BONUS PART 5 — The Box Patricia Left in the Trunk
“Russell brought it back,” Patricia said.
I looked at the photograph on my phone again. The two paper cups. The grocery bag. The red key ring on the table I still ate breakfast at.
“What was Russell doing in my parking lot?”
“He wasn’t in your parking lot. I brought the box home with me. He picked it up from my garage two days later.”
“Did Mom ask him to?”
“Yes.”
I waited.
Patricia had spent enough time with me over the last two years to recognize the kind of silence that meant I was giving her room. She also knew the kind that meant I’d heard something I didn’t believe yet.
“Your mother told me there were a few things she’d forgotten to give you,” she said. “She’d taped the box shut. I thought there were towels in it. Maybe that little saucepan you used for everything.”
“I took the saucepan.”
“I know. You made coffee in it that morning.”
“The cups were from the bakery.”
“The second coffee. You made the first one. It was awful.”
I remembered that. I’d poured hot water over grounds in the saucepan and tried to hold them back with a spoon. Patricia had watched me take a sip and said she thought she’d seen a bakery around the corner.
I’d remembered her coming to visit and bringing groceries. I hadn’t remembered her sitting across from me long enough to drink two cups of coffee.
“What was actually in the box?” I asked.
“Your mother’s blue household ledger. Some bills. A sheet with dates and amounts written down. And a note asking you to call Russell before Monday.”
I had a picture of the ledger immediately. Blue vinyl cover, silver corners, a cracked spine. Mom used to tuck grocery receipts into it without opening it. If enough receipts built up, the book wouldn’t lie flat.
“Why did I need to call Russell?”
“He was behind on rent. Your parents had said they’d help him. Your mother wanted to know if you could take on part of what they’d promised.”
I sat down.
“That was the first weekend I lived there.”
“I know.”
“I hadn’t been paid yet.”
“I know that, too.”
Patricia said it gently. I found that I wanted her to say it less gently. I wanted to hear how it had sounded to her that morning, when I’d been standing upstairs in an apartment I could barely afford and she’d been sitting downstairs with a list of somebody else’s bills.
“How did you know what was in it if it was taped shut?” I asked.
“The bottom opened when I lifted it out of the trunk. I caught the ledger against my knee. An envelope fell under the car. I read what was in it.”
“You opened a letter addressed to me?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t reach for an excuse. I could hear a clock ticking on her end of the line.
“What did the note say?”
“I remember one sentence exactly. I’ve wished for years that I remembered a different one.”
I put my hand flat on the table.
“She wrote, ‘I know you’ll find a way if I give you the numbers.’”
I closed my eyes.
My mother had paid two hundred dollars to get me into that apartment. She’d gone without new work shoes. She’d asked Dad to let me have the apartment without ever knowing what she’d done.
And then, before I’d slept there twice, she’d put a ledger in a box and sent it after me.
“Did she mention the deposit in the note?” I asked.
“No.”
I was surprised by how much that mattered. I’d already imagined the note saying she’d helped me and now it was my turn. I could put that particular sentence down.
There was still the one she’d written.
“I called her from the parking lot,” Patricia said. “I asked whether she knew what you had left after moving. She said she didn’t know the exact amount. I said that seemed like a pretty important number to leave off her sheet.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me you were better with money than any of them.”
I let out a short breath. I’d heard that one often enough to know exactly how it would have sounded coming from her.
Patricia went on.
“I told her I wasn’t bringing the box upstairs. I asked if she wanted me to put it back in the car and go home. She said I could do whatever I liked.”
“That meant she was angry.”
“She was furious.”
“Did you go straight to the bakery?”
“I sat in the car for a while. I’d driven three hours, and I could see your curtains. I thought it would be silly to drive home without finding out whether you’d managed to get the heat on.”
I looked around my kitchen. My mother’s recipe card was in the drawer. The photograph of her standing under my window was still open on my phone.
“You told me you were passing through,” I said again.
“I thought if I told you there’d been an argument, you’d spend the whole morning trying to find out what it was about. I wanted you to eat breakfast.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me later?”
Patricia let out a breath.
“At first, I thought your mother would. She said she was glad I hadn’t brought the box. I figured she’d tell you herself when she’d had time to think. Then, a couple of years later, you mentioned paying a bill for them. I thought about telling you then. I was afraid you’d hear it as me saying you’d been foolish.”
