by Kent Reedy

Created on: June 15, 2009

Franklin, the guy who had been letting me stay in his apartment, had secured another guest - sort of. He had invited a very agitated woman to come up for a visit. But he wasn't there when she knocked on the door, so another house-guest let her in - and then went back to bed himself.

She went straight to the telephone. As soon as she got a connection she began talking a-mile-a-minute. It quickly became obvious to me that her crisis was more of an emotional one than one based on serious events which could not be ignored. After the first phone call, she tried to also tell me what had happened. I must've seemed like a captive audience, since I was sleeping on the floor of the room where the phone was located. It didn't seem to matter that I was only half-awake, and had never met her before, but when I gave the most apathetic sounding single-syllable response I could come up with she went right back to the phone, and dialed up another listener.

Franklin would return later. At the moment he was still out somewhere - maybe caught up in the same incident which had caused this latest guest to get so wound up, for all that I knew. He liked to collect lots of visitors and guests in his apartment because he wanted it to be a busy and important place. That was fortunate for me, since I had no place to stay at the time.

The caller sounded less agitated now. She was talking to someone in a different part of the country, and had moved on to a different subject. I had heard her call directory assistance and ask for the phone number of the sheriff's department for someplace in Texas. Now she was asking someone in that place if there were any halfway houses there. It was an odd inquiry made at an odd time, so it didn't surprise me at all when the call came to a quick end. But I could sympathize with the motive; I had occasionally wondered myself what it would be like to call someplace far away in the middle of the night and just ask what things were like there. I had also wondered if things might be less difficult in a different city for people like us.

I don't know how late she stayed, but she was gone when I woke up the next morning. She came by one more time after that - again at Franklin's invitation but without his presence. That time I heard the other guest ask her to please not talk loudly on the phone when she came by at night. She never came back again after that - at least not while I was there. I left a few weeks later. I found my own place - a small apartment that was not too unpleasant but still cheap enough for me to afford.

Franklin's other guest left soon after I did, and before the end of the year Franklin himself had moved to another state. The whole world seemed more transient back then. It was as if just going someplace else seemed easier, and more likely to change things for the better, than it does now. Or maybe it was just that things were so consistently bad that it always seemed like there had to be someplace else that was less miserable.

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