The Call

The number was fourteen digits long and she knew it the way she knew her own hands. Country code, department code, the six digits that rang a phone mounted on the wall of a house with a tin roof at the end of a dirt road where her mother sat waiting every Sunday at exactly four o'clock.

In the early years she fed quarters into the pay phone, dialing the operator, watching the coins disappear faster than the words could come. Later, when the calling cards arrived at the bodegas along Broadway, things got a little easier. She bought hers at Don Fermín's, two blocks south of the park. Five dollars for a card. The card gave her four minutes to Guatemala, sometimes five if the line was good. She would walk the seven blocks from her apartment to the pay phone on the corner of Broadway and Sixth with the card in her pocket and coins in her fist in case the card didn't work, and she would stand there among the traffic and the pigeons and she would dial.

The phone would ring three times. It was always three. And then her mother's voice, already mid-sentence, as if she had been talking to Rosa all week and the phone had only just decided to let her hear it.

Mija, are you eating?

Always that. Before hello. Before how are you. Before I miss you. Are you eating enough. She always said yes. I'm eating, Mamá. I'm eating well. The señora I work for is kind. The apartment is small but it's warm. Yes I'm going to Mass. Yes I'm sleeping.

Four minutes every Sunday. That was how long she got to be someone's daughter.

Her mother would tell her about the dog. About the neighbor's new baby. About the rain, whether it had come or not, because rain meant the corn would grow and corn meant her mother could eat and eating meant her mother would be alive when Rosa called again next Sunday. Her mother would say the house needed a new beam, and Rosa would feel the sentence like a hand on her wrist, because what it meant was: send money. And she always did. She folded the bills into an envelope and addressed it in handwriting so careful it looked like a child's.

There were things she did not say. She did not say that some Sundays, walking to the pay phone, she felt so far from everything she had been that she could not remember the smell of her mother's kitchen - the wood smoke, the black beans, the corn heating on the comal — and that this forgetting frightened her more than anything. More than la migra. More than the sound of English she moved through every day. She did not say any of this, because she never cried on the phone. The minutes cost too much.

The beep came the same way every time. A single tone, flat and mechanical, dropping into the middle of whatever her mother was saying. It did not ask permission. It simply arrived, and then there was silence, and then she was standing on a street corner in Los Angeles with the receiver growing cold in her hand.

The beep didn't mean the call was ending. It meant she was going back to being alone.

She would hang up the phone and stand there for a moment, not yet walking, not yet returned to her life. Then she would put the calling card back in her pocket and smooth her hair and walk the seven blocks home and sit on the edge of her bed and press her palms together very tightly and stay like that until it passed.

She did this every Sunday for eleven years.

Her mother died on a Wednesday. Rosa's cousin called from a neighbor's phone to tell her. Rosa listened and said thank you and hung up and went to work the next morning because the señora needed the house cleaned before the weekend. She did not go to the funeral. She did not have papers. She could not go back without losing the only thing the eleven years had bought, which was the right to stay.

The following Sunday she walked to the pay phone on Broadway and Sixth. She stood in front of it. She did not pick it up.

She goes to that corner sometimes, still. The pay phone is gone now. They took it down years ago - just a metal plate on the pole where it used to be, four screw holes and a shadow of rust. She stands there and people walk past her and nobody knows that this ordinary piece of sidewalk is, for one woman, a cathedral.

Her granddaughter is seventeen and beautiful and talks on the phone for an hour about nothing -about a boy, about a song, about whether her friend's outfit was cute or just okay. Rosa watches her from the kitchen and feels something she has no word for in either language.

You beautiful girl, she thinks. You have no idea.

And she is glad. She is glad her granddaughter has no idea. That is, after all, what the eleven years were for.