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any worry over missing her morning yoga session was outweighed by the unusual hesitancy in his voice. As uncommon as it was, she knew that quaver all too well—how could she not, after raising him? He’d met a girl. Yoga or no yoga, Martha was not about to stand in the way of her son getting himself a new girlfriend. One of these days, she hoped to have grandchildren.
    He was a good man, her TJ. Called her every few days even when his work kept him busy and never forgot her birthday or missed taking her to brunch on Mother’s Day. He didn’t visit often, but Martha didn’t mind that so much; she had a life of her own, and she understood in a way that a lot of her friends never seemed to. They were always complaining about their children and grandchildren not making enough time for them, somehow forgetting that they had raised those children to go off and have good lives of their own, to raise good children and to do good for others. She and TJ had dinner together every three or four weeks and once in a while they met up for a movie, and those times were lovely, but she never wanted him to see her as needy … as an old lady who needed someone to take care of her.
    “Old, my bony ass,” she muttered to herself, and then chuckled. If she was muttering to herself about her behind being bony, she might be on the elderly side after all. But she didn’t have to like it, and she didn’t intend to surrender to it, either.
    The fellow doing the weather this week on channel 5 had sounded so ominous talking about this storm that it had made her a little nervous. The regular guy, Harvey something, was on vacation—and he’d sure picked the right week to be away—and Martha would have felt more confident in the forecast if he had been doing the predicting. Regardless, the storm was shaping up to be just as nasty as advertised.
    Martha sat in the soft, floral-upholstered reclining chair in her living room, flipping TV channels with her remote. The dance show she liked had ended at ten o’clock and she’d spent three-quarters of an hour dissatisfied with everything else she found, watching bits and pieces of half-a-dozen different movies and snippets of reality shows that tried to lure her in. She felt a certain horrific fascination with those shows but could not bring herself to sit through an entire episode. She felt sure that if she ever did, her humanity and intelligence would be lost forever. A bit melodramatic, she knew, but still somehow true.
    Irritated, she changed the channel again, searching for anything that didn’t seem vapid. Not that she would be awake much longer—she would doubtless fall asleep in the chair the way she did nearly every night—but she wasn’t ready to succumb to sleep just yet.
    When she clicked over to a Clint Eastwood movie she gave the remote a breather. Eastwood was just about the only legitimate old-time movie star left on the planet and she had always liked looking at him. Even as he aged he was still interesting to watch.
    Within minutes, her eyelids grew heavy and her head slowly lolled to one side. Half aware, Martha shifted to get more comfortable, listening to Eastwood’s throaty growl.
    The phone jerked her awake. It jangled a tinny melody that she preferred to an old-fashioned ring—usually. This late at night it was intrusive and much too cheerful. Frowning, Martha rose and hurried as best she could into the kitchen, thinking it must be TJ, checking up on her, but by the time she picked it up, there was nothing on the other end. Hitting the ‘Flash’ button several times, she could not raise a dial tone. The storm had knocked out the telephone line.
    She’d gotten off her chair for nothing.
    Standing in the kitchen, she thought about going up to bed rather than falling asleep in front of the TV. Instead, she wetted her lips with her tongue and went to the cabinet in search of the bag of Oreos she kept for just such moments. She imagined the cookies behind a special