The second call came on Wednesday at ten past seven, the hour when the light over San Diego goes soft and everyone's blinds are half closed. I was at the sink. I let it ring twice, the way I always do, dried my hands, and answered.
"Mrs. Calder?" A man's voice, warm, with a little gravel in it. "I'm calling from the recovery division. I have a file here with your name on it, and I'd like to give you good news before the week is out."
I said nothing. Let a stranger talk into silence; that is one thing I had learned in four months.
He said my name again and then he said the number. Six thousand eight hundred dollars. He said it the way an adjuster says a claim figure, without any relish in it. He knew which month the first payment had left and which bank the last one had cleared through, and he recited both without hurrying, as though he were reading them off a page.
"Where did you get that?" I asked.
"It's in the file, ma'am." He gave a case number, letters and digits, and then a phrase that has stayed with me: joint seizure. The funds, he said, had been recovered and were being held at a depository pending release, and release required a surety bond of nine hundred dollars, refundable in full, of which I would see every cent back.
"Say the amount again," I said. "Slowly." He did. I had the pencil off the windowsill and the electric bill turned over on the counter, and I wrote nine hundred dollars and the date and the hour. I asked him to spell his name and he spelled it: Ellery. I asked for a number to reach him if we were cut off, and he gave one with an area code I did not know, and I wrote that down too, and repeated both back to him so he would hear me doing it.
"Mrs. Calder, I need an answer tonight."
"I'll have to look at my accounts in the morning."
He said the offer closed at noon Thursday. He said there were other claimants standing in line. His voice lost a little of its warmth with each sentence, and I noticed it, and I noticed myself noticing, the way you notice a seam pulling loose.
Mara came in from her shift with her collar open and her shoes off at the door. I handed her the electric bill. She read my handwriting twice, turned it over to see that it was only a bill, and read it again. "When did this come?"
"Seven-ten."
"And you didn't pay him."
"I wrote it down instead."
She sat down heavily. "Mama, this means they still have your name." She laid the bill between us as though it were something that might stain the table. "Your bank. Everything. We have to stop answering until we know who's calling."
"We?" I took the dish towel off my shoulder and folded it. "You weren't here when it rang."
"That's what I'm saying. I need to be here, or you need to let the machine take it. Every call. You can pick up after I listen."
I had bought that answering machine to catch upholstery customers while I was upstairs with the motor running. Now she was proposing that it become a gate with her hand on the latch. I understood why. Understanding did not make it a smaller proposal.
"Suppose Della calls about fabric," I said. "Suppose it's your shift calling me because they can't find you. Do those wait for permission too?"
"Don't make this about fabric. He knew what you lost."
"And he asked me to lose more." I touched the figures on the bill. "I heard that part."
She looked up then. I wanted her to praise me, and resented wanting it. At sixty-eight I was standing in my own kitchen waiting to be told I had done well because I had not given a stranger nine hundred dollars.
"You told him you'd look at your accounts," she said.
"I wanted to finish the call without explaining myself. I am not paying him. I am not calling that number."
"You could have told me that first."
"You could have asked me before deciding who answers my telephone."
The kettle began its little tapping on the burner. Neither of us had turned it on; it was cooling from my supper tea. Mara rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead and asked whether I had promised anything. I said no. She asked whether I had given him any new account information. Again I said no.
I wrote those answers beneath the amount, while I could still distinguish what had happened from what we feared. Beside the name he had spelled I added, Caller gave this name. I did not know who he was, whatever he knew about me.
Mara wanted to take the bill with her. I made a copy on a clean sheet for her and kept the original. It was a small refusal, but it left the account of my own evening in my own drawer.
"Please let the machine answer tonight," she said at the door.
"Tonight," I agreed. "Not a new household rule."
After she left, the telephone stayed silent. I put the caller's deadline under a saucer and cleared a place beside it for the public telephone directory. Noon Thursday could come without my money. What I needed next was someone whose authority did not begin with calling me.