Sorel had carried the call for eight years. Her mother died when she was twenty-six. She had turned thirty in October and gone to the registry office the following week to complete the paperwork. Every year since, she had declined the call window. The registry sent an annual notice. She filed them.
The estate had finally settled. The house had sold in March, and the closing was today: three signatures, fifteen minutes, a check held for the buyers' attorney. Afterward the clerk looked at the file and said: "There's a note here. A call registration from 2017. It shows as unexercised."
Sorel said that was correct. The clerk said he wasn't certain what the current window was. She said she understood, and thanked him, and went out.
The buyers weren't taking possession until Thursday. She had the key until then. She drove to the house and let herself in.
The rooms were empty. The kitchen wallpaper, orange with small brown shapes, put up before Sorel was born, was still there. The new owners were painting over it. A notation in pencil near the door read: kitchen: 2 coats. She stood in the kitchen for a while. She had eaten at the table in this room for the first three decades of her life and the last time afterward with her mother's sister and the neighbor who had been bringing casseroles.
She knew what the call would be. She had lived with it long enough to know. Not the words exactly, she had tried to plan the words and they kept shifting, but the shape of it: the hour, the way her mother would receive it, the way the things she had prepared to say would be absorbed and redirected. The call had become a kind of ongoing thing. A category that still had something in it.
In the hallway she stopped where the phone had hung. There was a rectangle of unfaded paint at the bracket height. She stood there for a moment and then went on.
She locked up and put the key in the stamped envelope addressed to the realtor. She dropped it in the box at the end of the block and kept walking to her car. She sat in the car for a moment. The call registration was in her phone under a contact called Registry. She did not open it. She started the engine and drove.