“Were you afraid I’d be angry with you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was afraid of that, too.”
There was a little chip in my table near the edge. I worked a fingernail into it until I realized what I was doing.
“What did Russell say when he picked it up?”
“He saw the box on the garage floor. He asked if he could look inside. I told him the note was yours. He said he knew. He’d already read it at your mother’s house.”
That made me sit up.
“He knew she was sending it?”
“He knew she’d written it. I don’t know when he realized she’d sent me with it.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He asked if you’d seen the note. I said you hadn’t.”
I waited for the rest.
“He sat on the bottom step in my garage for a few minutes,” Patricia said. “Then he asked if I had any tape. The bottom was still loose.”
Something in the way she said it made me picture Russell holding the box between his knees, pressing the tape down with the side of his hand.
“Did he tell you why he’d come for it himself?”
“No. He put it in the back of his car and asked if I wanted him to take my trash can to the curb while he was there. It wasn’t trash day. I think he wanted something to do.”
I rubbed my eyes.
“Do you think Mom still has it?”
“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I think she might have the ledger. She kept using it for a while.”
For a moment, I wanted Patricia to tell me what she thought I should do. I wanted her to make a suggestion I could either follow or get angry at.
Instead, she asked if I’d had dinner.
“Yes.”
“What did you have?”
“A sandwich at Brenna’s. Then pie.”
“Was the sandwich any good?”
“It was better than the pie.”
“That’s a shame.”
We stayed on the phone a little longer. She told me she’d bought new slippers and had already lost one. I asked if she’d checked under the couch. She said she hadn’t because she was wearing the other one and didn’t want to find out it had been that easy.
Before we hung up, I said, “I’m glad you knocked that morning.”
Patricia went quiet.
“So am I,” she said.
I’d told Brenna I’d call the following week. She called first, on Monday, to tell me she’d walked to the wrong building for her placement and spent five minutes trying to open a door that said staff only.
“Were you late?” I asked.
“By a minute. The supervisor was still taking her coat off.”
“How was the rest of it?”
“Good. I got to make a folder. It sounds stupid, but she asked me how I thought it should be organized.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I wanted to see what went in it first.”
I could hear dishes clinking on her end. I imagined her in the unfamiliar kitchen, opening drawers until she found the right one.
“Did Mom call yesterday?” I asked.
“Once. At two thirty.” Brenna sounded faintly impressed. “I was at the store and missed it. When I called back, she was halfway through a crossword. She made me wait while she finished a word.”
“What was the word?”
“Oregano. She asked whether there were two Gs.”
I laughed.
Brenna ran water into something, then turned it off.
“What did Patricia say about the picture?” she asked.
I hadn’t realized Mom had mentioned it to her.
I told her what had been in the box. I told her what the note said, including the sentence Patricia remembered.
Brenna was quiet for a while.
“Was Russell there when you moved?”
“He helped Dad get the table down the front steps. He wrapped it in a blanket because he thought the legs would scratch the van.”
“I remember that blanket. Mom used to make us put it down when we painted anything.”
“Brown plaid.”
“With the hole in the middle.”
I could see Russell carrying the table backward. He’d told me to go on ahead and watch the screen door. I’d felt useless holding the door while he and Dad did all the lifting. I kept asking if they wanted to switch.
“Do you think he would’ve taken the money?” Brenna asked.
I looked down at the table.
“I don’t know.”
I thought about the rent. I thought about all the things I’d learned about my family since that Christmas. For once, I could tell the difference between something I knew and something I could make fit.
“I think I’d like to ask him,” I said.
Brenna said, “Okay.”
Then I heard a cupboard shut.
“Have you had dinner?” I asked.
“I bought noodles. I accidentally got the kind that comes with a little packet of oil I don’t know what to do with.”
“Did you read the back?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me before I had to.”
“Read the back.”
The packet crackled next to the phone. A few seconds later, she said, “It says add the oil.”
“Good start.”
She laughed. I stayed on the line while she got a bowl out. When the noodles were ready, she carried them upstairs and told me the pipes hadn’t made a sound all evening.
“They will as soon as you get comfortable,” I said.
“They probably will.”
I heard the fork hit the side of her bowl. Then I let her eat.
I asked Mom about the box on a Wednesday.
