I knew I could never let Mom hear the messages, because protecting her is one my most important raisons d’etre, so what I did was I took Dad’s emergency money from on top of his dresser, and I went to Radio Shack on Amsterdam. It was on a TV there that I saw that the first building had fallen. I bought the exact same phone and ran home and recorded our greeting from the first phone onto it. —Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,
Jonathan Safran Foer