off towards the elevators in one fluid motion. “Thank you!” she says, and then looks over her shoulder at Maggie. “Come on, Mommy! We’re gonna’ be late!”

Maggie thanks Sam the Santa and chases after Lucy towards the elevators. When Maggie gets there, Lucy is already waiting with at least a half dozen other people, most of whom are staring at Lucy with a mixture of resignation and despair, the same look her mom wore at both of the two lunches. “We’re here to visit my mom,” Maggie says to none of them in particular, she doesn’t want them thinking she or Lucy is a patient for some reason, and then directs Lucy towards the stairs, we can go up those, sweetie, let’s leave the elevators for the others.

On three, they walk over to the check-in desk where Maggie tells a chunky clerk with a neckbeard and no name tag that they’re here to sit with her mom during her chemo. Maggie gives him their names, and he confirms them on his computer — you’re pre-cleared he says — but then stops short of telling them to go anywhere. “Just a minute,” he says instead, and wheels his chair back to a file cabinet where he grabs a clipboard and starts flipping pages. He makes eye contact with Maggie and smiles, but it’s one of those smiles Maggie used to get when she finished an audition that wasn’t going anywhere. Something is wrong. He picks up the phone that’s on top of the file cabinet and hits a few buttons.

Maggie points over to some empty chairs by a decent-sized Ficus that needs watering across from the elevators. “Go sit over there and wait for Mommy, sweetie,” Maggie says, and hands Lucy her drawing. “Here. Why don’t you work more on your picture.” Lucy takes it, but says she’s finished with that. “I want to see what’s in this pack,” she adds, and scoots over to one of the chairs, kneeling in front of it and using the seat as a surface to draw on.

The clerk wheels back to Maggie. “Just wait here a minute. A nurse is coming by.”

Maggie looks around the waiting area anxiously, imagining the worst — her mom has done something to herself, taken something awful, Maggie should have worked harder to get down here and help out even sooner. It doesn’t matter that her mom makes things so difficult, she’s still all alone, not all that different than Dorothy Wells, even if her mom isn’t half as pleasant on the phone. What will she tell Lucy? Then before this all goes too far Maggie is chiding herself for being irrational again. Stop it, she tells herself. Stop it. She rests her chin in her palm and bites her lower lip, soft at first, then hard, until she tastes a little blood. She’s definitely not a good person, no way, even the clerk with the neckbeard is backing away from her, he can smell it coming off her in waves.

“Hi. Are you Maggie Whiteside?” Maggie looks up to see a woman — the nurse — dressed in a green flowered smock with matching pants and bright red eyeglasses standing behind the clerk. Her dyed blond hair is thinning a bit above her dark eyebrows — well, more than a bit — and Maggie tries not to stare. The nurse appraises Maggie for a moment, hands on her hips, an obvious look of concern crossing her face. “Are you ok?” she asks, and grabs a box of tissues from the file cabinet and holds them out to Maggie. “Your lip is bleeding,” the nurse says.

“What?” Maggie says. “Oh. Thank you.” She takes one of the tissues and dabs at the blood, turns to look at Lucy who’s busy with the coloring book. Maggie smiles, the sight of Lucy at play calming her a bit, what is she thinking, obviously there is some sort of logical explanation. Things are running way behind, they always do at hospitals, and her mom is still in the prep area and the nurse is going to tell her there are hours to go yet.

“I’m afraid your mother isn’t here,” the nurse then says; Maggie turns back to her.

“What?”

“Ms. Rosen. The computer shows she left a couple hours ago.”

Maggie pulls the tissue away from her mouth, drops it onto a metal tray that has appeared in the nurse’s hand. “She did? That makes no sense. She’s supposed to get her first chemo treatment today. At two-thirty.” Maggie points over at Lucy. “I’m here with my daughter to keep her company.” And then as if it somehow would change the situation, she points at the clerk and says, “he said we were pre-cleared.”

The nurse nods, her face still a mask of concern. “I know that, but all I can tell you is that she checked in this morning and then checked out a couple hours ago.”

“By herself? Was there someone with her?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to share any more details with you.”

“You’re not? That’s crazy. I’m her daughter.” Maggie’s voice rises as she says all this and she worries that Lucy will notice and come over, which will just make things worse. But Maggie sees Lucy is still keeping herself busy, though who knows, the child is probably listening to everything. And wondering. Wondering what’s happened to Gramma.

