"I'll wake you up. I'm going to be awake anyway."
"Mom, please." His voice went up and cracked. He was fifteen and his voice had mostly finished changing and it went back to twelve in the middle of the word please. "Please, I swear, I'll put it on the dresser. I won't touch it. You can put it across the room. Just leave it in here."
And that was exactly the wrong thing to say, because it was exactly what Kip used to say. I'll put it down. In a minute. I won't touch it. I'd heard that voice before, that pleading, from a grown man, and I'd believed it for three years, and I wasn't going to believe it from his son.
"Kellan. Give me the phone."
He looked past me. He looked at the wall. I didn't think anything of it then, but I can see it now, plain as a photograph: he looked at the wall he shared with his sister. Then he handed me the phone. His hand was shaking.
I took it to my room. I lay awake with it on my nightstand, face down, and it buzzed twice in the night, around one and again around three, and I didn't look at it, because I'd made a decision that I wasn't going to be the kind of mother who snooped. I was proud of that. I lay there and listened to it buzz and felt righteous. And all night I heard him moving around. The floor creaked. His door opened and closed. I heard water running in the bathroom. Once, around three, I thought I heard the oven timer go off downstairs, a single beep, but I was half asleep and I thought I'd dreamed it. In the morning he came down looking like he'd been hit by a car, gray in the face, eyes red, and he didn't speak to me at breakfast, and when I slid the phone across the table to him he grabbed it and looked at the screen and something went across his face that I took for relief and was something else entirely.
Juni's graph from that night was beautiful. I remember that, too. I checked it in the morning. A dip at one, down to sixty-eight, caught fast. Another at three, sixty-five, caught fast. A smooth line the rest of the night, right down the middle of the gray. Wow, I remember thinking. Look at her. Look at my girl.
I went back to work on Monday and I didn't take his phone again, mostly because I didn't want to see that look on his face twice. I told myself it had been withdrawal. That's what I told my sister. "You should have seen him," I said. "It was like taking a bottle away from a drunk." Steph made a sound on the other end of the line that I didn't like, and said, "Or he was scared of something," and I said, "Scared of what? Being bored?"
After the sixth, though, after the long low, Kellan came to me himself.
It was the following Saturday. I was at the kitchen table with my laptop and my legal pad, looking at phone plans, and he came and stood across the table from me with his hands in his hoodie pocket, and he took one hand out and set something on the table. A plastic bag with a twist tie. Inside it was money — ones and fives and two twenties and a lot of change.
"A hundred and twelve dollars," he said. "And forty cents. I've been doing Mr. Tibbets's yard and the Pikes' and their dog. And I sold my bike to Marco's cousin."
"You sold your bike?"