She was at the kitchen table when I came over. She’d been working on the cleaning company’s books, and there was an eraser sitting in a little pile of crumbs beside her pencil. She moved the papers into a stack and asked if I wanted tea.
“Yes,” I said. “After we talk.”
She sat back down.
“Patricia told me what was in the box.”
Mom nodded once.
“Why did you send her with it?”
She looked down at her papers. She seemed to be deciding how much to put away. Finally, she left everything where it was.
“Russell had missed work. He needed to catch up on rent. Your father and I had offered him more than we had.”
“Why did you offer it?”
“He was sitting right where you are. I wanted him to go home feeling better.”
I knew the impulse. I’d promised money while people were still sitting across from me because I couldn’t stand to see them go home worried. Some evenings, I’d waited until the door shut before I opened my banking app.
“How much did you want me to send?”
“Two hundred, if you had it. I thought you might be able to do a hundred right away and a hundred after you got paid.”
Two hundred.
For a few seconds, I listened to the refrigerator hum.
“Did you think about what you’d just done at the rental office?”
“All the way through writing the note.”
I looked at her.
“I told myself I’d found two hundred for you,” she said. “I could ask you to find two hundred for him.”
“Did you expect me to figure out you’d paid part of my deposit?”
“No. I wanted to keep that quiet. I could tell you exactly why I thought you ought to help him and still leave that part out.”
I pulled my chair back from the table a little.
Mom watched me. Her hands stayed beside the stack of papers.
“What did you do when Patricia brought it back?” I asked.
“She told me to come pick it up. I asked Russell to go.”
“Why him?”
“Because I thought Patricia might explain herself to him. I didn’t want to hear it again.”
That sounded so much like my mother that it took me a second to realize how plainly she’d said it.
“Did he bring it straight here?”
“Yes. He put it on the counter. I asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. He said he wanted me to open the box.”
She reached for the eraser, then set it down without using it.
“He handed me the sheet I’d written,” she said. “I’d put down what we could pay and what we thought you could pay. I hadn’t put a line in for him.”
“What did he say about that?”
“He asked why we were the only two people in the family who’d decided what everybody could afford.”
I pictured it. Russell in the kitchen, still in his coat. My mother looking down at a sheet she’d probably rewritten twice to get the numbers to line up.
“Was he angry you asked me?”
“He was angry I’d promised him something without telling him where I thought I’d get it. Then he was angry at himself because he’d known you were on the list and hadn’t said anything until Patricia refused.”
“Did he pay his rent?”
“He worked it out with his landlord. He sold a guitar. I don’t know if he covered the full amount that week. He told me to stop asking.”
I looked toward the counter. There was a bread bag beside the toaster, twisted shut without a clip. Mom had always done that when she meant to come back and make another slice.
“Do you still have the letter?” I asked.
“I don’t. I have the ledger.”
She started to stand, then stopped.
“Do you want to see it?”
“Yes.”
She went to the hall closet. I heard her move a box and then another one. A minute later she came back with the ledger against her chest.
It looked smaller than I remembered.
Mom set it on the table and opened it near the back. A receipt slid toward the edge. She caught it with her palm.
The pages smelled faintly of the cupboard where she used to keep tea.
“There,” she said.
I followed her finger.
She’d written down the money order for my apartment. Two hundred dollars, with the date. A few lines below it was a figure marked Russell, rent. Then there was a line with my first initial and another two hundred.
My amount had been crossed out.
“Who crossed it out?” I asked.
“I did.”
“When?”
“After Russell left.”
I looked at the page for a long time. The ink went from dark to light where her pen had started running out. My initial was still easy to read.
“There were months when I really did have enough to help,” I said.
Mom nodded.
“I liked that I could do it sometimes. I remember buying your groceries once when you’d been sick. You called the next morning to tell me you’d made toast. I was happy you had bread.”
“I remember that.”
“I want to be able to keep that memory.”
“You can.”
I pressed a finger beside my initial.
“Then there were months when you’d already decided I had enough before you called.”
Mom leaned forward to look at the page beside my hand.
“Yes,” she said.
The kitchen was quiet for a little while.
“Can I take a picture of this page?” I asked.
“Yes.”
She took her hand off the ledger so I could get the whole thing in the frame. After I took the picture, she turned the book toward herself and looked at it again.
“I used to carry that from room to room,” she said. “If I had it open, I felt like I was doing something.”
