We counted them.
Twenty-eight.
Most of them had arrived during Mom’s last hospital stay. They’d been sitting in the hallway for days. A few had little slips stuck to them from the building manager, saying they’d been held at the front office and brought up that morning.
“She must have ordered them before she went into the hospital,” Ben said.
I checked several of the shipping labels. Some of the order dates were in early September. One was from the end of August.
“Some of these are almost a month old,” I said. “Before the hospital. Before she even got bad.”
Ben looked at me.
“She was already planning this,” he said. “Before we even knew.”
That night, I went home to my own apartment and couldn’t sleep.
I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about August.
I’d taken Mom to the cardiologist in August. I’d sat in the waiting room for an hour, answering work emails on my phone. When she came out, she’d been quiet. I’d asked what the doctor said.
“Oh, the usual,” she’d said. “Take the pills. Keep my feet up. Lay off the salt.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it, honey. Let’s go get lunch. My treat.”
We went to the diner on Fourth Street. She ordered a grilled cheese and a strawberry milkshake. A whole milkshake. She never ordered milkshakes. She said they were a waste of four dollars.
She drank the whole thing.
I’d thought it was strange. I’d been so busy with work that I’d let it go.
Now I lay in the dark and understood what the doctor had actually told her that day.
And I understood what she’d done with that news.
She’d ordered a strawberry milkshake. And then she’d gone home and started shopping.
We came back the next day. And the day after that.
We found the first real clue on Thursday, in her kitchen drawer.
The drawer by the stove. With the rubber bands. Exactly where she’d said the spare keys would be.
The keys were there. And next to them was a folded sheet of lined paper.
I unfolded it.
At the top, in her loopy handwriting, she’d written: Packages for Claire and Ben.
Below that was a list. Dates. Store names. Short little descriptions.
Claire’s birthday: blue bowl.
Ben’s birthday: woodworking tools.
Christmas: two packages. (One each. NO PEEKING.)
Ben — Feb. Scarf. He never wears one.
Thanksgiving: pans. Claire’s turn to host.
And at the very bottom, underlined twice:
Open together: last.
Ben was reading over my shoulder. He stopped at the second line.
“Woodworking tools?” he said.
“You used to make furniture.”
“That was years ago.”
“So?”
He didn’t answer. He walked over to the window and looked out at the parking lot.
Ben used to be really good. I mean really, really good. When he was in his twenties, he worked at a cabinet shop, and on weekends he’d drive around to construction sites and estate sales and pick up old wood people were throwing out. Barn boards. Broken pews from a church that closed. An old oak door from a demolished schoolhouse.
He’d turn it all into beautiful things. Tables. Shelves. A rocking chair for Mom that she sat in every night until the springs in her back got too bad.
He used to talk about opening his own workshop. Just a little place. Custom work. He had a name for it and everything. Callahan & Sons, even though he didn’t have any sons, because he said it sounded old-fashioned and trustworthy.
Then the cabinet shop closed. He got laid off.
He found another job, eventually. Warehouse logistics. It paid better. But it was ten-hour days, sometimes twelve, and he’d come home so tired he’d fall asleep sitting up.
His tools went into his garage. They’d been there ever since. Gathering dust under a blue tarp.
Mom used to ask about his projects. Every time she saw him.
“Making anything lately, Benny?”
“Too busy, Mom.”
“Too busy for something you love?”
“Too busy for anything.”
“Maybe she wanted you to start again,” I said.
Ben shook his head without turning around.
“She shouldn’t have spent money on me.”
That sounded exactly like Ben.
What I hadn’t told anyone, and what Ben had never mentioned out loud, was that for the last year he’d been paying for most of Mom’s groceries. And some of her prescriptions. I’d found the receipts once, in her purse, with his initials written on them in her handwriting. B paid.
He’d been doing it even when his own money was tight. Even when his car needed new brakes and he drove around on the bad ones for two months.
“She wanted to,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
He kept looking out the window.
We decided to sort the packages by their dates. We’d open only the ones whose time had already come. Or ones we couldn’t identify.
Some were easy to match to her list. A set of nonstick baking pans, for Thanksgiving. A thick gray wool scarf in a gift box, with Ben — February written on the lid. A box of Christmas decorations, little glass birds with real feathers for tails, that we put aside without unwrapping.
