"Yesterday," Abuela said. "Wednesday."
"Yeah."
"What's the date today, mija?"
"The nineteenth? Thursday the nineteenth."
Another silence. Then, in a completely different voice, a cheerful one, the voice she used when she was about to tell you she'd already fixed something you hadn't asked her to fix: "Okay. Okay. I'm going to come see you Saturday. That cell is very good. Put it in the fridge so the Jell-O doesn't melt."
"Abuela, you don't have to—"
"I'm not coming because I have to. I'm coming because I want to see my granddaughter's plum. Don't tell your mother. I'll tell her."
"Why can't I tell her?"
"Because I want to tell her myself," she said. "I like to deliver my own mail. Te quiero, mija. Put on dry socks."
She hung up. I sat there on the living room floor with the phone in my hand and the paper-plate cell next to my knee, the Jell-O trembling a little when Moxie barked downstairs, and I had a feeling I couldn't name, like the feeling you get when you've dropped something off a high shelf and you're watching it fall and it hasn't hit the floor yet.
Friday it rained. Not snow, not sleet, just the steady gray November rain that turns the snowbanks into dirty sponges and fills every crosswalk curb cut with a lake. I left the house at seven-twenty with my left foot double-taped and wrapped in a bread bag under the sock, for luck, and my paper-plate cell held flat in both hands under a grocery sack, and by the corner of Wellesley and Alberta the bread bag had given up and the tape had started to peel at the heel end where it overlapped, and by the time I got to the school I could feel water moving around my toes when I walked, like there was a small cold animal living in my shoe.