I remembered being a child and asking if she could come look at a drawing while she was working on it. She’d tell me to leave it beside her and she’d look when she was finished. Sometimes I came down the next morning and found the drawing on top of the closed book, where she’d put it to remember to say something to me.
“Could I have that tea now?” I asked.
Mom closed the ledger.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like some, too.”
Russell took two days to answer my message.
He suggested we meet at a diner beside the road he took to work. He said he could be there at eight on Saturday. I told him I could make nine.
Then let’s do nine, he wrote.
I read that twice. I’d prepared a little explanation about why I didn’t want to get up early. I deleted it.
When I walked in, Russell was at the counter with a mug between his hands. He moved to a booth when he saw me. His jacket caught on the corner of the seat, and he had to stand up again to pull it free.
“You want breakfast?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought maybe you only wanted coffee.”
“I want breakfast, too.”
He looked relieved to have an ordinary thing to do. He picked up the menu.
We ordered. Then I asked him about the box.
Russell set his mug down.
“I thought your mother would bring that up one day,” he said.
“She did. So did Patricia.”
“What did they tell you?”
I told him. He listened without interrupting until I got to the part about the guitar.
“I sold the amplifier first,” he said. “I hung on to the guitar until the following week. Thought I could make it work if I got another shift.”
“Did you?”
“I got the shift. Still sold the guitar.”
He turned his cup so the handle pointed toward him. I remembered him playing that guitar in my parents’ living room one summer. He’d stop in the middle of a song if somebody asked him to play it louder.
“Did you know Mom was asking me before Patricia left?” I asked.
“I saw her write the note.”
“And you were okay with it?”
“I went home without saying anything.” He rubbed his thumb along the handle. “I was hoping you’d send the money.”
That answer cost him something. I could see it in how carefully he kept his eyes on his cup afterward.
“What changed?”
“Patricia asked me if I’d seen your apartment. I said I’d helped you move. She said you’d made coffee in a saucepan and told her you were waiting for your first paycheck to buy a coffee maker.”
I remembered a coffee maker showing up later. It was secondhand, with a brown mark around the warming plate. Patricia said a woman at work was getting rid of it.
“Did you give her a coffee maker to bring me?”
“No,” Russell said. “I was going to. She told me she’d already found one.”
The waitress brought our food. Russell moved his mug out of her way and waited until she left.
“I was embarrassed,” he said. “I’d helped you move the table. I’d seen you carry your groceries in. I knew it was one bag. And when your mother showed me your name on the list, I let myself think you must have some money I didn’t know about.”
I cut a corner off my toast.
“Would you have paid me back?”
“I would’ve told you I would.”
I looked up.
He took a breath.
“I was behind with your parents already. I knew they’d wait if I asked them to. I figured you’d wait, too.”
I remembered what Brenna had said about posting the Christmas video. She’d figured Mom would explain it, and I would accept the explanation.
I could see what both of them had been counting on.
Russell picked up his fork and set it down again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You should’ve had your first weekend.”
I took a bite of toast. It had gone cold at the edges.
“I did have it,” I said after I swallowed. “Patricia came. I got the curtains up. I ate on the floor.”
Russell looked down at his plate, smiling a little.
“I remember you saying you didn’t need chairs.”
“I needed chairs. I didn’t want Dad to go back down the stairs.”
That got a laugh out of him. It faded, and he waited.
I’d come with a question I hadn’t known whether I’d ask.
“Did you know about Christmas?” I said.
He looked up.
I could see him work out which Christmas I meant.
“Your mom said you were staying home.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I did at dinner.”
The words at dinner stayed between us.
“When did you stop believing her?”
“When Brenna posted the video. She took a call in the kitchen a little later. I heard her ask your mother what she was going to say to you. Then I heard your mother say she’d handle it.”
“What did you do?”
“I dried the dishes.”
I waited.
“That was it,” he said. “I went back to the dining room and asked who wanted coffee.”
He broke the yolk on his egg. It ran into the potatoes.
“You could’ve called me,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I would’ve picked up.”
“I know.”
I pushed a piece of toast through the butter on my plate. He let me take my time.
“I wasn’t expecting us to talk about Christmas today,” he said eventually.
“Neither was I.”
He nodded.
We finished eating. He told me he’d started playing guitar again. He’d bought a cheap one from a man who had painted his initials on the back. I asked what they were. He told me, and for some reason we both spent a minute trying to think of a name that went with them.
