Mom Phone

When the hall phone rings, a young man in a backwards ballcap and baseball tee picks up, tells the woman asking for his mother to hang on, and starts calling up the stairs. His mother never answers, so he keeps at it: short barks at first, then long pauses, increasingly formal announcements, a stretch of staring at the ceiling, and finally a full-throated chant. The caller, meanwhile, waits calmly at her dining table, painting her nails with the receiver tucked against her shoulder. At last his mother walks in through the front door behind him with an armful of groceries, annoyed that he never realized she had been out shopping, and he shrugs it off and wanders away.