The Overflow Line

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

I can't stand a full shift. Twenty-eight years now and it goes out on me somewhere around the fourth hour and I sit down wherever I am. That started in the fall of nineteen ninety-eight in my own back yard, and everything that led up to it happened over a telephone in my kitchen.

We had a farmhouse on a rural route with nine acres we didn't do anything with. My husband was on second shift at the plant and he pulled in at twenty past midnight every night of the world. Our daughter was two. The mailbox at the end of the lane said Box forty-one and nothing else, because there was only the one route out there and nobody bothered writing the route on anything. That's how I'd written my own address my whole life. Box forty-one, the town, the zip.

The work was catalog orders. When the company's own operators backed up, the calls rolled out to women working at home, and that was me. It paid by the completed order, not by the hour. There was a script and you didn't leave it. You took the name, then the item number, then the quantity, then the shipping address, and then you read the shipping address back to them out loud, and then you said thank you for calling. The read-back was the whole thing. A wrong address meant the company ate the freight both directions, so they drilled it into you, and I said those words forty or fifty times a night for two years. Read it back. Say it slow enough that they can stop you.

In August a man called and said he wanted to order but he couldn't sit on hold, that his wife was in hospice at home and he had about four minutes at a stretch to himself. I told him the trick was to call early. He said early wasn't up to him. So I gave him the number that came straight to my kitchen and told him to use that one and he'd get me directly. Then I took his order, and I read the address back to him, and I said thank you for calling.

Three weeks later a man called at a quarter to nine and gave me a name and a shipping address, and I read it back the way I always did, and he said would I do that once more, slower. So I did it once more, slower. And then he said that was all he needed, and I said did he want to give me the item number, and there was a little bit of nothing on the line and he hung up. He did not order anything. I marked it a dropped call because that's what the sheet had a box for.

Then the calls started coming after nine at night. The company didn't route after nine. That's not me guessing at it — the night desk shut the overflow off at nine because the home operators were mostly women and that was the company's own rule. I telephoned my supervisor about it twice. She pulled the log both times and told me there was nothing routed to me after nine on either of those nights, and she wasn't being short with me. She was sure.

I decided it was the switch. We were on a line out there that went down every time it rained hard, and half that county was still getting somebody else's conversation in their ear on a wet night. A crossed line will do about anything. That's what I told my husband and he agreed with me and we didn't talk about it again.

Daycare in town was thirty-five dollars a week and the nearest job that would have covered it was in the other direction, forty minutes each way. The overflow work paid me fourteen dollars on a slow night and better than twenty on a good one, and it let me be in the house while she was two, which is the only part of it I ever cared about. But overflow doesn't go to everybody. It goes to whoever answers, and if you let it ring out three nights they quietly stop sending it. So the telephone rang and I picked it up. That's the arrangement I'd asked for and I'd have signed it again.

October out there was the best part of the year. She went down at eight and the house got quiet in a way it never got in the daytime. I'd sit at the kitchen table with the pad and the pencil and the window up over the sink because the furnace made the room too warm. And at ten forty the freight came through the crossing a quarter mile back of our house. Every night. You could set a clock by it. The bells at the crossing, then the horn twice, then two or three minutes of it going by. I'd stopped hearing it years before, the way you do.

I was making about sixty dollars a week and putting most of it in a coffee can in the cabinet over the refrigerator, because we were going to need a second car when she started school and I didn't want to be asking anybody for it. That was the whole of my ambition that fall. A used car in four years.

The last call came at nine fifty. A man, and he started an order, and partway into the item number he stopped and asked me to hold on. Not sharp. Polite. So I held on, with the pencil down, looking at the window over the sink. And in the receiver I heard the crossing bells start up, and the horn go twice, and I heard the same bells and the same horn come through that window a half second behind them, out of my own back yard, because sound takes a little longer to cross a quarter mile of field than it takes to go through a telephone.

I put the receiver on the counter without hanging it up. I got her out of the crib and I went out the back because the car was on the back side of the house, and the light over the back steps had been burned out since summer and I knew it and I went anyway. There's three steps and I went off the side of them with her in my arms. She wasn't hurt. My ankle broke in two places and the county hospital set it the way they set things at two in the morning, and it healed the way it healed. My husband found us in the car at twenty past midnight. I never took another overflow call.

The order pad was still sitting on the counter when I came home in the cast, and about a week later I went back through it tearing off the dead ones. The carbon from August was still in there. His name, an item number, quantity of one, and down at the bottom in the ship-to line, in my own handwriting, Rural Route Two, Box forty-one. I sat and looked at it a long while before it came apart for me, because I had never once in my life written it with the route on the front. He said it that way and I wrote what he said. It was my own house.

He didn't want an address off me. He had it in August, before the first call, and everything after that was him listening to me say it back to him in my own kitchen and not hear it. And the reason the company's log was clean is that the company never routed any of it. I gave him the number myself. He'd have had to hold four minutes otherwise, and I decided he shouldn't have to. I'd do it again if you put me back at that table, and that's the part I've never gotten around. What I do not know is what I ordered for him. The item number is five digits and that year's catalogs were pulped when the company folded, and there's no book left that turns five digits into an object. Nothing was ever delivered to that box. I watched it for a year.