The Dot Two Exits From Home

we have a location app our mom set up years ago, back when she wanted to know we'd both landed safe from a trip. mom stopped using it a long time ago. we never turned it off.

i don't call my sister much anymore. we say we're busy, we say next month, we mean it every time and it never happens. but i still open the app most nights. her little dot moving home from work, stopping at the gas station near her place, going still by ten.

tonight her dot is at a gas station two exits past where she'd turn for home. it's been sitting there since before midnight. that's the exit toward the town we grew up in, the one neither of us has driven back to in three years.

i type are you okay and delete it. i type are you near mom's old street and delete that too. calling would mean admitting i don't actually know what's going on in her life anymore, only where the dot sits. and if i ask and she tells me, i'll have to be someone who checks in for real, not someone who just watches the map.

the dot hasn't moved in forty minutes. i tell myself she's asleep in the car, or the reception's bad out there. i put the phone face down and pick it back up nine times. i never call.