Question

I knew I could never let Mom hear the messages, because protecting her is one of 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


What inference does the narrator make?

Answer 1

He infers that the collapse of the building means his father is likely dead (or that the messages will reveal that truth) and that those messages would devastate his mother—so he copies the greeting onto a new phone to hide/protect her from hearing them.