"What are you looking at?" I asked as I forged for last night's leftovers in the fridge. Without breaking her concentration, mom waved behind her, "Hand me the phone. Fast."
I pinned a piece of cold fried chicken between my teeth, tucked a two-liter bottle of Orange Drink under my arm and handed her the cordless phone.
"I can't believe you still have an answering machine. Seriously, mom." Twenty years of dust was caked into the seams of the antiquated electronic. The recorded greeting was at least that old. "Ssh!" Mom urgently blasted me to keep my voice down. I defiantly asked with my 'inside voice', "what are you doing, anyway?"
"I have to call 911."
My cold fried chicken shed some of it's congealed coat and the camouflaged crumbs dropped to the speckled vinyl floor below. I didn't have to look to know that she was still at the window. Watching. Her paranoia didn't impress me anymore.
"Why do you have to call 911?" More crumbs fell out.
"Because! There's some..." She paused to find the most dramatic, least offensive, urgent descriptive she could come up with."...there's gangster raps outside!"
My laughter heaved a bolus of fried chicken into my esophagus, launching me into a fit of gagging and choking. "What the stink is a 'gangster rap?'" Now she had my attention and I looked up. Mom was in the same crouching tiger pose at the window, motionless, spying the 'gangster raps'. She lowered her voice to a whisper, "Thugs, gang kids!" She positioned her thumb on the '9', ready to dial.
I poured flat Orange Drink into a coffee mug. "What are the gangster raps doing?" She stared harder through the tiny opening in the wooden blinds. "They are standing around that car across the street."
"So, they aren't actually doing anything?" I confirmed her observations but she didn't answer. "Mom. It's not 911 Prevent an Emergency. Put the phone down." She continued her surveillance, waiting for the gangster raps to do something-anything-litigious.
"What's mom looking at?" Lis swiped the last piece of chicken from my paper towel plate. "She's watching some gangster raps, and waiting for the shit to go down." Mom raised her voice above a whisper, "Don't swear in my house!" Lis stood beside her and looked over mom's shoulder into the street. "Oh, I graduated with those guys. One of those kids was in Student Council I think, and that other kid was in my Honors class."
Mom stepped back and put the phone on the counter beside the sink. "I want you girls to clean up all those crumbs you dropped and throw away your trash. I mean it." She was heading upstairs when the phone rang. "Will one of you brats get that?" Mom hollered from the landing where she had resumed her neighborhood watch crusade at the upstairs window.
"Maybe we should keep the line open, mom, just in case? The machine will get it."
