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that," he said. "I just to need to repair this, uh, situation."
    "I don't see why you're telling me all of this," I said.
    "You talk to people all the time for your job, right?" he said.
    "Yes ..." I said.
    "So you're good with communicating."
    "I mainly dispatch tow trucks," I told him. "That doesn't require too much communication."
    "And you help people," he said. "That's exactly the combination I need."
    "I don't understand," I said.
    "I'll get her back here," he said, "and we'll call you. Then you can talk to her. And you'll fix everything for us. Right?"
    I didn't say anything for a moment.
    "Right?" he said again.
    "Sure," I said.
    "You'll take care of us?"
    "I'll take care of you," I said.
    When the call was done, Adam came on the line. "What," he said, "was that?"
    I looked around but couldn't see him anywhere.
    "This is a call center," he said, "not a distress line."
    "What could I do?" I said.
    "You could have told him to call back only if had a real problem. You could have not said you'd help him talk to his girlfriend."
    "That was just to get rid of him."
    "If he does call back, I want you to hang up on him."
    "All right," I said.
    "Or we'll be hanging up on you."
----
    AND ONCE I HAD a suicide call. Before I could even say anything, the woman on the other end said, "I'm going to kill myself."
    "You have the wrong number," I told her. "This is for people whose cars have broken down."
    "I'm sitting in my car," she said. "I've got a knife. And a whole bottle of sleeping pills."
    "Is there anything wrong with the car?" I asked her.
    "I'm broken," she said. "I'm going to kill myself."
    "So there's nothing wrong with the car," I said.
    "No," she said. "The car is fine. I just had it tuned up, in fact. I'm driving it around as we speak."
    "Well, what do you want from me then?" I asked.
    "I want you to listen."
    I looked up, across the room, and saw Adam standing outside his office, gazing around the floor. He was wearing his headset but he wasn't looking at me. I disconnected and went outside for a break.
    Hope was standing on the stairs outside the building, smoking a cigarette. I told her about the suicide call.
    "They always want you to listen," she said and shook her head.
    "I'm not trained for this," I said.
    "I wouldn't worry about it," she told me. "It's best never to believe anything these people say."
    "So you don't think she was going to kill herself?"
    "Well, what would you be able to do about it if she was?" She shook her head again. "No, it's really best not to believe them."
----
    THE LAST TIME Jude called was the night I was fired. "I couldn't get her to come back here," he said, "so I'm just going to call her on my cell phone and we'll do it that way."
    "You can't keep calling like this," I said.
    "I can tell you what she says," he went on, "or I can just put the two phones together and you can talk to her directly. Whatever works for you."
    "What works for me is hanging up right now," I said.
    "But you're here to help me," he said. "It says so right on my membership card."
    "Goodbye," I told him.
    "I locked my baby in the truck," he said quickly.
    I paused but didn't say anything.
    "The truck's still running," he said. "In the garage. It's going to fill up with carbon monoxide."
    "Why don't you just open the garage door," I said.
    "It's stuck," he said. "Frozen solid. You have to help me."
    "Don't do this," I told him.
    "If you hang up on me," he said, "you'll be killing my baby."
    "Do you even have a baby?" I asked.
    "It's ours," he said. "Me and my girlfriend's."
    I didn't say anything for a moment, and he took my silence for assent, started giving me the information I needed. By the time I was done filling out the forms on the computer, I could hear a distant ringing. "I'm just calling her now," he said, his voice distant. I realized he had put the phones up against each other and was listening in on both.
    But there was no answer. The phone kept ringing and ringing. There wasn't even voice mail. "All