There were packages everywhere.

Boxes stacked against the wall outside her door. Shopping bags crowding the welcome mat. Smaller padded mailers wedged in the gaps between them, like somebody had tried to fit as many as possible into one small hallway.

My brother stopped so suddenly on the top step that I walked into his back.

“What on earth?” Ben muttered.

I came around him and stood there.

There had to be thirty deliveries. Maybe more. They covered the whole stretch of carpet in front of apartment 4C. One box was so big it leaned against the door frame. A plastic bag from a department store had tipped over, and a corner of white tissue paper stuck out of it.

Our mother had been dead for one week.

And somebody had been shopping.

Mom didn’t buy things. I need you to understand that, or none of this makes sense.

She wore sweaters she’d knitted twenty years earlier. She still had the same brown couch we’d jumped on as kids, with a burn mark on the left arm from the year Ben tried to make s’mores with a candle. She used her grandmother’s dishes, the ones with the little blue windmills, because “perfectly good is perfectly good.” When the toaster broke, she fixed it with a paper clip and kept it for six more years.

The most expensive thing I ever saw her buy for herself was a winter coat, and she talked about it for two months like she’d robbed a bank.

“Maybe people sent sympathy gifts?” Ben said.

I bent down and looked at the nearest label.

“No,” I said. “They’re from stores.”

I checked another one. Then another.

Almost every package had her name on it. Ruth Callahan, 4C.

Our mother’s name. In printed letters. On box after box after box.

I pulled her keys out of my coat pocket. They were on a ring with a little plastic strawberry Ben had given her when he was seven.

“I’m opening one,” I said.