woman they could spend time with. Sometimes they moved into retirement centers or assisted living, where there were better cures for loneliness than telling stories of sexual prowess to a woman they would never meet.
In the past month, two of her regular customers had moved on. Unfortunately, one had been due to a fatal heart attack, but luckily not while he was on the phone with her. Lainie had broken the news, and they’d held their own private moment of silence before Lainie gave her the numbers of a couple of new men who sounded as if they would be Wanda’s type.
She always put her oldest customers at the top of her list, and they knew it. A man grew to trust her. He knew she would be there when he needed the contact. So she was cautious about accepting new callers. Tonight, though, with two recent vacancies, she blocked her own number, as she always did, then tried the first number on her new list. The phone rang five times, and she got a recording. The voice was a woman’s, an old one at that. Since Wanda wasn’t in the habit of leaving her name and number on answering machines, nor in the habit of talking to married men, if she could spot them, she hung up, scratched him off her list and tried the second.
The telephone rang three times before a man picked up. He sounded far away, and Wanda wondered if he was on a cell phone.
Wanda started every conversation the same way, by making it clear exactly who she was and why she was calling. Her greeting was also a warning that the client was now being charged by the minute.
“You’re being seduced,” Wanda said.
“I was hoping I would be.”
The man had a gravelly voice. She pictured Batman from the most recent movie and hoped this guy was half as good-looking as Christian Bale.
“So what are you doing?” she asked. “Me, I’m lying on the sofa, wearing my favorite nightgown.” She never said negligee anymore, because once, when her mind had wandered to the way Ken was neglecting her, she’d mistakenly called it a negligent.
“I’m sitting in my office, staring out the window.”
“This a work number?”
“You don’t have to worry. I’m all alone here. Nobody will overhear us.”
“Well, that will be up to you. I can’t control that end of things.”
“Tell me about yourself.”
Of course she knew better than to tell the truth. “Who do you want me to be? I can be a blonde. A brunette. I can look like Julia Roberts or Christie Brinkley or even Madonna, only not in one of those pointy bra things.”
“Who do you really look like?”
Carol Burnett popped into her mind—Carol Burnett as the beleaguered Eunice, at that—but that hardly fit the situation. “Blond, sleek and sexy. A woman you don’t want to take home to your mother.”
“Too bad. I’ve always liked the homemaker type.”
“Blond, sleek and sexy in an apron, then. And your mama still wouldn’t like me, but only because I cook better than she does.”
“So what do you like to cook?”
“Pies,” she said, without screening her answer.
“Man, I love a good pie. Tell me about them.”
This was certainly unique, but Wanda knew that every man got into the calls at his own speed. And this was refreshing for a change. She was tired of describing more intimate parts of herself that did not exist.
“Key lime’s my very best. But I bake a coconut cream that’ll make you think you died and went to heaven.” She didn’t add that the last one had almost sent her there. Vomiting for two days was not in the least romantic.
“Anybody ever done that? Died and gone to heaven while you were talking to them?”
“Not died,” she said coyly. “But a man or two’s said these phone calls are heaven-sent.”
He laughed, a laugh as husky as his voice. “I like a woman with a sense of humor.”
She filed that away. Not everybody did. Some men were sure you were laughing at them. This one had a stronger ego.
“Tell me about you,” she said. “What are you like? What do you like? I’m here, just listening away.”
“This doesn’t get old?”
“If it did, I wouldn’t do it.”
“It doesn’t bother you that you can’t see me? That you can’t tell a thing about me?”
“I can tell you’re a smoker.”
“How?”
“The voice. A smoker’s voice. A whiskey drinker’s voice, too.”
“No, especially not the last. I fight that craving. Hard.”