The Box Only Marge Could Open

Lisa put her hand on his back. I got up and got the box of tissues from the window sill, and I set it by him, and I sat back down and waited. You do not rush a person through that.

“My mother,” he said, when he could.

“Darlene?”

He nodded. I had met Darlene perhaps six times. A small, cheerful woman from over in Norfolk, Nebraska, who brought a relish tray to the wedding and called everybody dear. She died in 2021, in a nursing home, in a Medicaid bed. I had always wondered a little about that, because Greg’s father had left her comfortable.

“It was the mail,” Greg said. “With her. It started with one of those sweepstakes letters. You have won, send the processing fee. Twenty dollars. Then they sell your name, I guess, and it’s forty letters a week. Prize claim offices. Some outfit that said it was a veterans’ charity. A psychic in Canada, Marge. She wrote checks to a psychic.”

Lisa was staring at him. “You never told me it was that bad.”

“I never told anybody.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “I’d go see her every couple of months. The house was clean. She was cheerful. She’d say she was fine, and I’d say good, and I’d drive home. The bank finally called me. I was on one account from when Dad died. She’d overdrawn it. I went over, and I found the back bedroom.”

He stopped.

“Grocery sacks,” he said. “Full of them. Lined up along the wall like she was saving them for something. She had a notebook where she kept track of what she’d sent, so she’d know what she was owed when the prizes came. Thirty-eight thousand dollars. Four years of it. She kept books too, Marge. That’s the thing. She had it all written down.”

I felt that one go through me, I will not pretend otherwise.

“And she was so ashamed when I found it that she wouldn’t look at me. My own mother. She said, I didn’t want to be a bother.” His voice broke on it. “I was three years late. I could have looked at one envelope. One. And I was being polite.”

“Oh, Greg,” I said.

“So when you went up to Jean’s, and I’m carrying in your mail, and there’s something from a dentist, and something from a bank, and something that says open immediately on it,” he shook his head, “I just thought, not again. Not this one. I’m going to be early this time.”

There it was. The whole of it, sitting on my table next to the cinnamon rolls.

I reached over and put my hand on his wrist. He has big hands, scarred across the knuckles from thirty years of pulling parts. He did not pull away.

“You listen to me,” I said. “I’m sorry about your mother. I wish I’d known. I’d have sat with her. I’d have taken her my ledger and we’d have sorted those sacks together, two old bookkeepers, and she would not have been ashamed in front of me.”

He nodded. He could not talk.

“And you were right to be afraid. You’re right that it happens, and you’re right that it happens to careful people. But Greg. Early is asking.”

He looked up.