When the waitress came back, he asked for separate checks.
I paid mine. He paid his.
Outside, he showed me a photograph of the guitar. The initials were bigger than I’d expected.
“Could probably sand them off,” he said.
“Does it bother you?”
“Only when somebody asks if that’s my name.”
“What do you tell them?”
“That I’m thinking about changing it.”
I laughed.
He put his phone in his pocket.
“Would you want to do breakfast again?” he asked.
I looked at him. I thought about the box. I thought about him standing at the sink drying dishes on Christmas night while I watched a video on my couch.
I also thought about how he’d answered when I asked whether he would have paid me back. He’d had an easier answer available. I was glad he’d given me the one he had.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
He nodded.
“Okay.”
We walked to our cars. He turned back once, raised a hand, and kept going.
Brenna came home for a weekend in late March.
She’d brought Gary along because the window in her room was being repaired and she didn’t trust her housemate to remember which plants needed to be moved.
“I thought he thrived on neglect,” I said.
“He does. I’ve discovered there’s a difference between neglect and somebody putting a ladder through your pot.”
She set him on my kitchen windowsill and took off her coat.
There was a new leaf in the middle of the plant. It was small enough that I had to lean in to see it.
“Is that new?”
“Yes,” Brenna said. “Please don’t make a big thing of it. He’s already impossible.”
I made tea. She told me about sitting in on her first client meeting. She’d taken two pages of notes before she realized the supervisor had brought her along to listen and hadn’t expected her to write anything down. When she showed the supervisor afterward, the woman asked if she could keep a copy.
“What did you write?” I asked.
“Mostly things people said that I didn’t want to get wrong later.”
I gave her the mug with the bigger handle. She set both hands around it.
“Did you talk to Russell?”
“Yes.”
“How did that go?”
I told her a little. I told her about the breakfast and the guitar. I told her he’d heard part of the conversation in the kitchen on Christmas and gone back to the dishes.
Brenna looked toward the window.
“I remember him drying those dishes,” she said.
I waited.
“He asked me if I wanted him to take the phone out to the car for me. He meant the one I’d posted the video on. I told him I had it handled.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
She took a sip of tea.
“I think I thought if I said it fast enough, nobody would make me explain what I’d done.”
We sat without talking for a minute. Then Brenna pulled her phone out and opened the banking app.
“I sent the payment yesterday,” she said. “It should be there now.”
“I saw.”
She looked at me.
I’d seen the notification the night before. I’d opened the loan account after dinner, checked the last payment, and read the balance twice. Then I’d closed the page and waited for her to get here.
I went to my desk and brought back the confirmation I’d printed.
Brenna set her mug down.
I slid the page across the table. She looked at the balance, then at me.
I remembered what she’d asked on the first night in her new room. She’d wanted to hear me say it.
“The loan’s paid off, Brenna.”
She kept looking at me.
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
She put a hand over her mouth. Her eyes filled, and she laughed through it.
“I was going to say something clever when you told me.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
“No.”
I laughed, too. Then I felt my eyes fill, and I had to pull a napkin out from under my mug.
Brenna looked down at the confirmation again.
“I’m glad I paid you,” she said.
“I’m glad you paid me, too.”
She nodded.
There was a time when I would have said I was proud of her before I said anything about how much the money had mattered to me. I would have wanted her to leave feeling good, even if I had to skip over a little part of what I felt.
I could tell her both things now.
“I’m proud of you,” I said. “And I was counting on that payment. I’m glad I could count on it.”
Brenna wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
“Can I keep this?”
“Yes. I printed it for you.”
She folded it once. Then she opened it back up because the fold went through the balance. She put it flat inside the notebook she’d brought from work.
I asked if she wanted lunch.
She opened the refrigerator and looked inside.
“You’ve got eggs.”
“You can make them if you want.”
“I do want to.”
I took down two plates. Brenna set the pan over medium-low heat and waited long enough for me to start wondering whether she’d turned it on.
She glanced over.
“Don’t touch that dial.”
I took my hand off the counter.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“I was.”
We ate at the kitchen table. When Brenna got up for more toast, her notebook was open beside her plate. I could see the edge of the loan confirmation tucked inside.
She left it there while we ate.
Mom sent the last payment on the Christmas envelope in April.
