Page 3 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Bouncer

I get the new washer in. Get the valve open again, test it, and watch the drip stop for the first time in a month. Should feel like something, fixing a thing that's been broken this long. Mostly what I feel is a woman's voice still going in my head, blue rent, the file where I'm correct, a crack in her voice she probably doesn't know I heard.

I pick the phone back up before I've decided to.

Correcting a mistake. That's all this is. Somebody ought to tell her she just spent four minutes building a legal case against a man who fixes his own faucets and doesn't own a single rental property, before she wastes tomorrow morning doing the same thing to whoever actually holds her lease.

I dial the number back.

Two rings, then a click, then a voice that isn't hers, isn't anybody's, really, just the flat, professional cadence of a recording. "You've reached Maya Reyes, Senior Marketing Manager. I'm unable to take your call, but if you leave a message—"

Senior Marketing Manager. Recorded some other week, some other version of her life, before whatever happened today took the title away and left her yelling at strangers about spreadsheets instead. I don't leave a message. I hang up before the beep, which is its own kind of coward's move, and stand there in my kitchen holding a dead phone for the second time tonight over the same woman.

Fine. She's screening. Smart, given the day she's had. I still don't love it.

I dial again.

This one's out of principle now, if I'm honest with myself, which I try to be even when it's inconvenient. She interrupted my night once already with somebody else's grievance, and the least she can do is pick up long enough for me to hand the problem back to its rightful owner.

Same two rings. Same recording. Senior Marketing Manager, still unable to take my call.

The beep comes before I've decided what I'm going to say, which means what comes out isn't exactly planned.

"This is the guy you yelled at for four minutes about a spreadsheet." I let that sit a second, hear how it sounds, decide I don't care. "Wrong number. I'm not your landlord; I don't have your file, and I definitely don't have the deposit you think I'm sitting on. You might want to actually dial the guy next time. Hope the eviction thing works out." A pause longer than it needs to be. "For what it's worth. The blue rent thing. Solid system."

I hang up before I can hear how that lands, because there's no way to hear it; it's a voicemail, but some habits don't care about logic.

I stand in my kitchen for a minute, phone still in hand, waiting on nothing. She won’t call back off a voicemail like that. Nobody would. I've just left a woman I've never met a message that's half correction, half compliment on her spreadsheet, and there's no version of that where she hears it tonight and it goes anywhere at all.

Text is cleaner anyway. Less room for either of us to say something we'll regret.

Me: Wrong number. Not your landlord. Figured you'd want to know before you lawyer up over nothing.

I send it and set the phone face down on the counter, which is a habit I don't examine too closely, the setting-it-down-face-down part, like there's something in me that doesn't want to watch it not light up.

It doesn't light up.

I go back to the bathroom, admire the faucet not dripping for a minute, because a job finished clean is still a job finished clean regardless of what else is going on in a man's night. Rain starts up somewhere past ten, the kind that comes in sideways this high up, tapping the windows like it's got somewhere to be. I check the phone twice in the next hour, which is twice more than I've checked a phone in longer than I want to think about, and both times it's as quiet as the first.

Makes sense. Woman's had a night where an unknown number calling twice and leaving a voicemail reads as a debt collector. I'd screen me too.

Still. There's a version of tonight where she calls back, hears the voicemail, laughs at the blue rent line the way I halfway meant her to, and something in me that's been quiet a long time gets to not be quiet for five more minutes. That version doesn't happen, not yet. I know that by eleven, when the rain's settled into a steady drum and the cabin's back to its usual size, and I'm sitting in a chair I built with my own two hands, listening to weather instead of a phone that isn't going to ring.

I don't delete the number. Didn't plan to; wasn't going to pretend otherwise, even to myself.

Seems like a waste, deleting a number attached to a voicemail somebody's going to want an explanation for eventually, whether tonight or not.

Chapter Three

Maya

Vicky's liquor cabinet is better stocked than her conscience, which is really saying something, because half a bottle of Casamigos does not scream I’m leaving in the dead of night without paying my share of the electric bill. I find it while packing up the kitchen, wedged behind a rice cooker neither of us ever used, next to a mostly full bottle of some raspberry liqueur that looks like it's been waiting since a Halloween party two years ago to ruin somebody's night.

Phone's wedged between my ear and shoulder, Sunny's voice coming through tinny and warm. "You don't have to pack tonight," she's saying, over what sounds like Beck building something in the background. "Come now, pack tomorrow, we'll make it a whole production."

"I have a system." I set the tequila on the counter next to the raspberry thing, next to a bottle of red that's decent, all of it clearly not mine, all of it very abandoned along with everything else Vicky decided wasn't worth the trip to Danny's. "If I don't finish tonight, I'll lose momentum, and if I lose momentum, I'll end up living out of a single suitcase for eight months like that girl we went to school with who got dumped and never unpacked. I refuse to become her, Sunny. I refuse."

"Nobody's becoming anybody. Drink some water and go to bed."

I look at the tequila. Then the wine. And at the raspberry liqueur, out of some morbid curiosity, the way you'd look at a car accident you're not involved in.