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.
Let me back up.
My name is Claire. I’m thirty-four. My brother Ben is thirty-eight. Our dad left when I was three and Ben was seven, and after that it was just the three of us. Mom worked at the county library for twenty-six years. She raised us in a little rented house on Hadley Street, and then, when we were both grown and gone, she moved into this apartment on the fourth floor of a brick building on Crestview Avenue.
She lived here fifteen years. She said it was the perfect size. “Two bedrooms,” she’d say. “One for me, and one for whichever of you shows up hungry.”
About two years ago, her heart started giving out.
It happened slowly at first. She got tired walking up the stairs. Then she had to stop on the landing. Then her ankles swelled, and the doctor said a lot of words I had to look up later, and then there were pills, and appointments, and more appointments.
We knew she was getting worse. We weren’t stupid.
But neither of us expected to lose her so soon.
She went into the hospital at the end of September. She was there almost three weeks.
Even in that bed, with tubes in her arm and a monitor beeping next to her head, she couldn’t stop being our mother.
“Claire,” she said one afternoon, “please tell me you’re eating something besides sandwiches.”
“I eat other things.”
“Name one.”
I thought about it. “Soup.”
“Out of a can?”
“Soup is soup, Mom.”
She closed her eyes and sighed like I’d personally disappointed every woman in our family going back four generations.
Then she opened them and looked at my brother, who was folded into the plastic chair by the window.
“And Ben. You look exhausted. Are you sleeping?”
“I’m sleeping fine.”
“You have bags under your eyes like a raccoon.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
We laughed. Ben and I both laughed, sitting there in that hospital room. Because she was lying in a bed with a failing heart, and the thing she was worried about was my soup and Ben’s eyes.
That was Mom.
She gave us instructions too. About the apartment.
She gave them on the second-to-last good day, when she was sitting up and drinking apple juice through a bendy straw.
“The spare keys are in the kitchen drawer,” she said. “The one by the stove. With the rubber bands.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“And don’t throw away Grandma’s plates.”
“We’d never throw away Grandma’s plates.”
“Ben would.”
“I would not!” Ben said from the chair.
“You tried to give them to Goodwill in 2009.”
“I was moving! I thought they were extras!”
“There’s no such thing as extra windmill plates,” Mom said, and she sipped her apple juice with great dignity.
I promised her we’d take care of everything. I said it like it was a someday thing. Like she’d be home in a week, telling us where everything went.
I just hadn’t expected to do it without her.
She died on a Tuesday morning, a little after six. Ben was there. I was in the cafeteria getting coffee. I’ve had to make my peace with that.
The funeral was on Saturday. The library closed early so her old coworkers could come. Half the building showed up. Mrs. Okafor from across the hall made a lemon cake so big it took two people to carry it in.
And then, on the following Tuesday, exactly one week later, Ben and I drove to Crestview Avenue with a trunk full of empty cardboard boxes to start sorting through her things.
We sat in the parking lot for ten minutes without getting out.
“Are you sure we’re ready to do this?” Ben asked.
I looked up at the fourth floor. At her kitchen window. Her blinds were half open, the way she always left them, so her spider plant could get afternoon sun.
“No,” I said. “But we have to start somewhere.”
Ben got out first. He picked up the stack of empty boxes from the trunk and held them in his arms like a shield.
“Come on,” he said.
We climbed the stairs together. She’d climbed these stairs every day for fifteen years, even when she had to stop on every landing.
Then we reached her floor.
And stopped. 