It was a little more than her usual transfer. I checked the total against my notes, then texted her.
That makes six hundred. I’ve marked it paid.
She wrote back a few minutes later.
Will you send me the date you put down? I want mine to match.
I sent it.
Later she called and asked if I wanted to take a walk. She said she’d finally bought a pair of good shoes and wanted to see how far she could get before she found out where they rubbed.
I met her by the library. We made it around the block twice before she sat down on a bench and took off her left shoe.
“Right where I thought,” she said, pressing a finger to the back of her heel.
I had a bandage in my bag. I handed it to her. She put it on herself and set her foot back in the shoe.
“How does that feel?” I asked.
“Like I can make it to the bakery.”
We went in and got coffee.
It was busy. The only free table was near the door, and every time somebody came in, the cold air blew across our ankles. Mom tucked her feet under her chair.
“I’ve been thinking about the ledger,” she said.
I waited.
“I don’t think I ever told you why I kept your initial on that page after I crossed the number out.”
“You could still read it,” I said.
“Yes.”
She took the lid off her cup. A little coffee had gathered under it, and she shook the drops back in.
“I wanted to see whether I’d actually managed to get through a month without asking you. I thought if I left the line there, I’d remember I could do it.”
“Did you?”
“That month I did.”
I looked out at the sidewalk. A man was waiting for his dog to finish sniffing the same lamppost it had already gone around twice.
“Then I asked you the next time,” Mom said.
I turned back.
“I wanted you to know I remembered both parts.”
I wrapped my hands around my coffee. I could have told her I was grateful she’d remembered. I was. I also felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with the walk.
“Sometimes I’d see your name come up on my phone,” I said, “and I’d think I should answer before I had time to decide I didn’t want to.”
Mom looked at me.
“I answered some calls from you while I was in the bathroom at work. I’d go in there so nobody would hear me talking about money.”
She put her lid back on the cup.
“I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t want anybody to know.”
A woman opened the bakery door, stepped in, and held it for the person behind her. The cold came in over the floor again. This time Mom pulled her feet closer to mine beneath the table.
“Are you glad I called today?” she asked.
I thought about it for a second.
“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to get out of the house.”
She nodded. She took a drink.
Then she told me she’d seen a dog in the park wearing a raincoat with its name embroidered across the back. She’d been trying to get close enough to read it without looking like she was following the dog.
“Did you find out what it said?”
“Pancake.”
I laughed. Mom did, too.
When we left, she asked whether I wanted to come over for dinner the next week. I said I could do Friday. She said she could make soup.
I offered to bring bread.
She asked what kind.
I told her I’d decide when I got to the store.
The following week, I called Patricia and asked her to come over for breakfast.
“What time?” she asked.
“Whatever time you normally start looking for something to eat on Saturday.”
“That depends. Are you making coffee in a saucepan?”
“I own a coffee maker now.”
“I’ll be there at nine.”
I bought cinnamon rolls and put them in the oven to warm. When Patricia knocked, I opened the door before she had time to knock again.
She was wearing a brown coat.
I looked at the cuff.
“It’s the same one,” she said. “The lining’s been replaced twice.”
“Is that why you keep it?”
“I keep it because I look good in brown.”
I took her coat. She put a bag of oranges on the counter and asked for a knife.
We cut the oranges and ate breakfast at the table. Patricia took the middle roll because it had the most icing. She told me she’d earned it by spending fifteen minutes getting a good parking space.
I’d printed the photograph from my first apartment. I brought it out after we finished eating.
Patricia wiped her hands and picked it up.
“Look at that,” she said. “There’s the little red key ring.”
“Do you remember what we talked about that morning?”
She studied the photograph.
“You asked me how long eggs kept in the refrigerator. You were worried you’d bought too many.”
I smiled. I’d expected her to say we’d talked about my job, or being homesick, or whether I was going to come home for Christmas. The eggs sounded right.
“I remember you opening every cupboard to show me how you’d organized them,” Patricia continued. “There was one that didn’t have anything in it. You said you were going to leave it empty until you knew what belonged there.”
I looked at the photograph again. I couldn’t see the cupboard from the angle Dad had taken it. I remembered opening it, though. It had been the first empty space I’d ever had that I didn’t need to share with anybody.
“Did you ever fill it?” Patricia asked.
“Eventually. With the coffee maker.”
She laughed.
