It wasn’t a payment log. It was a record of every afternoon she’d spent with my son, wrapped around a box of money she was saving for a future she’d just told me she didn’t expect to see.
“Mom,” I said. “What do you mean you don’t have much time?”
And she told me. She’d been to the doctor. There was a diagnosis — I’m going to keep the specifics as private as she kept them, because she asked me to, and because it’s hers. What matters is that my mother, at sixty-six, had been told that her time was more limited than any of us had known, and she had done, with that terrible news, the most my-mother thing imaginable.
She hadn’t told us, because she didn’t want Caleb’s last years with her to be sad ones. She hadn’t slowed down. And she had come up with a plan — a strange, roundabout, beautiful plan — to leave her grandson something before she went.
“I don’t have a fortune, Claire,” she said. “I have a paid-off house and a small pension and not enough to matter. But I figured, if I charged you for the days I get with him anyway — the days I’d pay you for, if I could — then I could put real money away for him. For college. For whatever he needs when I’m not here. And you’d never let me just give it to you. You’re too proud. You get that from me.
