Searching for Candlestick Park by Peg Kehret

other.
    “Is there anything else you want me to do?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    I waited.
    “After we eat, I want you to call your mother.”
    I shook my head.
    “She must be worried about you. It isn’t right not to let her know you’re okay.”
    “I sent her a letter.”
    “That isn’t the same as hearing your voice. You could have been forced to write a letter.”
    “If I call, she’ll come after me. She’ll make me go home.”
    “You don’t need to tell her where you are. Just tell her you’re all right.”
    “What if she has the call traced?”
    “We’ll call from a pay phone.”
    I shook my head again. “Mama could still find out the town.”
    “I’ll pay for the call, so there won’t be an operator involved.”
    I hesitated. Even if Mama traced the call to Grafton, it would take awhile for her to get here, and she wouldn’t know where to find me once she arrived. And I was leaving in the morning.
    “It’s homemade spaghetti sauce,” Hank said.
    The polenta was delicious. Foxey thought so, too.
    After we ate and did the dishes, I walked beside Hank to the pay phone downtown.
    While he dropped quarters in the slot, he said, “You only get three minutes, so talk fast.”
    Aunt May answered the phone. When I said, “Hello, Aunt May,” she screamed. I’ll probably be deaf in my right ear for the rest of my life, the way she shrieked into the receiver. Then, without so much as a hello or how are you, she yelled, “Leona! It’s him!”
    I held the receiver away from my head in case Aunt May decided to shriek something else but instead she said, “Where are you?”
    “Hollywood,” I lied.
    “No, you aren’t,” Aunt May said. “There’s no way you could get all the way to Hollywood so soon unless you sprouted angel wings and I highly doubt a sneaky boy who steals money from his aunt, and disappearsfor days on end, and scares his poor mama out of her wits, is about to sprout any angel wings.”
    Mama came on the phone then. “Spencer? Spencer, is it really you?”
    “It’s me, Mama,” I said. “I called to tell you everything is fine.”
    “Everything is NOT fine,” Mama said. “How can everything be fine when I don’t know if my only child is alive or not? For all I know, you’re lying dead in a gutter somewhere.”
    “I’m not in a gutter,” I said. “If I was dead, I would not be able to dial a telephone.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Hollywood.”
    “Already? How did you get there so soon?”
    “I hitchhiked.”
    “Hitchhiked!” Mama’s voice was nearly as shrill as Aunt May’s had been. I winced and held the phone farther from my ear. “You know better than to hitchhike. You take your life in your hands when you hitch a ride. Anyone could pick you up. Anyone! You don’t know who’s behind the wheel of a car these days. It could be an ax murderer. The minute you get in that car, he could pull out his ax and split your skull in two. The last thing you’ll see on this Earth is your own brains spilling out across some stranger’s steering wheel.”
    “Nobody split my skull, Mama. I’m okay and Foxey’s okay, too.”
    “You still have that fool cat with you?”
    That question surprised me. Of course I still had Foxey. Why did she think I left?
    “I thought he would run off before you got six blocks from home,” Mama said.
    “Well, he didn’t.”
    Hank tapped his wristwatch and I knew the three minutes were nearly over.
    “I have to go now, Mama,” I said.
    “Go?” she cried. “Go where?”
    “Back to my friend’s house.”
    “What friend? Who are you staying with?”
    “Good-bye, Mama.”
    “Wait!” Mama said. “I’ll pay for the call. I have to write down your number so I can . . .”
    An operator interrupted. “If you wish to continue your call, please deposit another two dol-”
    I hung up. I didn’t want Mama to hear how much the call had cost because if she did, she might call the phone company and they could figure out how far away I was