Chương 2
I rolled my eyes because I was tired and embarrassed and not nearly as saintly as she apparently imagined.
“I’d rather God send me eight uninterrupted hours of sleep.”
Fiona smiled.
“Don’t get greedy.”
That was Fiona.
Even near the end, when getting from the bed to the bathroom became an expedition, she could still catch me off guard.
The last winter took most of that from her.
Her appetite disappeared first.
Then her strength.
She began leaving half her oatmeal untouched, claiming I had made too much when I had actually started using a smaller bowl.
Sometimes she watched the bedroom door for several minutes without speaking.
“Waiting for somebody?” I asked once.
“No.”
“You keep looking.”
“I’m allowed to look at a door.”
“All right.”
“You always ask too many questions.”
“That’s because you never answer any.”
She almost smiled.
A week before she died, I found her sitting upright with both hands resting on the old pillow behind her.
It was an ugly thing, yellowed with age and repaired along one seam with uneven blue thread.
I had offered to replace it dozens of times.
Fiona refused every time.
That afternoon she ran her thumb over the blue stitches.
“What is it, Mom?”
“Nothing, Mabel.”
She kept touching the seam.
Then she added, “Not yet.”
I should have asked what she meant.
Instead, the dryer buzzed downstairs, Caleb called from the kitchen asking where we kept batteries, and my phone began ringing with the pharmacy’s automated refill reminder.
Life carried me out of the room.
Three nights later, Fiona could barely swallow water.
Daniel was in Chicago.
A winter storm had turned the interstate ugly, and when I called him shortly before midnight, he said he was leaving anyway.
“Don’t,” I told him.
“What?”
“Don’t drive like an idiot trying to prove something.”
“That’s my mother.”
“I know whose mother she is.”
The silence between us lasted two breaths.
“Is she dying?”
I looked at Fiona.
Her chest rose beneath the blankets, paused, then fell.
“I think you should come home.”
Daniel arrived too late.
At 2:11, Fiona opened her eyes.
I was rubbing lavender salve into her hands because she had always liked the smell.
Her gaze moved past me toward the head of the bed.
“What do you need?”
Her lips moved.
I leaned closer.
She lifted one trembling finger toward the old pillow.
“For you, Mabel.”
“What is?”
“The pillow?”
She gave the smallest nod.
I wanted to laugh because it made no sense, and I wanted to cry because everything made sense at two in the morning when someone you loved was leaving.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“I’ll keep it.”
Her hand tightened once around mine.
Then it relaxed.
I kept talking to her for almost a minute before I understood that she was no longer breathing.
By the following night, our house had become quiet again in the wrong way.
Daniel had finally fallen asleep upstairs.
Caleb, eighteen now and suddenly awkward inside his own grief, had gone to a friend’s house after asking three separate times whether I was sure I did not need him.
The funeral home had taken Fiona.
Her room smelled faintly of lavender and the disinfectant wipes I had used every day without noticing their smell.
I carried the pillow into the kitchen.
Denise had been right about one thing.
It was filthy.
I set it on the table and picked at the torn seam.
Several feathers escaped and stuck to my sweater.
“Perfect,” I muttered.
I found a grocery bag and began pulling loose stuffing from the opening, intending to clean the pillowcase before putting it away.
My fingers went through feathers, old cotton batting, and something that scratched my knuckle.
Then they struck something solid.
I stopped.
For a second I assumed it was a button.
I reached deeper.
Whatever was inside was too large for that.
My fingertips found a hard rectangular edge wrapped in cloth.
I pulled gently, but it caught in the stuffing.
A few more feathers spilled across the table.
I worked the object free and laid it beneath the kitchen light.
It was a bundle wrapped in one of Fiona’s old floral handkerchiefs and tied twice with faded blue thread.
The same blue thread she had used to repair the pillow.
My hands began to shake.
I untied the first knot.
The second had been pulled so tight that I needed kitchen scissors.
Inside the handkerchief was a small metal box, scratched nearly silver at the corners.
There was no lock.
I lifted the lid.
A folded envelope lay on top of several documents.
My name was written across the envelope in Fiona’s unmistakable cramped handwriting.
Not Daniel’s name.
Not “my children.”
Mine.
I sat down.
For twelve years I had opened Fiona’s medical bills, insurance notices, pharmacy instructions, Christmas cards, and junk mail because her eyesight had grown too poor to manage them herself.
I had never seen this envelope.
Under my name she had written four more words.
Do not give them this.
I read the sentence twice.
Then I heard a floorboard creak in the hallway behind me.
I closed the box so quickly that the metal lid pinched the side of my thumb.
Daniel stood in the doorway wearing the same T-shirt he had slept in, his hair flattened on one side.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
It came out too fast.
His eyes moved from my face to the feathers scattered across the kitchen table.
Then he saw the pillow.
“Mom’s pillow?”
I put my palm over the metal box.
“She gave it to me.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
He frowned.
I immediately regretted the edge in my voice.
Daniel stepped into the kitchen and rubbed both hands over his face.
“I meant Denise told me you nearly tackled her over it.”
“I did not tackle her.”
May you like
“She said you snatched it out of her hands like she was stealing the crown jewels.”
Despite everything, a small sound escaped me that was almost a laugh.
