Mom cried.
Right there in the doorway. Holding the roses against her chest. With cake on her fingers.
She hugged him. Ethan stood very still. Like he didn’t know what to do with his arms. Then, slowly, he hugged her back.
“Come in,” Mom said. “Please. Have some cake.”
“I don’t want to intrude.”
“Ethan,” Mom said. Her teacher voice. The voice that made fifteen-year-olds apologize. “Come in and have some cake.”
He came in.
He sat at the end of the table. He ate one slice of cake. He said almost nothing.
Glenn stared at him the whole time.
I later learned he’d spent his last money on them.
I found out by accident. Two weeks later. I drove past the old bookstore on Queen Street. I saw Ethan in the alcove by the back door. Sitting on a piece of cardboard. Counting change in his palm.
I pulled over. I don’t know why.
I walked up.
He looked up. He saw me. He closed his hand.
“Susan,” he said. “Is your mom okay?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “I was just driving by.”
I looked at his closed hand.
“Ethan,” I said. “Those roses. On her birthday. How much money did you have?”
He didn’t answer.
“How much?”
He looked at the ground.
“Twelve dollars,” he said. “And forty cents.”
“That’s all you had?”
He shrugged.
“I had a job for a while,” he said. “At a car wash on Lincoln Highway. They let me go in February. That was the last of my pay.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
I meant it. I genuinely didn’t understand.
Twelve dollars. His last twelve dollars. On flowers for a woman he’d known for five months. Who had a house and a pension and two children and grandchildren.
Ethan shrugged.
“She deserved flowers on her birthday,” he said.
That was all.
I drove home and sat in my driveway for a long time.
I’d been watching him for six months. Checking Mom’s bank statements. Waiting for him to ask for something.
He’d spent his last twelve dollars on yellow roses because my father used to buy her yellow roses.
I went inside. I told Tom.
Tom was quiet for a while.
“Maybe,” he said finally, “he’s exactly who he looks like.”
Over the following months, Mom grew terribly fond of him.
That’s the only way to say it.
She lit up on Thursdays. She’d call me on Wednesday nights and say, Ethan’s coming tomorrow. I’m making pot roast. Or I’m teaching Ethan to make pie crust. Or Ethan’s fixing the kitchen faucet.
She knitted him a scarf. Navy blue. He wore it every day.
She taught him to make her pie crust. He was terrible at it. She laughed so hard she had to sit down.
She found out he’d dropped out of high school at seventeen. She sat with him at the kitchen table every Thursday and helped him study for his GED. Like she was teaching home ec again.
He passed it in August.
She framed the certificate. She hung it in the hallway. Next to my college diploma. And Glenn’s. And Claire’s.
“Mom,” I said. “That’s his. Not ours.”
“I know,” she said. “He doesn’t have a wall.”
Then, one Sunday in September, she said something that left me speechless.
We were sitting at her kitchen table. After church. Drinking coffee. Folgers. The kind she kept for me.
She set her cup down.
“Susan,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I asked Ethan to marry me.”
I nearly dropped my coffee.
I actually did spill some. On the tablecloth. The one with the strawberries she’d had since 1978.
“Mom!” I said. “He’s fifty-six years younger!”
She smiled sadly.
“I know,” she said.
“Mom, what—how—why?”
She looked out the kitchen window. At Dad’s garden. Empty now. She hadn’t planted tomatoes since he died.
“I wanted him to have a home,” she said quietly. “And someone to look after him.”
“You could’ve just given him a room. You have three empty bedrooms.”
“I tried,” Mom said. “He won’t take it. He says he doesn’t want charity.”
“So you asked him to marry you?”
“If he married me,” Mom said, “he’d have this house when I’m gone. He’d have my pension. Survivor benefits. Health insurance. Edwin’s Social Security. Everything.” She looked at me. “He’d never have to sleep behind a bookstore again.”
I stared at my mother.
Eighty years old. Five foot one. In her church dress and her pearls. Calmly explaining that she’d proposed marriage to a twenty-four-year-old homeless man so he could inherit her Social Security.
“What did he say?” I asked finally.
Mom smiled.
“He laughed,” she said. “At first. He thought I was joking. Then he saw I wasn’t.”
“And?”
“And he got very quiet,” she said. “And he looked at me for a long time. And he said no.”
“Thank God.”
“He said,” Mom said slowly, “Mrs. Kemper, I wouldn’t marry you for a roof over my head. Not you. Not anybody.”
She paused.
“And then he said something I didn’t understand,” she said.
“What?”
Mom looked at her coffee cup.
“He said, Especially not you.”
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
I thought he meant especially not you, because you’re eighty.
I didn’t know what he really meant.
Not then.
Mom didn’t bring up marriage again.
But something changed after that Sunday. I could feel it.
She was different with him. Gentler. Like she was holding something carefully. Like a teacup you’re afraid to drop.
She started calling him sweetheart.
She’d never called anybody sweetheart except Claire.
Three months later, Mom passed away peacefully in her sleep.
It was a Thursday.
December fourteenth.
Ethan found her.
He came at two o’clock like always. He knocked. Nobody answered. He had a key now. She’d given him one in October. He let himself in.
She was in her bed. Under the wedding-ring quilt she’d made in 1964. With her reading glasses still on and a library book open on her chest. Little Women. She’d read it every December since she was nine.
The doctor said she’d gone sometime in the early morning. Her heart. Quietly. She hadn’t felt anything.
Ethan called me at 2:11.
I’ll never forget his voice.
“Susan,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. She’s gone.”
By the time I got there, he’d called 911. He’d called her doctor. He’d called Father Michael at St. Anthony’s.
He was sitting on the floor next to her bed. Holding her hand. With his back against the wall.
He’d taken off her reading glasses. He’d closed the book. He’d folded her hands on top of the quilt.
He’d put a yellow rose in them.
From the vase on her dresser. The last one left from her birthday. Nine months old. Dried and faded to the color of old paper.
She’d kept them. All twelve. Hung upside down in the pantry to dry.
He didn’t say anything when I came in.
He just looked up at me. His face was wet.
He stood up. He let go of her hand.
“I’ll go,” he said. “You should be with her.”
“Ethan—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “She was your mom.”
He picked up his green backpack.
He walked out.
I didn’t stop him.
I should have.
