Phoning Melinda

The line is one block deep by the time I arrive.

I always tell myself I’ll get to the shop early, but life intervenes with burnt toast or my landlord banging on my door asking about back rent. Sure enough, I don’t get to Marty’s until after eleven, and there it is--the line.

“How’s it moving today,” I ask the woman in front of me.

She gives me half a glance before taking another drag of her cigarette. Her coat is too thick for autumn weather, and her shoes look like they’ve been sewn back together once or twice.

“Slow,” she says, “Everybody’s taking their sweet time.”

Perfect. I’ll be late for work again. The only reason I haven’t been let go is because nobody else will take the job at the pay they’re offering. I work at the orange juice factory downtown removing the pulp from the juice that’s headed for the pulpless containers. It’s easy work, but it eventually erodes your sense of smell and taste. Everywhere I go, it’s citrus. It was pleasant enough at first, but now it’s starting to drive me mad.

The line does indeed move slowly. I debate calling out sick from work, but I don’t have any sick days left, partially because I never had any to begin with. They recently passed a new law that sick time only needs to be provided to sick people who can’t work. When someone pointed out that people who can’t work don’t need sick time, the government added a new holiday to the calendar, and everybody got excited and forgot all about the sick day conundrum. I forgot about it too until the first time I had a cold and realized I had to go into work anyway.

“Next up,” yells Marty at the door, “Move it along, move it along.”

I don’t remember him yelling like that at anybody else. As soon as I’m next in line, suddenly there’s a rush. I smile at him as I pass. Marty looks like a saloon owner from the Old West. Big, broad shoulders and a bald head that always seems to be covered in sweat. He wipes at it with a rag he keeps in the back pocket of his jeans, and when he sees me smiling at him, he squints his eyes as though I’m a hallucination.

“Four minutes, max,” he says, even though I know the people before me got more than that. Marty’s had a problem with me ever since my last two payments to the shop were returned. It’s not my fault that I spent a long weekend in Venus when I didn’t have any money in my bank account. Prioritizing mental health is important, and mental health costs money, and if you don’t have money, you still have your priorities.

That’s the morning mantra I tell myself as my toast is burning.

Inside the shop, there’s a small table with a phone placed on it. The phone looks like one of those old landline phones from sixty years ago. I sit down in the wooden chair provided for an additional dollar, and pull the folded up piece of paper out of my wallet. No matter how many times I call this number, I can never remember it off the top of my head. The phone rings a few times, and I wonder where she could be. It’s not like she has anything else going on aside from traversing the landscapes of eternity.

I pick at a tear in the red cloth that covers the table. All around the shop are photos of loved ones that people have tacked to the walls. Some people like to see the people on the other end of the phone while they’re talking to them. I have no such desire. I’ve mostly forgotten what Melinda looks like, and that’s just fine with me.

“Hello?”

Her voice is always the same. A little tired, a little aggravated. A faint Boston accent, and a light cough. I don’t know why she still has the cough since she no longer has lungs or a body to keep them in. Maybe it’s just an affectation.

“Hey Melinda,” I say, “How are you?”

“Other than being dead,” she says, “I’m not half bad.”

Before I can ask another question, she launches into a story about playing bingo with Elizabeth Taylor. Something tells me it’s not the real Elizabeth Taylor, but I don’t stop her, because the more she talks, the more she’ll eat away at the four minutes, and then I have an excuse to go. I find it unfair that some of the other people get to talk longer, but that’s only because I resent inequity wherever I see it. When it comes to the particular circumstances of this weekly call, I’m all too happy to cut it short.

“...And she tried saying she wasn’t cheating, but I knew she was,” Melinda continues, “Just like she cheated on that poor husband of hers. One of them anyway.”

“Yup,” I say, “Uh huh. Uh huh.”

“Are you still working at that grape juice emporium?”

“It’s an orange juice factory.”

“If you say so.”

Melinda does not approve of my job. When she was alive, she worked as a lunch lady at the elementary school I attended. She saw it as a noble job, serving young children healthy meals to nourish their growing minds. Most of the lunches were just soggy fries and hamburger patties, but she believed in her work all the same.