Then she turned the photograph over, found the back blank, and put it down.
“I thought I’d made the wrong decision for a little while,” she said.
“About the box?”
“Yes. After I left, I kept thinking the letter was yours. It wasn’t up to me to decide whether you could read it.”
I looked at the empty plate in front of her. She’d torn off a little piece of the paper lining under the cinnamon roll and used it to get the icing her fork couldn’t reach.
“If I had read it that morning, I think I’d have sent something,” I said.
“I thought so, too.”
“And I think I’d have spent years wishing you’d stopped me.”
Patricia looked at me.
“I still wish you’d told me sooner,” I said.
She nodded. “I wish I had, too.”
The room went quiet for a few seconds. Then I asked if she wanted another roll. She did, and she wanted the one next to the middle because there was icing on two sides of it.
I brought the pan to the table and let her point.
We spent another hour there.
Before she left, Patricia asked whether she could take the photograph home. I told her I’d printed two copies.
She tucked one inside her coat so it wouldn’t bend.
At the door she said, “I’m glad you had me over.”
“I’m glad you came.”
I watched her go down the stairs. Halfway down, she stopped to check that the photograph was still in her pocket. Then she went out into the parking lot.
I closed the door and went back to the table. There was icing on the old iron mark. I wiped it away and left the placemat folded on the counter.
That evening, Dad called.
He asked whether I had time to talk. I said I had about half an hour.
“I found a receipt for that table,” he said.
“I’m beginning to think you should stop opening boxes.”
“So is your mother.”
He laughed. I heard paper rustle.
“Do you remember how much you paid?” he asked.
“Thirty dollars.”
“Twenty-five. The woman gave you five back because you carried it down yourself.”
“Oh. Right.”
I remembered the woman standing on the landing with a five-dollar bill. I’d tried to refuse it because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. She tucked it in my coat pocket while I was holding the table.
“What made you look for the receipt?” I asked.
“I wasn’t looking for it. I was clearing out the box from your first apartment. I thought you might want to decide what goes and what stays.”
“What else is in there?”
“The lease. The moving truck receipt. A couple more photographs. Your mother’s note about the deposit.”
I looked at the picture I’d kept. Patricia’s sleeve was barely visible at the edge. I couldn’t have told you what she’d been doing with her hands. I could remember how the room felt with her in it.
“I’d like the note and the photographs,” I said. “I have my own lease. You can get rid of that copy.”
“All right.”
There was a pause.
“Anything else?” I asked.
Dad cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s something I need to ask you, and I’ve been putting it off because I’m fairly sure I know what you’ll say.”
I looked at the clock. We’d been talking for seven minutes. I had time to hear him.
“What is it?”
“Your mother and I are talking about selling the house.”
I stood up without meaning to.
“Have you found somewhere else?”
“We’ve looked at two places. We can afford the smaller one. It’s farther from the grocery store, which your mother keeps bringing up.”
I pictured the front steps, the mark on the dining room wall behind Dad’s chair, the kitchen counter where the turkey had already been in the oven when Mom called me.
I thought he was going to ask me to come over and help them sort through it all. I was already wondering how many Saturdays I’d be willing to give them.
Dad let out a breath.
“Your mother wants to know if there’s anything in the house you’d like to keep,” he said. “I want to know something different.”
I waited.
“There’s a drawer in my desk with some of your school things in it. I started going through it yesterday. I found a letter you wrote to us the summer before you moved.”
I sat back down.
“What letter?”
“You asked us to read it after you left for work because you didn’t want to be in the room when we did.”
I pressed the phone closer to my ear.
I remembered writing something that summer. I’d sat in my room with the door shut, listening for my mother on the stairs. I could remember folding the paper. I could even remember where I’d left it.
What I couldn’t remember was either of them ever mentioning it.
“I thought you threw that away,” I said.
“No. I put it in the drawer.”
“Did you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Did Mom?”
Dad was quiet long enough for me to hear my own breathing.
“That’s what I need to ask you,” he said. “She’s going to be there Friday when you come for dinner. Would you be willing to show it to her yourself?”
I looked at the photograph of my first apartment. The curtains were up. My keys were on the table. I’d been so sure that getting out of the house would be the hardest part.
“Dad,” I said, “what did you tell her I’d written?”
Another silence.
Then he answered.
“I told her you’d changed your mind.”
END OF BONUS PART 5
