Chapter 27 - The Call from the County Jail
The call came at two o'clock in the afternoon from a collect number in Henrico County.
I sat on the front porch of my cottage, wrapped in an old woolen blanket that smelled of cedar, holding the handset to my ear while the tide slowly rose to fill the marsh grass.
"You have a collect call from an inmate at the Henrico County Detention Center," the mechanical operator announced. "Eleanor Vance. To accept charges, press one."
I pressed one.
There was a loud *click*, the background roar of clanging metal doors and shouting voices, and then my mother’s voice burst through the receiver—frantic, ragged, stripped of every ounce of southern grace she had ever cultivated.
"Clara! Clara, you have to get me out of here!" she shrieked, her voice cracking into high, hysterical sobs. "They came to the house with handcuffs! In front of the neighbors, Clara! Mrs. Pemberton was watching from her rose garden! They put me in the back of a police cruiser like a common criminal!"
I leaned my head back against the rough cedar siding of the porch. "Hello, Mother."
"Don't 'hello' me!" she cried, her voice rising to a shrill scream. "Call Arthur's lawyer! Call the magistrate! Tell them it was a mistake! Tell them you told me to sign that paper! Tell them you authorized the loan from North Carolina!"
"I didn't authorize it, Eleanor," I said, using her first name for the first time in my life.
The silence that followed was so abrupt, so total, that I could hear the static hum of the prison switchboard.
"What did you call me?" she whispered, the shock cutting through her panic.
"I called you Eleanor," I said calmly. "The woman who canceled my twenty-fifth birthday dinner so she could pay for Hannah’s speeding ticket. The woman who let me work sixty hours a week to keep the heat on while she ordered custom draperies for the parlor. The woman who just tried to put sixty thousand dollars of federal bank fraud on my name."
"You are my daughter!" she screamed, her rage boiling over into the phone. "Everything I did, I did for this family! For your sister! Hannah is delicate, Clara! She doesn't have your strength! She couldn't survive out in the world like you! You owe us! We gave you life!"
"You gave me a bill," I said, looking out over the water where the silver light was dancing on the waves. "And I paid it. In full. Every single day for seven years."
"If you don't fix this," she hissed, her voice trembling with hatred, "I will never speak to you again. You will be dead to this family. You will have no mother, no sister, no father. You will be nothing!"
I closed my eyes, took a deep, clean breath of the salt air, and smiled.
"Eleanor," I said softly.
"What?!"
May you like
"Your three minutes are up."
And I pressed the red button, cutting the line into silence.
