Dangerous

Anything can happen.

I remember my daughter telling me this. It was after the apartment next to hers in Palm Springs blew up in the middle of the night. She’d been in her new place just a few days, unwittingly moving next door to a meth lab. So it blew up and there was fire and fire trucks and her escape from harm and her call from a phone booth across the street from her apartment.

It was three in the morning when the phone rang. It rang and rang out in the hallway of our old beach house on Lake Superior. It was a phone that sat on a tiny table, the way phones used to do when they functioned as family anchors. I got out of bed, searching for a light I didn’t need, wasting time. Stalling. No one calls at three in the morning to sell…