My Wife Sent Me to a Psych Ward, So I Gave Her a Big Surprise novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Shoebox

Maura sneaks Damon's mother in through the laundry door with meatloaf and a shoebox of 156 cards the hospital never delivered. A forged note and a returned-mail slip initialed B.T. show who kept her out.

Maura brought my mother in through the laundry door at nine that night.

Larch Hollow locks its front lobby at eight, so the laundry door is the only one that opens after that.

Maura had propped it with a mop bucket.

"Ten minutes," she whispered. "If the night orderly asks, she's the new linen contractor."

My mother stepped over the bucket in her green wool coat, carrying a shoebox under one arm and a Tupperware in the other hand.

She stopped when she saw me.

I had not seen her in three years, and she was smaller than I remembered.

"Damon," Hazel said. "You're thin."

"Mom."

"They don't feed you." She put the Tupperware on a dryer and took my face in both hands. "I brought meatloaf."

"You can't bring glass in here," Maura said. "That's plastic, so it's fine."

My mother looked at her. "Who are you?"

"The one who called you."

"She's the one who has been keeping you alive," my mother said to me.

"I've mostly been doing his pills," Maura said.

I laughed, and then I could not stop, and then I was holding on to my mother's coat with both fists.

She let me.

She smelled like cold air and the lavender soap she has bought at the same drugstore since I was six.

When I could talk, I said, "Rosalind told me you stopped coming."

"Rosalind told me you didn't want me."

She pulled a folded sheet of notebook paper from her coat pocket.

It had been folded so many times that the creases had gone soft.

She put it in my hand.

Mom, please stop coming. It only makes it worse. Take care of yourself. W.

It was my handwriting.

I read it twice, and the second time I saw the loop on the W. It was a shade too round.

"That's not mine," I said. "She practiced it. She used to copy my signature on the gym forms."

"I know that now."

"Mom."

"I believed it for four Sundays." She said it flatly. "I stayed home four Sundays and I cried in the kitchen. On the fifth I thought, if my son doesn't want me, he can say it to my face."

"What happened?"

"The desk said there was a visitor list and I wasn't on it. I came the next Sunday, and the one after that, and the one after that."

Maura had set down her clipboard.

"A hundred and fifty-six Sundays," she said quietly. "I kept the turned-away log."

My mother took the lid off the shoebox.

It was full of cards.

Birthday cards, get-well cards, a Christmas card with a cardinal on it, and about a hundred plain ones with a stamp of a truck she had drawn herself.

Every one had been opened and put back in its envelope.

"I handed one to the desk every week," she said. "They told me they'd pass it along."

"They went in the returned-mail bin," Maura said. "In month eight I started taking them home."

"Why?"

"Because somebody should read them." Maura looked at the floor. "I'm sorry I didn't bring them sooner. I wasn't sure what you'd do if you got them all at once."

I took out one at random.

On the front my mother had written, Delmont Street news: the neighbors' cat came back. It was gone nine days. He is insufferable about it.

I put my hand over my mouth.

"There's a hundred and fifty-five more of those," my mother said. "You can't read them all tonight. You have a closing on Friday."

I looked at Maura.

"I told her," Maura said. "On the phone. I told her everything I could."

"I want to be in that room," my mother said.

"You will be," I said.

"Rosalind called me this morning." My mother's mouth went thin. "Very warm. She asked me to bring your good suit on Friday, the charcoal one, so you'd look right when you sign. She said the buyers like to see a family."

"What else did she say?"

"That I should wait in the car. That seeing you sign might upset me." She snapped the lid back onto the shoebox. "So I'll wait in the car."

"Mom."

"I'll wait in the car until the elevator opens, and then I'll go upstairs and stand behind my son."

Maura almost smiled.

The shoebox stayed open a moment longer between us, and I went through the envelopes one at a time.

Near the bottom was a thicker one, with a returned-mail slip stapled to the front.

The slip said REFUSED BY PATIENT, with a date from the second month.

I never refused anything. I never saw it.

In the lower corner, in blue ink, somebody had initialed the slip.

B.T.

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