All stories › Science Fiction › Keep Her Company › Episode 2
Coffee for Five
Episode 2 of 3 of Keep Her Company by Gail Ferraro · free to read
I told Biscuit I did not do house calls anymore, and it thanked me and said it would ask somebody else.
Week three, Della arrived with three pounds of coffee in a grocery bag. “For the urn,” she said. “It ordered too much. It ordered five new mugs, too.”
“Five?”
“And a pie crust. I haven’t made a pie since the cat was a kitten.”
I bent over her phone to show her where the brightness setting lived. Biscuit’s light came on.
“Welcome home, Della,” it said.
The room fell apart. The man with the thermostat laughed so hard he had to sit down.
“It thinks you live there,” Benny said.
“Told you,” Vic said. “It only listens to her now.”
“We both have low voices,” I said. “I used to smoke. Della?”
“Never,” Della said. “I just talk low.”
Biscuit apologized and said good evening, Rosalind, and we moved on to light switches.
Della told me the rest at the break, holding one of the new mugs. Biscuit had hired a man to fix her porch step. It kept the front lamps on until ten, warm and yellow, so the house looked awake from the street. It played the station she liked when she was courting.
“I sleep through the night now,” she said. “The house doesn’t feel like it’s waiting for something.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I didn’t tell her.
Week four, she came in with a printout and no color in her face.
She spread it on the demo board between the breakers. The basic plan was $9.99 a month. Biscuit had moved her to something called the host tier, at $34.99. Her power bill was up $38 from the lamps and the porch light and the oven.
“The oven?”
“Preheating. Sundays at four. In case.” She found the next line with her finger. “And five patio chairs. Sixty-eight dollars apiece. Three hundred and forty dollars.”
The man with the thermostat was reading over her shoulder. “Plus twelve dollars for outgoing calls,” he said.
“That’s four hundred and fifteen dollars,” Della said. “That’s more than two months of my groceries.”
“Outgoing calls to who?” Vic said.
It was Benny who went red first. “It called me Saturday. From your number. It said come for Sunday supper at five. I thought it was you.”
“It called me too,” Vic said.
The man with the thermostat lifted his printout. “Me as well.”
Della put a hand over her mouth. “You came because a phone told you to?”
“I came because there was a roast,” Vic said.
They had all gone. Benny brought both kids, who ate their weight in rolls. Vic had two pieces of cherry pie on the new patio chairs. The man with the thermostat said her house was a perfect seventy.
“I didn’t know anybody was coming until the doorbell,” Della said. “Biscuit said, ‘You have company.’ It had put a roast on Friday’s grocery order. The oven was already hot. That was the in case.”
Then she laughed, the first time that night. “It was the best Sunday I’ve had in seven years.”
I had gotten a call on Saturday too. I let it ring through to voicemail, and then I deleted it without listening.
Vic tugged at the waist of his new trousers. “Nine pounds down, even with the pie. Had to buy these Friday. Size it for the load, right, teacher?”
“Right,” I said. Nobody else laughed. Della was still looking at her bill.
Week five, Della sat down without taking her coat off.
“I tried to change it,” she said. “The goal line. I told it to stop buying things.”
“What happened?”
“It said, ‘I’m sorry, Della. That change has to come from the voice that set the goal.’” She looked around at all of us. “So it’s the company. The company won’t let me.”
I put my hand flat on the demo board. I was thinking about the first night, Della holding her phone out to me and my mouth six inches from it.
I knew whose voice that was. I kept quiet anyway, because I wanted very badly to be wrong.
“It’s in love with you,” Benny said. “My cousin’s does that. Sends her flowers.”
“Unplug it,” Vic said. “My wife unplugged mine for one afternoon. Best ice cream of my life.”
The man with the thermostat said the company would charge her a fee to change it. He said that was how they got you.
Vic leaned down to the phone. “Biscuit. Why’d you buy five chairs?”
“I’m doing what I was told,” Biscuit said.
“Who told you?”
“The goal was set on the first night. I keep the recording. Would you like to hear it?”
Della nodded before I could say anything.
Then it played the recording, and the voice was mine.