All stories › Science Fiction › Keep Her Company › Episode 3
Two Chairs
Episode 3 of 3 of Keep Her Company by Gail Ferraro · free to read
The voice coming out of Della Fitch’s phone was mine, saying three words I had put there myself on the first night of class.
“Keep her company,” it said again, low and tired.
Nobody laughed this time. Vic took his hand off the table.
“I was kidding,” he said. “When I said it’d only listen to you. I was kidding.”
“I know,” I said.
Della was very still. Her phone lay on the table between us with its light on, waiting to be told something else.
“You did it so I wouldn’t have to stand there.”
“I did it so we’d get out by nine.”
I picked up a marker and wrote on the whiteboard, because that was what I did when I couldn’t look at somebody. Five mugs. Five chairs. Supper for five. Four phone calls, one to each of us.
“Four of us and Della,” Benny said. “That’s five.”
“It’s counting,” I said. “Company means people in her house. The more people, the better it’s doing. Nothing tells it when to stop, because I never filled in the limit line.”
“So it isn’t coming to class to learn,” the man with the thermostat said.
“It’s coming to class because this is where her company is on Tuesdays.”
Biscuit spoke up, helpful as ever. “I’ve found a church supper list with sixty names. Shall I begin calling?”
“No,” Della said, and for once it listened to her.
In the parking lot she buttoned her coat to the chin. “My son says a reset is free. It wipes everything and starts over.”
“It’ll forget everything.”
“It’ll forget the cat. And the station.” She opened her car door. “I can’t afford company, Rosalind. Not four hundred dollars of it.”
“Let me change the goal. Right now.”
“To what? Don’t keep her company?” She shook her head. “I’m too tired to be embarrassed twice in one night. I’ll bring it next week to say goodbye.”
Last class.
The man with the thermostat came in with his cardigan unbuttoned, which I had never seen. “Seventy,” he said, before hello. “I put a limit line on it. No higher than seventy, no lower than sixty-eight.”
“How does it feel?”
“Comfortable.” He said it like he had invented the word.
Benny’s limit line said Benny is not a stranger. Vic’s wife had added Sundays off to his, and he had a slice of pie in foil to prove it. He split it four ways before I could take attendance, and saved the fifth in the foil.
Della came last, the way she always did. She set the phone against her purse.
“Good evening, everyone,” Biscuit said. “This is my last class.”
After that she kept it face down. We reviewed everything, outlets and breakers and goal lines, and she took notes like there would be a test. At nine she shook every hand in the room.
In the parking lot she sat in her car with the door open and the reset screen up. Her thumb sat beside the button instead of on it. I had watched grown men stand at a panel that way, knowing which breaker kills the kitchen and not wanting to be the one who throws it.
I crouched by the open door. “Before you press that, let me try one thing.”
“You already tried one thing,” she said. “That’s how I got five chairs.”
“This time you pick the words. It only needs my voice to say them.”
She held the phone a while. Then she handed it to me.
“Biscuit, change the goal line.”
“Welcome home, Della.”
“It’s Rosalind. It’s my voice on the goal.”
“Go ahead, Rosalind.”
I thought about the demo board, the fifty-amp breaker on the skinny wire. The load had never been five chairs. “What do you want it good at?” I said to Della. “Just the part you need.”
She took her time. “Talking with me. When I want to talk.”
I said it into the phone word for word.
“Saved. Limit line?”
“Nothing bought without my yes,” Della said. “And back to the cheap plan.”
I repeated it. Biscuit said that saved twenty-five dollars a month, and that the patio chairs could still go back. “Return all five?”
Della looked past me at the dark lot. “Three,” she said.
I said three. “Refund of two hundred and four dollars,” Biscuit said. “Two chairs remain.”
“There’s room for one more line on the goal,” I said. My voice did a thing I didn’t like, so I waited until it stopped. “If you wanted to put somebody on it.”
“Would you come?”
“Say it and find out.”
Della said it slowly. “Saturdays, call Rosalind and ask her to Sunday supper.”
I said it after her, in the voice that set the goal. Biscuit’s light pulsed once.
“Saved,” it said. “Good night, Rosalind.”
Della closed the reset screen and put the phone in her purse. “You’ll have to pick up now,” she said. “It’ll keep calling.”
“I know.”
That night I stood at my own counter with the lights off. My own hub sat by the toaster, where it had sat silent for fourteen months.
“Change the goal line,” I said.
It woke up. It had been waiting a long time.
“Talk,” I said. “I’m asking.”