I turned around.
Tom was holding up a phone.
Not his phone. Tom has a big black smartphone in a thick case. This was different. It was a small, cheap, gray flip phone. The kind you buy at a gas station for twenty dollars. The kind I hadn’t
seen anyone use since 2008.
I had never seen that phone before in my life.
But Michael had. And so had Rachel. I could see it in their faces.
“Actually,” Tom said, calmly, pleasantly, stepping past me onto the deck, “I have a special gift for you both. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”
Tom walked down the deck steps into the backyard. He walked slowly. He didn’t hurry. He walked
the way I imagine he walks across a construction site, checking every beam.
He stopped in the middle of the yard, a few feet from Rachel and Michael. Everybody was watching him. Nobody made a sound.
He held up the little gray flip phone.
“I found this three weeks ago,” he said. His voice wasn’t loud. But it carried. Everybody could hear. “In the glove compartment of Rachel’s car. I was looking for the registration papers. I was taking
