The first time I really looked at my son's phone that fall, it was lying face up on the kitchen counter next to the toaster with a gray sock wrapped around the bottom of it, and I thought the sock was a joke.
It was a Thursday in the middle of October, a little after two in the afternoon, which in my life at that time was the equivalent of seven in the morning. I had been asleep since half past eight. I came downstairs in my sweatpants and the flannel shirt I slept in, with my hair still flat on one side, and the house had that empty school-day hum to it, the refrigerator going, the furnace ticking on and off, a leaf blower somewhere down the block on Fieldcrest. The kids weren't home yet. Kellan's bus got in at two-fifty and Juniper's at three-ten, and I had a ritual for the space before they came: coffee, two pieces of toast with peanut butter, and the graph.
The graph lived on my phone. It was a jagged blue line on a white background with a gray band across the middle of it, and the gray band was where my daughter was supposed to stay. Above the band was yellow and below it was red. Juniper was ten and she had been diabetic since she was six, and for most of the four years since, the line had been the first thing I looked at when I woke up and the last thing I looked at before I slept, regardless of what hour of the day those things happened. A little white sensor the size of a stack of three quarters lived on the back of her arm and talked to her phone, and her phone talked to mine, and mine talked to me. When everything was working, it felt like a miracle. When it wasn't, it felt like a smoke alarm going off in a house I couldn't get to.
That afternoon the line was fine. She'd gone up a little after lunch, the way she always did on pizza Thursday in the cafeteria, and come back down. I scrolled back through the night, which I did every afternoon, and the night was fine too. A dip at a quarter to three, down to sixty-four, and then a climb back up into the gray. She'd caught it. Or her alarm had caught it and she had woken up and drunk a juice box and gone back to sleep. That was what she'd been doing since April, since I'd gone to nights. She was proud of it. I was proud of her for it. I'd told my sister on the phone more than once that Juni was more responsible at ten than I'd been at twenty-five, and I'd meant it.
I put the toast in and turned around and there was Kellan's phone, by the toaster, in its sock.
I picked it up. It was an old Samsung that had been mine before it was his,. The screen was cracked in a pattern like a windshield after a rock hits it, a hard white star in the bottom left corner and lines running out from it all the way to the edges. A green stripe ran down the right side of the display, top to bottom, a pixel-wide line of bright green that never went away. The case was gone. One corner was crushed in. The charging cord was plugged into the bottom, and the sock was wrapped around the cord and the base of the phone together in a fat bundle, and it was tucked against the toaster at an angle so that the weight of the sock held the plug pressed up into the port.
I lifted it and the little lightning bolt on the screen vanished. I set it back down the way it had been and the lightning bolt came back. Thirty-one percent.
So that was what the sock was for.
I stood there and ate my toast and looked at it, and I'll tell you honestly what I thought, because there's no point in telling this any other way. I thought: he did this to it. I thought about the morning in August when I'd come home from work and found him at the table with the screen already broken, and how he'd said he dropped it in the driveway, and the way he hadn't looked at me when he said it. I thought about the email from his chemistry teacher, Mrs. Quillen, which I had read in my car in the warehouse parking lot two weeks before at six-fifteen in the morning, with the heater running and my fingers still numb from the cold room: Kellan is a bright student but he has been sleeping through most of second period and is missing four lab write-ups. I thought about the light under his door. I worked from ten at night until six-thirty in the morning, four nights a week, sometimes five, at Magic Valley Medical Supply out on the highway past the sugar plant, and on my nights off, when I lay awake because my body no longer knew how to sleep in the dark, I would get up at two or three to use the bathroom and there would be a thin blue line of light under my son's door. Every time. Every single time I looked.
He was fifteen. I knew what a blue line of light under a fifteen-year-old's door meant. Everybody knows.
I put my plate in the sink. I went and stood at the back slider and looked at the yard, which needed raking, and at the trampoline that nobody had jumped on since the spring, and at the cottonwood at the back fence that was losing its leaves in big yellow handfuls every time the wind came across from the canyon. I told myself I wasn't going to start anything when he got home. I told myself that every afternoon.