I went home and went to the bathroom drawer and found the receiver and charged it and turned up the volume as loud as it would go, and that night, before my shift, I set it on Juni's nightstand next to her juice basket and her phone both, so that if one didn't scream, the other would. She looked at it the way she'd look at a spider.
"It's just till we get you a new phone," I said.
"I don't need a new phone."
"You need a phone that works."
"Mine works."
"Juni, your phone let you sit at forty for two hours. Your phone is fired."
She didn't laugh at that either. I remember being puzzled by it. She usually laughed at my jokes, even the bad ones — she was the only person left in the house who did. She looked at the receiver and then past me at the wall, which was the wall she shared with her brother's room, and she said, "Okay," in a small voice, and I kissed her on the top of her crooked bangs and went to work.
The money was not nothing. I want to be clear that I wasn't some woman who went to the mall and came home with a shopping bag because she felt like it. I looked at the list on the clinic website and then I looked at the prices, and the cheapest phone on that list that was new enough to be supported for more than a year or two was an iPhone that cost eight hundred and twenty-nine dollars, or thirty-four fifty-four a month for twenty-four months on the plan. I signed up for a sixth night that week. And the next week.
All of this time, Kellan's phone was dying in its sock.
I'm not going to pretend I didn't see it. I saw it. I saw him in the mornings when I came home, sitting at the kitchen table at a quarter to seven with his cereal and the phone propped against the sugar bowl with its cord stretched across the table to the outlet by the microwave, a second sock now, a blue one, wedged against the plug. I saw him walk around the house holding it like something wounded, both hands, as if he could keep it alive by keeping it warm. I saw the stripe on the screen go from one stripe to two. I saw him check it in the middle of dinner, quick, under the edge of the table, the way his father used to check the score of a game he'd said he wasn't watching.
And I thought: good.
That's an ugly word to write down and I'm writing it. I thought, maybe if the thing dies all the way, he'll sleep. Maybe if the thing dies all the way he'll do his lab write-ups and stop falling asleep in second period and come back to us from wherever it was he went every night behind that door with the blue line under it. I thought of it like a fever that has to break.