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Early evening, August. In the stillness of the suburban house, the telephone rang. Mitchell hesitated only a moment before lifting the receiver. And here was the first wrong note. The caller was Mitchell's fatherin-law, Otto Behn.
Not for years had Otto called before the phone rates went down at 11:00 P.M. Not even when Otto's wife, Teresa, had been hospitalized.
The second wrong note. The voice. "Mitch? Hello! It's me-Otto." Otto's voice was oddly lifted, eager, as if Otto were a farther distance away than usual and worried that Mitchell couldn't hear him. And he sounded affable, even buoyant-as Otto rarely was these days on the phone. Lizbeth, Otto's daughter, had come to dread his calls in the late evening: as soon as you picked up the phone, Otto would launch into one of his riffs, complainttirades; deadpan, funny, but with a cold fury beneath, in the long-ago style of Lenny Bruce, whom Otto had much admired in the late 1950s. Now, in his eighties, Otto had himself become an angry man: angry about his wife's cancer, angry about his own "chronic condition," angry about their Forest Hills neighbors (noisy kids, barking dogs, lawn mowers, leaf blowers), angry about being made to wait two hours "in a refrigerated room" for his most recent MRI, angry about politicians including even those he'd helped canvass votes for in the first heady flush of his retirement from high school teaching fifteen years ago. It was old age that Otto was angry about, but who could tell the poor man that? Not his daughter, and certainly not his son-in-law.
Tonight, though, Otto wasn't angry.
In a warmly genial, if slightly forced voice querying Mitchell about Mitchell's work, which was corporate architectural design, and about Lizbeth, who was the Behns' only daughter, and their grown, beautiful, departed children, the grandchildren Otto had adored when they were kids, and this went on for a while until at last Mitchell said uneasily, "Uh, Otto-Lizbeth is out at the mall. She'll be back around seven. Should I have her call you?"
Otto laughed loudly. You could all but see the saliva glistening on his full, fleshy lips. "Don't want to talk to the old man, eh?"
Mitchell tried to laugh, too. "Otto, we've...