Chapter 6
Chapter
That night, I’m sitting alone in my too-quiet, empty house, buzzing from that lunch and trying not to think about whatever’s been happening in Slack, when Greg texts me:
you had lunch with the new executive? what did he want?
Suddenly I’m so irritated. Bold of you to escalate to texting! And it’s after polite messaging hours!
I scroll up to the last texts he sent me—the ones right after Mom died that I never answered, and farther up, it’s just one or two terse messages a year for birthdays and holidays, back and forth.
Seriously, who does Greg think he is?
If he wanted to have a say in my life—if he wanted the kind of relationship where he could text me after nine p.m.—maybe he shouldn’t have kissed me senior year, twice, and then ditched me for a new group of friends.
And sure, I should be over it by now, but that’s not the point!
I’m not going to write back. I won’t dignify this with an answer.
But I still spend the next several hours ruminating on all the things I wish I could say.
This house felt small when I was growing up, but after my New York apartment, it feels palatial, uncomfortably empty.
You’re so spoiled, Mom would always say. You’re not a real adult.
I was just starting to feel like one, almost. Sure, I was living in a shoebox with three roommates, but I paid rent and hauled my laundry to the laundromat and rode the train back and forth to my grown-up job.
I made my student loan payments and stared at that huge amount of the principal once a month, feeling like it was a rock I’d never push all the way uphill.
But then, bam, I’m back in my childhood bedroom, with the mortgage paid off by Mom’s life insurance so I don’t even have that grown-up worry.
With the guilt-soaked luxury of an in-unit washer-dryer and all the memories of Mom that everything laundry-related brings back—her instructions for sorting clothes properly, her strong opinions about fabric softener brands, all the nights when she’d fold clothes while we watched TV.
And Mom’s dream job basically fell into my lap, so I should probably try harder to be happy about it.
Now it’s two a.m., and I’m staring at the ceiling, rehearsing all the ways I wish I could tell Greg off.
Think about something else. Think about something nice.
My mind goes back to the cafeteria, sun streaming through the big windows and Mark Winterson giving me his full attention. But I start replaying every weird thing I said, and the stress winds me up.
Think about something else! Something…less exciting. More soothing.
I try to picture a field of flowers.
Flowers.
Sampaguita.
Greg’s old Acura.
Dodgeball.
It would be hard for one person to know all of those things, together.
Even, say, if someone trained an LLM by feeding it Mom’s Slack messages—I shudder at the thought—there’s no way she ever mentioned the dodgeball story to anyone at work.
Mom was very image-conscious when it came to me.
She only ever wanted to show the outside world the best, most braggable version.
Sometime around three a.m., I can’t stand it anymore. I pop one eye open, roll onto my side, and open Slack—all the names with the circles next to them grayed out in the sidebar, mine lit up green.
And in the DM with myself, I write:
ruby.ocampo:
Mom? Is that actually you?
God, this is ridiculous. This is—
sampaguita72:
Of course it’s me! Who else would it be?
Ay I forgot to tell you—check in my desk, the one with the roll top. The back of the drawer comes off.
I should have written it down! I forgot to write it down.
It’s hard to think of everything.
I’m barely breathing as I make my way through the dark hallway of our one-story ranch-style house, walking on tiptoes like I’m about to ambush an intruder.
I turn on the light in the living room, where the desk sits next to the couch. All of the hairs on my arms stand on end.
After Mom died, I did all these things—took care of paperwork, bagged up clothes to donate, went to the Social Security office. But I barely remember doing them, now. It’s like a giant hand was playing Barbies with my body, shuttling me around.
Tita Wendy is the one who encouraged me to slowly get rid of things, if I’m keeping the house.
“So you won’t feel so weighed down,” she said, pointing with her pursed lips to the clear storage boxes piled against the walls, at once neat and chaotic.
Then she whispered like Mom would still be able to hear: Adela was always a bit of a hoarder.
But I’m relieved that I kept this desk, even if I never use it.
I pull up the roll top and jump back, half expecting something horrifying to spring out. But there’s just the inlaid set of drawers—not even any clutter, since I cleared out the years’ worth of mail and receipts she used to keep in here.
I slide open a drawer and push on the wood in the back, trying the corners, and—
It comes loose. There’s a space behind.
And an envelope nestled there. Fat with something inside it.
I pull it toward me and my eyes grow wide, seeing that it’s stuffed with cash.
Susmaryosep. It is the kind of thing Mom would do, stashing emergency reserves in random places.
Could someone still be scamming me? They could have broken in and put this here, and—you have to spend money to make money, so maybe—
I turn the envelope over in my hands and there’s Mom’s handwriting in black felt-tip pen, her unmistakable shaky looping script.
I’m trying so hard to breathe normally when I sit down at the kitchen table and pop open my laptop screen.
sampaguita72:
Did you find it? I really should have written it down.
I close the laptop again and slump forward, face buried in my folded arms, and for the first time since Mom died, I have a good, long cry.