"Hello, It's Me"
Warner Forever Release
March 2005
ISBN: 0-446-61453-X

©2005 by Wendy Corsi Staub

Page 2

"What are you doing up there, Milo ?" she calls, even as she wonders whether the teardrop will make this cookie taste salty. She can always toss it aside . . . but then she won't have a full sixteen dozen, and Merlin-or his snooty client-are sure to notice.

Not that she's even met the man who's throwing the Flag Day shindig. But it's safe to assume that anyone with a waterfront estate in Southampton is snooty. "I'm practicing, Mommy," Milo shouts down the stairs.

Practicing. Of course. "Just be careful, okay?" she calls wearily, wiping her eyes on the hem of the violet-sprigged vintage apron she's wearing.

She pipes another, slightly jagged red stripe on the slightly soggy cookie and concludes somewhat illogically that it'll serve the snooty Southamptonite right to taste the tears of the Widow Harlowe.

Thud. "Be careful, Milo !" she calls again. "I will, Mommy," comes the reply. "That time I almost did it."

Sure he did. He almost flew.

That, after all, is what he's been trying to do for months. Blanket/cape tucked in at his neck, arms outstretched, he attempts to take off on a daily-all right, an hourly-basis. His mission: to fly up to heaven so that he can tell his dad about his lost tooth and his new superhero action figures and his first year of elementary school and everything else Andre has missed in the dozen months since he died.

Annie hasn't the heart to tell her son that his mission is futile. How can she, when she herself spends every day longing for one last chance to tell her husband that she loves him?

With a trembling hand, she pipes another strip of red frosting, this one more wobbly than the last, on the cookie. Oh, hell. It looks like a zigzag, not a stripe. Annie tosses aside the icing tube and reaches again for the phone.

She dials the familiar number and waits as it rings once . . .

He's not going to answer. You know that. Even when he was alive and remembered to turn on his cell phone, he never picked it up on the first ring. Twice . . .

Usually, he didn't even grab it on the second. Remember how you used to picture him fumbling around, looking for it in his pocket, or the glove compartment, or at the bottom of his beach bag or tackle box? Three times . . .

He's not going to answer it. Not ever again. Why do you keep doing this to yourself, Annie? Fifty bucks a month just so that you can hear his voice? Four . . .

There's a click, and then the inevitable: "Hey, you've reached Andre. You know what to do . . ."

She waits for the beep. This time, when she hears it, she doesn't hang up. This time, heedless of the tears streaming down her face and plopping like raindrops onto the half-finished flag, Annie leaves a message. "No, Andre," she wails, "you're wrong. I don't. I don't know what to do. I need you so badly . . ."

Unable to force another word past the aching lump in her throat, Annie hangs up and stares bleakly into space. Raising a crystal flute to his mouth, Thomas Brannock IV takes a sip of champagne. It's odd, he thinks, to be drinking champagne when the afternoon sunlight is still beaming through the tall paned windows of his dining room. Happy hour is a few hours away. But then, this isn't pleasure; it's business. These days, what isn't? "What do you think? Too dry?" the stereotypically buff, good-looking, and effeminate caterer asks, hovering at his elbow.

"Too fruity," Thom pronounces, biting back the urge to add, "No offense." He sets the flute on the freshly polished surface of the eight-foot table that once graced his grandmother's Newport dining room. "Can I try the other one again?" "Of course."

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