Page 140 of Across His Line

And I almost smile. Because I know why he’s asking. Okay what? he texted me once, the day before Thanksgiving, when I said I’d ride with him. He needs the whole thing. Out loud. Not some word that could mean anything.

Not verbal confirmation. Not like that. He just needs to know he heard me right.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll stay with you.”

22

Relief is simple

Rafe

She’s on hold with the bus company before we’re off campus.

She’s got her phone on speaker in her lap, and the hold music is a song I think was popular when my mom was in college, played on what sounds like a keyboard in a basement. Every forty seconds, a woman’s voice breaks in to tell us our call is important. Tessa sits there with her duffel at her feet and her backpack between her knees and a pen in her hand, and she doesn’t look annoyed at all. She looks like somebody waiting for a fight she’s already planned.

I drive. I don’t say anything. I turn the radio all the way down, so it won’t get in the way.

Twenty minutes in, somebody picks up.

She gives them her confirmation number. Her name. The date. She says she needs to cancel the trip on the twenty-second, and the guy on the other end tells her the fare is nonrefundable, and she says she understands that, and asks what the options are. She’s calm and polite.

He says she can change it. For a fee.

She asks how much. She asks if the fee is waived if she changes it more than thirty days out. He doesn’t know. He puts her on hold again. The keyboard comes back.

She writes something on the back of her hand with the pen.

He comes back. The fee is waived if it’s thirty days out. She moves the ticket to the Friday of spring break, in March, and thanks him, and asks him to email her the new confirmation, and makes him read the email address back to her twice.

She hangs up.

She looks out the window for a while. We get on the highway. I think that’s the end of it.

Then, twenty miles later, she picks the phone back up.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Business.”

She pulls up the email. She reads it. She scrolls down to the bottom, where the small print is, and she reads that, too, with her lips moving a little.

She calls them back. Same hold music. Same woman telling us we’re important. A different guy this time. She gives him the new confirmation number. She says she’d like to cancel the March trip. He tells her it’s a flexible fare now, and flexible fares canceled more than fourteen days out get a full refund to the original card.

“Great,” she says. “I’d like to do that.”

He does it. She makes him read her the refund number. She writes it on the back of her hand under the other thing.

She hangs up and sits very still.

“I got it back,” she says.

I look over. “The whole thing?”

“All of it.” She turns and looks at me. Her face is doing something I’ve only seen it do a couple of times, like somebody turned on every light in the house. “Ninety-four dollars. All of it. They’re putting it back on my card in five to seven business days.”

“How?”

“Because the change made it a new fare. And the new fare had different rules. Nobody tells you that. You just have to have a mom like mine to know things like this.”