But some of them didn’t match anything on her list.
One package had fabric in it. Several yards of cotton fabric, and spools of thread in matching colors, and three sewing patterns still in their paper envelopes. Dresses. Simple ones.
Another package had a set of watercolor paints. Not a kid’s set. A real one, in a metal tin, with twenty-four little squares of color and two good brushes and a pad of thick watercolor paper.
And another one had a wooden birdhouse kit. The kind you put together yourself. With a little roof and a round hole in the front and a tiny wooden perch.
Ben held up the birdhouse kit and stared at it.
“Did Mom suddenly develop twelve hobbies?” he said.
I picked up the fabric.
It was soft cotton. White, covered in tiny yellow flowers. Daisies, maybe. Little yellow centers and tiny white petals.
My stomach tightened.
I knew this pattern.
When I was a teenager, I sewed. All the time. Mom had an old Singer machine she’d gotten from her own mother, and she taught me how to use it when I was twelve. After that, I couldn’t stop. I made skirts out of old curtains. I made tote bags out of jeans. I made blouses out of fabric scraps from the remnant bin at the craft store, where everything was a dollar a yard.
Most of what I made was terrible. Crooked seams. Hems that wandered. Buttons that didn’t line up with the buttonholes.
Mom kept every single piece.
I wanted to be a fashion designer. I had sketchbooks full of designs. I took every art class my high school offered. I applied to a design program in Chicago and got in.
And then I looked at the cost. And I looked at Mom’s library salary. And I went to the state university instead and got a degree in business administration. Because that was the smart thing.
After college, I took an office job doing scheduling for a medical supply company. It paid steadily. It had health insurance. It was fine.
I kept telling myself I’d go back to sewing someday.
Then Mom got sick.
I started spending my evenings driving her to appointments. Picking up her prescriptions. Sitting with her in waiting rooms. Doing her laundry when she couldn’t carry the basket down to the basement.
My sewing machine went into my hall closet. Behind the vacuum cleaner.
I hadn’t touched it in two years.
“Claire?” Ben said.
I was just standing there holding the fabric.
I turned it so he could see.
“I made Mom an apron out of this pattern,” I said. “When I was sixteen. This exact fabric.”
He looked at it for a second. Then he smiled.
“The one with the crooked pocket?”
“She wore it for years.”
“She said the pocket was supposed to be crooked,” Ben said. “She told Aunt Linda it was a design choice. Linda believed her.”
I laughed.
Then, right in the middle of laughing, I started crying again. I couldn’t stop it. It came out of me like a hiccup.
Mom had remembered something I’d almost forgotten myself.
She’d gone looking for this fabric. Somewhere. Online, probably, squinting at her old laptop with her reading glasses on the end of her nose. She’d found the exact pattern from an apron I made when I was sixteen.
Ben put down the birdhouse kit and came over and put his arm around me.
We stood there in the living room, among twenty-eight boxes, while I cried into his shoulder.
On Saturday, we finally started on her bedroom.
I’d been avoiding it. Ben had too, I think. We kept finding reasons to work on the kitchen or the closet in the hall.
But we couldn’t avoid it forever.
Her bed was made. Of course it was. She made her bed every morning of her life, even the morning she went into the hospital. The quilt was pulled up smooth. Her pillow had a little dent in it.
On her bedside table was a lamp, a glass of water with a film of dust on top, a bottle of hand lotion, and a small spiral notebook with a green cover.
Ben picked up the notebook.
He opened it.
“Shopping lists,” he said. “And delivery dates. And order numbers.”
He flipped a few pages.
Then he stopped.
“Claire,” he said. “Come here.”
Between the shopping lists, in the margins, in her loopy handwriting, she’d written notes.
Notes about us.
Ben says he’s fine, but he looks tired.
Claire hasn’t mentioned sewing in months.
Ben fell asleep in the chair again. Third visit in a row.
Claire answered work emails the whole time at Dr. Mehta’s. Didn’t even look up when they called my name.
I read that one twice. My face went hot.
Then there was one more, on its own, near the bottom of a page:
They keep asking what I need. I wish they’d tell me what they need.
I sat down on the edge of her bed.
I read that line several times.
