My mother closed her eyes. She put her phone face down on her knee. She stayed like that, with her eyes closed, long enough that I thought she might have fallen asleep sitting up, which she sometimes did. Then she opened them and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, "Okay. We'll need to clean. Can you do the bathroom? I'll do the kitchen."
We cleaned for two hours. I've never seen my mother clean like that, before or since. She took everything out of the refrigerator and wiped the shelves. She scrubbed the stove top with a toothbrush. She took the mail pile off the kitchen table, all of it, months of it, and stood at the counter sorting it into three piles, and then she took one of the piles into her bedroom and closed the door, and when she came out she didn't have it anymore.
I noticed that. I didn't think much about it. I noticed it the way you notice the color of a car that drives past.
I should tell you something here that I didn't think was important when it happened.
About a year and a half before, the spring of sixth grade, I had been home sick and gotten the mail. Most of it was the usual stuff, bills and grocery circulars and a credit card offer for my mother. One envelope was long and white with a blue eagle logo in the corner, and it was addressed, in typed capital letters, to NOEMI ARRIAGA, and under that, C/O JOANNA VAIL, and under that our address. I remember it because I almost never got mail. I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs holding it, thrilled, thinking it was some kind of contest I'd won.
My mother took it out of my hand when she got home. She glanced at it and said, "Oh, that's just government stuff about your dad. Paperwork. It's boring," and she put it in her purse, and I forgot about it. I mean I really forgot. I didn't think about that envelope again until the Saturday my grandmother came, and then I thought about it so hard I could see the eagle.
That Friday night, Sadie sat at the kitchen table with a piece of folded construction paper and a box of markers and asked me how to spell "grateful."
"G-R-A-T-E-F-U-L," I said. "Why?"
"I'm writing Daddy a thank-you card for the shoes." She held it up. On the front she had drawn three pairs of shoes with enormous care, the white sneakers with a red swoosh, the boots with fluffy cream tops, the black ankle boots with tiny shiny lines to show they were shiny. Above them she had written THANK YOU DADDY in bubble letters, each one colored in a different color. "Mom said she'd mail it Monday."
I looked over at my mother. She was standing at the sink with her back to us, washing a pot that was already clean. I saw her shoulders go still.
"That's really nice, Sade," I said.