“Every dollar you’ve handed me is in a box in my closet with Caleb’s name on it. I never spent a cent. I’ve been saving it for him, and adding my own on top. I can’t stop, sweetheart — because I don’t have much time to fill that box, and I want it full before I’m gone.”
Chapter 2: The Box in the Closet
I drove to my mother’s house that night and I made her show me the box, and I have not stopped thinking about what was inside it.
It was a shoebox, on the shelf in her bedroom closet, and written on the lid in her careful handwriting was “CALEB.” Inside was every forty dollars I’d ever handed her — I recognized some of the bills, the twenty I’d given her folded a certain way — and a great deal more, because my mother had been quietly adding her own money to it, on top of mine, for two months.
But it wasn’t just the money that made my knees give out. It was the notebook underneath it.
My mother had been keeping a ledger. Every visit, dated. Forty dollars, and then a line about what she and Caleb had done that day. “Made dino nuggets, read three books, he lost a tooth.” “Taught him to play gin rummy. He cheats like his grandfather.” “He fell asleep on me during the movie. I didn’t move for two hours.”