Maggie turns back to the nurse. “There’s nothing you can tell me? You’ve got me really worried. I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise but my mom isn’t in the greatest place right now.” Maggie sets the flowers down on the counter and takes her purse off her shoulder to get at her phone. Maybe they missed a call – god, she sure hopes so. The nurse reaches across the counter and lays a hand on Maggie’s wrist. “Let me see if there’s something more I’m allowed to tell you,” she says. “Give me a second and I’ll be right back.”

The nurse walks away as Maggie gets out her phone — she has no service inside the hospital, she really needs to get that new provider. She switches to the Wi-Fi and then sees it, the call came in while they were talking to what’s-his-name the Santa downstairs. She swipes over to the voice-mail page and the message from her mom is right above the one from Dorothy Wells, which just reads Hello? Hello? Hello? Maggie scans the transcription of the message from her mom with more of the shitty punctuation, her heart sinking as she does so, wondering again what she’s going to tell Lucy, though at least this will be nothing out of the ordinary.

Hi Mags, it’s Mom. Listen, I don’t know quite how to say this, but I’ve decided that it’s best for me that I go through this treatment with a friend I’ve met here at Sunny Acres she’s had cancer herself and has promised to sit with me for all my treatments. So I went for the chemo earlier today so that Ginny could come with me – that’s my friend you understand, don’t you. I still need you to pick some things up for me, I’ll text you the list, and you can bring them by on Thanksgiving, we’re still getting together then I hope That’ll be four days after my next treatment and Ginny tells me I’ll be feeling pretty good on Thursdays. Oh, and is it ok if she comes tell Lucy-goose I’m sorry, and that gramma loves her, but that I will see her next week, ok? Thanks for understanding. Bye.

The nurse comes back and Maggie tells her she’s figured things out, her mom left her a voice-mail and her service stinks and she just plain missed it. The nurse nods, looking like she’s feeling sorry for Maggie, and in the moment all Maggie can wonder is what she’s going to do with these damn flowers. She looks over at Lucy, who’s now staring back at her, aware that something is up, but smiling all the same. Maggie hands the flowers to the nurse, who takes them like she took the used tissue, by rote, because that’s part of her job, taking things that are to be discarded.

“Give these to someone who can use them,” Maggie says.

She goes over to Lucy and tells her to gather her things, they’re not going to see Gramma today after all. When Lucy asks why Maggie doesn’t lie but doesn’t really explain things either, just says things have changed, they’ll see Gramma next week on Thanksgiving. That’ll be nice, Lucy says, I can give her the drawing then, and then shows Maggie what she’s done with the coloring book she got from the Santa downstairs. The front page is just about finished. Among other things, Lucy has added red glasses to the nurse like the one at the check-in desk and colored the patient with the IV in a mixture of yellow and green, unintentionally making him look a little sickly. She stuffs the little book and the crayons into her jacket pocket for safe-keeping and stands by Maggie’s side, clutching the drawing she made for Maggie’s Mom tight in her hand.

“Come on, Mommy,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes,” Maggie says. “Let’s.”

They use the stairs again and pass the Sam the Santa on their way out – he waves goodbye and they wave back and then exit into the chill, now made worse by a breeze that’s come up. Maggie shivers and spies a coffee cart ten yards away on the sidewalk, how did she miss that when they were coming in, she could really use something hot to drink. The teenage girl staffing it is wearing a Padres cap and a green apron with a couple of big buttons that Maggie can’t read from this distance. The girl meets Maggie’s gaze and flashes a smile, points to a tray at the front of her cart that’s got some good-looking pastry samples in tiny paper cups.

Maggie squats so she’s face to face with Lucy. “You hungry? You want a donut or something?”

“That sounds yummy, Mommy.” Maggie’s phone starts ringing and she looks down at the interruption. It’s her mom. She reaches to answer but then stops, lets it keep going instead. Once, twice. She presses the silence button and stashes the phone in her purse, where it continues to vibrate for a few seconds before going quiet.

“Who was that?” Lucy asks.

“Just another wrong number.”

“Was it Dorothy?”

Maggie tousles Lucy’s hair, she’s lucky to have her. “No, sweetie. It wasn’t Dorothy.”

Lucy tips her head like a bird, her tongue sticking out again, she’s rubbing the space with the missing incisor. “You sure do get a lot of those,.” she says.

“A lot of what?”

“Wrong numbers.”

And Maggie laughs, a hard chuckle that fits in well with the chill. She sure does, she thinks. She sure does. She watches as Lucy skips over to the coffee cart, her little red jacket and the drawing in her hand both flapping in the wind. “Hi, what’s your name?” Maggie hears the coffee girl say, but Lucy’s reply is lost in the breeze.

##