slipped away. It was an image I tried to keep with me whenever she was being particularly unreasonable or screaming her head off at how stupid I was. I would remember back to the day I was proud of her, and somehow that made it not so bad.
chapter 6
12:30 p.m.
Once the first boxes were filled and put away, I had to drag more empty ones out of the garage. I tried to look at it as though I was getting rid of two things at once, and from the looks of the garage, Mom probably had enough cardboard boxes to handle most of what was in the house. She always said she could start sorting through her things once she got enough boxes. I was guessing she finally had enough.
My stomach started rumbling as I picked my way through the piles in the front hallway, and I wished I’d gotten something to eat when I’d gone out before. As I was lifting a pile of newspapers from the far corner of the living room, I stumbled and the stack hit something that made a faint tinkling sound. I tossed some newspapers off the top and saw the familiar dark wood. Our old piano. It had been so long since I’d seen it, I’d actually forgotten we had one. Shoving years of junk off the keyboard, I hit a few notes that were wildly out of tune but left me with a strangely satisfied feeling inside.
Somewhere in a distant corner of my mind, I remembered being a really little kid and sitting with my back against the side of the piano, feeling the notes run up my spine as Mom’s hands flew over the keyboard. When Daddy first left us, Mom spent all her free time playing the piano. She didn’t play lullabies or pretty music, though. Her songs were loud and harsh and demanded that you pay attention. I would sit for what seemed like hours with my head just barely touching the dark wooden piano leg, watching as her feet worked the pedals furiously. I used to think that someday she would pedal that piano so hard it would start up, crash through the wall, and drive off down the street.
My fingers left prints in the dust that had settled on the faded wood. Nobody had touched the piano in years. After Mom stopped crying all the time, she didn’t seem to need the music anymore. I wondered if she buried the piano to forget about it, or if once it was buried, she never thought about music at all.
Over the next hour, I filled six more boxes of various sizes and deposited them behind the garage. That space was starting to look fuller, but I wasn’t seeing much difference inside the house. Plus, my arms were aching from all that lifting. I shook them out to try to get the blood flowing again.
As I looked around, I started to notice the clothes. There were clothes everywhere—some on hangers dangling off furniture and doorknobs, some in plastic bags with the tags still on them, and some draped here and there over stacks of other things, like someone had discarded a shirt or pants and was coming back to get them in a minute.
I picked up one of the black trash bags and started grabbing at the clothes that were within reach. Mom went shopping almost every day looking for deals, but we didn’t go out together very often. She always said I slowed her down because I stopped to look at everything, and she had a very cutthroat method of getting through a store. It was almost as if she wasn’t interested in what she bought: the real point of the trip was the discount she got. She thought thrift stores were invented just for her.
There was a large red Macy’s bag underneath a pile of shirts in the living room. I stuffed the shirts into the giveaway bag and reached for the Macy’s bag that was full of something, but it didn’t feel like clothes. Pulling the handles apart, I spotted six or seven wallets, all the same style but in different colors. I recognized them immediately because I had a green one exactly like them in my purse.
We’d been on one of our rare mother-daughter shopping trips when I’d found the wallets on the sale rack last year. They came in a dozen colors ranging from hot pink (definitely not me) to more muted sage and cobalt blue. They were perfect because they weren’t filled with spaces for photos of the friends I didn’t have. Just room for money and a license if I ever got one. I was looking at the display when Mom came up behind me.
“Ooh, these are nice,” she said. She picked up a pink one and opened it to see the inside.
“Yeah, I need a new wallet,” I said warily. I never knew if Mom would be in a bad mood and accuse me of wasting money even if it was mine. “I’ve been using my black one for such a long time, it’s falling apart. What do you think, green or blue?”
Mom took both of them from me and looked from one to the other. “They’re both so pretty.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “You know, Christmas is just around the corner. Maybe Santa can bring you a new wallet, and you can save your money.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “Besides, these are expensive.” I’d learned not to expect too much for Christmas or my birthday. Mom always seemed to have some sort of financial crisis right before a major holiday.
“They’re not that much,” Mom said. She turned the blue one over and looked at the back. “They’re already forty percent off—and I’ll bet they’ll go down more closer to the holidays. What color do you think Santa should bring?”
I smiled at her. Sometimes, mom could be cool like in the old days. “I don’t know. Why doesn’t he just surprise me?” I put both wallets down on the display. “But Santa shouldn’t bring me pink.”
“I’ll let him know,” she said.
On Christmas morning, we went over to Aunt Bernie and Uncle Jack’s house to open presents. They weren’t really related to us, but they’d been friends with Mom since before she and Dad got divorced and were the closest thing we had to family nearby. They didn’t have any kids, and we’d been opening our presents at their house since I was little. Best of all, they had a huge house in the hills, so there was always room to play with whatever new toy we’d been given.
I still had a few presents left to open when Mom handed me a big, square box. Things shifted inside when I shook it, and I couldn’t imagine what was in there. As I tore off the wrapping, Mom sat excitedly on the sofa waiting for me to see what was inside. I lifted the lid to find not just a green wallet, not just a blue wallet, but a bunch of wallets in all different colors scattered in the box.
“Do you like them?” Mom asked, clapping her hands like a little kid. “Remember, we saw the wallets in Macy’s that day?”
I set each one out on the carpet in front of the fireplace. There were eight of them, in every color except pink. I looked at Mom. “I remember,” I said. “But I thought you were only going to get one.”
“Well, they were such a good deal, I decided to get a few,” she said, waving the cost away with her hand. “You know I can never pass up a bargain. Your present is that you get to choose whichever one you want.”
I picked up the green one. “Thanks, Mom. But what are you going to do with the rest of these?” I could see Aunt Bernie staring at us with a strange look on her face.
