I Haven't Hung Up

Her mother, a client, it makes no difference: she is always the one who hangs up first, so that she never hears the tone. The summer she was twenty-five she would leave a call open and fall asleep on it. They had agreed to hang up when the birds started, but in the first week of September she woke to find the call already ended, before any bird. Thinking she had said something in her sleep, she never called again. The old phone at the bottom of her drawer still holds that night's recording, four hours and twelve minutes of it.