And “I can’t stop” — not “I won’t.” Because she genuinely couldn’t. Stopping meant admitting the clock was running. Stopping meant fewer afternoons in the ledger and fewer dollars in the box. My mother, told she was dying, decided to spend her remaining time filling a shoebox with her grandson’s future, forty dollars at a time, and she could not stop, because stopping was the same as giving up, and my mother has never in her life given up on anything.
I got angry at her for charging me. I threatened to hire a stranger. For three weeks, I took my son away from a dying woman who was using the last of her time to provide for him, because I was too proud and too oblivious to understand what the forty dollars meant.
I will carry that for the rest of my life. And I’ve forgiven myself for it, mostly, because she made me — because when I sobbed my apology into her shoulder, she said, “How could you have known? I hid it well. I’m good at hiding things. Where do you think you get it?”
Chapter 4: The Afternoons We Had Left
We did not waste the time we had left.
