He hesitated.
“Don’t tell her it’s from me.”
“Dale, you said money is tight.”
He shrugged.
“Your dad used to tell me you couldn’t fix everything.”
I stared at him.
He smiled.
“But you could make the next ten minutes a little better.”
My throat tightened.
“He said that to you?”
“When I was ten, someone stole my bicycle. I was crying outside my dad’s shop. Tom spent an hour helping me search.”
“Did you find it?”
“Nope.”
Dale chuckled.
“But I never forgot that he took the time.”
He picked up his groceries and left.
That evening, I delivered the envelope to Maya.
Inside were three twenty-dollar bills.
And a handwritten note.
SORRY FOR SIGHING. GOOD LUCK WITH THE BOYS.
Maya read it twice.
Then taped it to her refrigerator
beside the calendar.
Of course, life didn’t suddenly become easy.
Maya still had difficult months.
Her furnace stopped working in January.
One of the boys developed an ear infection in February.
Her husband never returned.
There were nights when she was so exhausted she barely knew how to keep going.
But she wasn’t facing everything alone anymore.
Mom began visiting every Wednesday and Saturday.
At first, she helped with the babies so Maya could rest.
Then she started teaching Maya our family’s recipes.
Before long, she was simply going because she wanted to.
Somewhere along the way, Maya and her sons became family.
Noah and Eli now call my mother Nana June.
Noah is still the noisy one.
Eli can apparently sleep through almost anything.
And Mom wears Dad’s watch every single day.
She had a jeweler make extra holes in the old leather strap so it would fit.
He
offered to replace the cracked band.
She refused.
He offered to polish away the little scratch near the number four.
She told him not to touch it.
“Those marks belong to Tom,” she said.
My life changed too.
I still work at register three.
I still count every dollar.
My old Honda still makes strange noises, although Dale eventually repaired the worst problem and refused to accept payment.
But one January evening, I enrolled in an online veterinary assistant program.
Two evenings a week.
At my current pace, it’ll take eighteen months.
When I told Mom, she cried.
Then she found an old photograph of me at twelve, missing a front tooth and holding a very unhappy orange cat.
