When my wife moved in, she arrived with two suitcases and a cardboard carton of books.
Her clothes found their way into the wardrobe almost at once. The books remained stacked against the wall. The lowest shelf of the bookcase was crowded with my odds and ends, and I promised to clear it for her.
She pulled out a white phone box.
“Do you still need this?”
“Leave it for now.”
She did not ask why. She set it on the windowsill.
My mother had bought me the phone just before I left home for my first job in another city. She did not trust my old phone or its failing battery. Her concern was simple: once I was somewhere unfamiliar, the thing would die precisely when I needed to reach someone.
I chose the phone. She paid for it.
After the sales clerk installed the SIM card, she told me to save her number first. The moment I finished, the new phone rang.
Standing half a step away, she held up her own phone and asked, quite seriously, “Can you hear me?”
People in the shop laughed. She laughed too.
“It doesn’t count when I’m this close. It still has to work when you’re far away.”
I carried that phone through several cities. Its screen cracked. Its battery was replaced. One day it shut down and never came back on. Eventually, I traded it in. The photographs, contacts, and number moved on to another phone. The white box stayed with me.
Whenever I moved, I packed it inside a larger box. At the next address, I took it out exactly as it was. It never held anything else. I never flattened it. Every home I lived in surrendered a box-shaped piece of space to it.
My wife’s books remained against the wall for several days. We had to draw in our feet whenever we passed them. Dust began to settle on the top two volumes. She did not remind me about the shelf, but the white box travelled from the windowsill to the corner of my desk, then from the desk to the top of a cabinet.
That weekend, I brought it down.
The lid still lifted with measured resistance. The moulded insert remained surprisingly white, preserving the hollow where the phone had once lain. Only the dimensions had become obsolete.
I placed my current phone over the hollow. It extended beyond the edges. Looking at the old outline, I called my mother.
At first, she could not remember the box.
“Which phone?”
“The one you bought before I left for my first job away from home.”
“I bought you a phone?”
“At the shop, you called me while you were standing right beside me. You asked if I could hear you.”
There was a pause. Then she laughed.
“What was I doing calling you from half a step away?”
A television murmured at her end of the line. At mine, my wife was lifting the books one by one and brushing the dust from their covers.
“What are you busy with over there?” my mother asked.
“Sorting things out. Her books still have nowhere to go.”
“Then go and sort them out. Call me when you’re done.”
When the call ended, the screen went dark. The phone in my hand would not fit the old insert, yet my mother’s voice had just travelled through it.
I looked into the box again. All it held now was the shape of a phone no one used.
I removed the insert and pressed both sides of the box between my hands. The cardboard resisted for a moment. Then the glued seam parted with a soft crack.
My wife looked up.
“You don’t want it anymore?”
“Not the box.”
I placed the flattened cardboard in the recycling bag. She gathered the books from the floor, and together we arranged them on the shelf I had cleared.
When the last book was in place, she did not fill the shelf completely. She shifted the row to the left, leaving a short stretch of open space.
“Why leave that empty?” I asked.
“There will be more books.”
I looked at the space she had left and did not search for anything to fill it.