I bought the phone on the seventeenth, a Saturday, at the carrier store in the strip mall on Blue Lakes next to a mattress place that was always having a going-out-of-business sale.
I went alone. I'd thought about bringing Juni so she could pick the color, and then I'd thought about the look she'd given the receiver, and the way she'd said I don't need a new phone, and I decided I'd rather surprise her. I had worked six nights that week. I had slept four hours that morning and then lain in bed for another hour with my eyes open, listening to the house. Juni was at her friend Ximena's for the afternoon.
The kid who helped me at the store was named Tavish. He had a nose ring and the patient voice of someone who'd talked a lot of grandparents through a lot of passwords. He asked me what the phone was for and I told him, and he nodded seriously and said his cousin had type one, and he went in the back and came out with the box, white, thin, heavy for its size in a way that felt expensive in your hands. I picked the pink, because Juni had said once, months ago, in the car, that the pink one was pretty. He asked if I wanted the protection plan and I said yes, and he asked if I wanted a case and a screen protector and I said yes, and the total went up and up on the little screen on the counter, and I signed it with my finger.
While he was printing the paperwork, he said, "Anybody else on the plan need an upgrade? You've got a second line here that's eligible. There's a promo on through the end of the month."
The second line was Kellan's.
I looked at the display case next to the counter. There was a whole row of phones under the glass, some of them on sale, little orange tags. I'm not going to pretend there wasn't one for a hundred and ninety-nine. I'm not going to pretend I didn't stand there and think about the bag of money with the twist tie, and the bike, and his face when he'd handed his phone to me in September. I did the math. I'm always doing the math. Thirty-four fifty-four a month plus the protection plan plus the sixth nights I was going to have to keep working until Christmas, plus the gas, plus the endo copay in November, plus the sensors, which were three hundred and ten dollars a month with our insurance until we hit the deductible, which we never seemed to hit until about the second week of December, plus Kip, who hadn't sent anything since August.
"Not today," I said to Tavish.
He nodded like he understood. He probably did. He put the box in a little bag with handles and the receipt in the bag, and I walked out past the mattress store and sat in my car in the sun with the bag on the passenger seat and I'll tell you what I felt. I felt relieved. For the first time since the morning of the seventh I felt like I'd done something. Like I'd put a wall up between my daughter and the red part of the graph. I sat there and I took a breath that went all the way to the bottom of my lungs, and it felt like something I hadn't done in eleven days.
And under that, small, the way a stone is small in a shoe, I felt the other thing. I told myself it was just tiredness.
When I got home, Kellan was in the kitchen. He was standing at the counter with his phone in both hands, and his jacket was still on, and there were leaf bits in his hair and a smear of dirt on his cheek. The phone wasn't in a sock. It was plugged into the cord, but he was holding the plug in with his thumb, pressing it up into the bottom of the phone, and staring at the screen like he could will a number into it.
"What happened?" I said.
"Nothing. It died." He didn't look up. "It was at forty when I left and it died at the Vandersloots'."