Lee dialed the number.  He got her answering machine.  This was around two o’clock in the afternoon.  The voice, her voice on the outgoing message, held the same sweetness as when he had first spoken with her twenty-five years earlier.  He stupidly—stupid is how he felt after hanging up—left a message.  He said his name and added that he hoped she still remembered him.  He said he would leave his number, his cell number, and he began reciting it.  At first he couldn’t remember the number, stumbling over the first few digits.  Feeling foolish after making a few incorrect attempts, he gave up and said that he’d call her back.  Then, like a kitty jumping out of a shoebox, his cell number jumped out of his mouth.  He ended the message by saying that he would really like to hear from her, that he hoped she would call him back.

For the rest of the day, he was preoccupied with the thought of receiving the return call from her, whether it would come or not, what he would say.
That evening he wasn’t feeling well.  He had taken a pill to relieve pain caused by a recent leg injury and the subsequent medical procedure he had had that morning.  Two days before, he had fallen down a staircase using his shin as a ski.  It produced a beautiful softball-sized bump—a hematoma, as his doctor so clinically called it.  He didn’t like taking pills, especially pain pills—he didn’t enjoy the narcotic effect.  When in pain, such as when the Novocain wore off after dental work, he usually “bulldozed” his way through it—no matter how much it hurt.  Well, he wasn’t going to be able to bulldoze through this one.  The pill, Vicodin, made him nauseous, gave him a headache, and did very little to dull the pain, so he turned in at about eight o’clock, very early for him, earlier even than his wife, Felicity, who usually went to bed around nine.  As always, he placed his cell phone on the nightstand next to his side of the bed.