So there I was, crouched in the hallway, holding her strawberry keychain, tearing the tape off the nearest box.

It was medium-sized. Plain brown cardboard. I used the edge of her apartment key to slice through the tape and lifted the flaps.

Inside, wrapped carefully in brown packing paper, was a mixing bowl.

A blue ceramic mixing bowl. Deep blue, like the sky right before it gets dark. Glossy on the inside. A little white stripe running around the rim.

I lifted it out with both hands.

Beneath it, at the bottom of the box, lay a card in a white envelope.

I knew the handwriting before I even turned the envelope over. Loopy, a little shaky at the end, every i dotted with a small circle. She’d written in that same handwriting on every lunch bag, every permission slip, every birthday card of my whole life.

For Claire’s birthday. Please open on the day.

My birthday was three weeks away.

The envelope wasn’t sealed. The flap was just tucked in.

I know I should have waited. I know that’s what it said. But I was crouched on the floor of a hallway a week after my mother died, holding a blue bowl, and I couldn’t wait three weeks to hear her voice.

I slipped out the card.

My darling Claire,

I hope I’m there to make your birthday pancakes. But if I’m not, I want you to have this.

You always loved the blue bowl we used when you were little. I broke it years ago and never found another quite like it.

I finally found one.

Love, Mom.

I couldn’t breathe.

I remembered that bowl. I hadn’t thought about it in twenty years, but the moment I read the card, I could see it. The old blue bowl on the counter on Hadley Street. Mom whisking pancake batter in it every birthday morning. Letting me lick the spoon. Me sitting on the counter in my pajamas, swinging my legs, watching the batter go round and round.

She’d dropped it when I was eleven. It shattered all over the kitchen floor. I cried harder than I cried when the hamster died.

She’d looked for another one for years. At garage sales. At antique shops. I’d forgotten that. She’d never stopped looking.

Ben stepped closer.

“What is it?”

I held up the card. He took it from me. He read it once. Then he read it again, slower.

“She bought this for your birthday?”

I nodded. Tears were falling onto the bowl. I wiped them off with my sleeve, like they might stain it.

“She knew,” I whispered.

“She knew what?”

I looked at the boxes surrounding us. Stacked against the wall. Piled by the door. Twenty-some more, waiting.

“She knew she might not come home.”

We sat on the hallway floor for a long time. I don’t know how long.

I held the bowl in my lap. Ben sat with his back against the wall and his knees up, staring at the packages like they might start talking.

Mom had never told us she was getting ready for the possibility of dying.

Not once.

Every time we visited the hospital, she talked about ordinary things. The weather. Whether it was going to rain on Thursday. Mrs. Okafor’s grandson getting into college. Whether Ben had finally fixed his leaky kitchen faucet.

“It’s still dripping, isn’t it?” she’d say.

“It’s barely dripping.”

“Benjamin.”

“It’s fine, Mom.”

I’d thought she was just trying to stay positive. Keep things light. Keep our spirits up.

Now I wondered how much she’d been keeping from us. And for how long.

“Should we open another one?” Ben asked quietly.

I looked down at the birthday card in my lap. Please open on the day.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said. “Some of these might be meant for later.”

He nodded slowly.

“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s at least get them inside before somebody steals them.”

We carried everything in.

It took us six trips each. Ben carried the big ones. I carried the bags.

The apartment smelled like her. Lavender soap and old books and something that was just Mom. Like a sweater that had been washed a hundred times.

Her reading glasses were on the side table by the couch, folded, sitting on top of a library book. The book was due back in two days. I made a mental note to return it. That’s the kind of stupid thing your brain does when it can’t handle the big things.

Her knitting basket sat beside her chair. A half-finished sweater lay on top of it. Dark green. One sleeve done. The needles still stuck through the yarn, right where she’d left off.

On the kitchen counter stood her favorite coffee mug. White, with a chip on the handle and faded red letters that said WORLD’S OKAYEST MOM. Ben had given it to her as a joke when he was nineteen. She’d used it every single morning since.

There was still a ring of dried coffee at the bottom.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at that mug, and for a second I thought my legs were going to give out.

Ben came up behind me with an armful of boxes. He saw what I was looking at. He didn’t say anything. He just touched my shoulder on his way past.

Then he quietly moved all the packages into the living room and lined them up along the wall under the window.