Phone calls

Every evening at seven, my mother's time, I call her. That's five o'clock here, which means I stop work at five, which I never used to do. It's the best thing that has come out of the last month, and I'm a little ashamed it took a pandemic.

For the first week the calls were about the news, and they were awful. We'd go through the numbers together like two people reading a weather report for a storm neither of us could leave. By the end of each call we were both worse off than when we started. So the second week she announced, in her library voice, that we were going to read a book together instead.

She chose Peril at End House, because it's Christie and because it was on the shelf next to her chair. I have my own copy here, an old paperback I bought at a sale years ago and never read, and that turned out to matter: she wanted us both to be reading paper, so neither of us could cheat by searching for a name. We read three chapters a day, no more, and at seven we talk about them.

I didn't expect how much I'd love it. My mother reads a mystery the way she ran a library: closely, with a pencil. She keeps a list of suspects on an index card and moves them up and down as we go. She had the murderer by chapter nine and wouldn't tell me, and when I accused her of having read it before, she said she had, in 1971, and had forgotten it entirely, and had worked it out again from first principles, which she considered a point in her favor. I suspected the wrong person until the end, as Christie intended. My mother says I always suspect the most interesting person, which is a writer's mistake.

We finished it on Thursday and started Five Little Pigs. It's a better book. A painter was poisoned sixteen years ago, his wife was convicted, and Poirot has to solve it from the memories of five people who were there. Every chapter someone tells the same afternoon a little differently. My mother says it's the most honest book Christie wrote about how people remember things, and she's right, and she's only halfway through.

Today is Easter. Normally she'd go to church and then to a neighbor's for lunch, and this year she did neither. So we had a long call instead, three chapters and an hour after, and she told me what she'd have cooked if anyone were coming, in detail, course by course. I made myself a sandwich while she described the ham.

Is there someone you've been talking to more this month than you have in years?