Nobody in my life has ever really gone out of their way to be nice to me. Even when I was a kid, my parents would only acknowledge me if I asked for something like clothes to wear to school or a ride to the doctor when I broke my wrist in gym class. I always suspected that they only had me for the Population Preservation Tax Credit, and while they weren’t abusive, they certainly weren’t affectionate. When I graduated from high school, I didn’t see them at my graduation. I came home to find a new family living in our house with a box of my things in the driveway. There was no note.

The only person I can remember showing me any kindness was Melinda. She would always give me extra soggy fries and ask me how my day was. When I broke my wrist, she sat with me until my parents sent a taxi to bring me to the hospital. Once I left elementary school, I would stop by my old cafeteria just to say “Hello” to her. She’d slip me some hash browns and tell me never to end up working in a grape juice emporium. For a long time, she was my only real friend. Despite our age difference and her curse-filled stories about her ex-husband, it didn’t seem all that strange.

One day I went to check in on her and found another woman standing at her spot in the lunch line. She told me that Melinda had passed away a few days ago of cardiac arrest. I was pretty torn up about it, but then I saw the woman hand me a folded up piece of paper with a phone number on it.

“Here,” she said, “She left this for you.”

The next day I went to Marty’s.

Since then, I make it a point to go once a week, but, if I’m being honest, I really wish I’d never started coming in the first place. No matter what kind of relationship you have with people when they’re alive, it never holds up after they’re gone, especially not when it’s all based on phone calls in a little shop on the West Side. I realized pretty quickly that I only knew Melinda as a child and that, as an adult, we didn’t have all that much in common. I still appreciated how nice she was to me when I was younger, but checking in on her every week had become laborious. I would have stopped, but I worried she’d feel like I had abandoned her.

“....But say one word about Richard Burton, and she goes right off the rails,” Melinda was carrying on, a little cough after every fourth word.

“Elizabeth Taylor sounds like a real piece of work,” I said.

“Elizabeth Taylor?” said Melinda, “I was talking about Olivia de Havilland.”

“Oh,” I said, “Uh. Sorry.”

“Hey bub,” she said “I don’t mean to be rude, but, uh, I’m not sure how much more time I’m going to have for these little chats.”

I nearly fell off the wooden chair. The time was running out, and I could see Marty wiping at his brow as a scowl formed across his face.

“You mean you don’t want me to call you anymore,” I asked.

“It’s just that you don’t have much to say,” she said, “It’s always ‘My toast burned this morning’ or ‘Venus wasn’t as nice as they said it would be’ or ‘You’d be amazed how much pulp an orange can produce.’ It’s not exactly stimulating conversation.”

It’s true that what we had here wasn’t much more than an exchange of pleasantries, but I always assumed Melinda looked forward to it. Could it be that she dreaded these calls as much as I did?

“I don’t mean to rush you, but I really need to go,” she said, “Liz and Dick are meeting me for polo, and if I’m late, I catch hell for it. Take care of yourself, bub.”

The line went dead.

I stood up and made my way past Marty, who mumbled something about how I’d left the tablecloth askew. The line had shrunk by the time I got outside. Just a few people waiting to go in and speak with their loved ones, or ones they thought they loved, or just people they wanted to keep in touch with for some reason.

On the way to the juice factory, I stopped at a travel kiosk and scrolled through a few options. Saturn looked nice, but it was out of my price range. Then again, everything was out of my price range. I scrolled further and found a discount on a two-day trip to Enceladus. I don’t find moons to be all that enjoyable, but I hit “Book” anyway just to give myself something to look forward to.

I once asked Melinda if the Afterlife was like space, she told me it was more like a three-star hotel. You don’t hate it, but it doesn’t thrill you either. You exist and you exist and you exist and every so often the phone rings, and you get to talk to somebody on the other side.

“That’s when you remember that not everybody gets to experience a three-star hotel,” she said, “And you quit your bellyaching and go back to playing bingo.”

The booking to Enceladus didn’t specify what kind of hotel I’d be staying at, but I hoped it was at least three stars. The one I stayed at on Venus was nice, but everybody kept talking about how amazing the crusted magma smelled, and all I could smell was citrus. The rocks all around me looked like oranges, and the smoke rising up from underneath them made me wonder if I ever remembered to unplug my toaster oven.