He sat there holding the Fourth of July photograph with the hole in it, and through the wall he heard the carport radio come on, his father turning it up louder than he usually did, a ball game, the announcer's voice rising and falling, and under it the small, steady, tapping sound of a screwdriver turning a screw that was already all the way in.
* * *
He waited four days.
He told himself it was because of the rain, which came every afternoon that week at three o'clock like it had an appointment. He told himself it was because Danny Ruiz's cousin had brought over an Atari 7800 and they had to beat Joust. He told himself a lot of things. The truth was that every time he took the torn envelope flap out of his sock drawer and looked at the phone number, he heard his father's voice saying Lots of people named Abbott in that flat-tire way, and he put it back.
On the fifth day his father drove to Green Valley on a house call, a console television that weighed more than the man who owned it, and his mother was asleep, and Carter rode his bike to the Circle K and put a quarter in the pay phone.
She answered on the first ring, like she had been sitting next to it.
"Hello?"
"Mrs. Abbott? It's Carter. From the bus stop."
There was a silence on the line so long that he thought the quarter had run out.
"Well," she said finally, and her voice was very careful, "I made the lemonade on Saturday, and it's gone flat. You'll have to settle for sun tea."
* * *
The Casa Grande Apartments were two stories of pink stucco around a courtyard with a dry fountain in the middle and an oleander hedge that somebody had stopped trimming. Number fourteen was upstairs at the end. There was a pot of geraniums by the door, half dead from the heat, and a mat that said WELCOME in letters so worn it just said ELCO.
She opened the door before he knocked.
"You came," she said.
"I said I would."