When I could breathe again, I wiped my face on my sleeve.
“I saw the savings account,” I said. “This morning. The three payments to NE Studio. I thought…”
He winced. “I figured you might look eventually. I just thought I’d have till Saturday.”
“Four thousand eight hundred dollars, Mark.”
“It’s six thousand five hundred total. The last payment’s due when she finishes.” He looked a little embarrassed. “I used part of my bonus. I know we said that money was for the roof.”
“The roof can wait.”
He laughed. It came out wet.
“I didn’t know how to reach you, Kate,” he said quietly. “After your mom died. You went so quiet. You’d come home from work and do the dishes and put Leo to bed and then just sit in the dark. You wouldn’t talk about her. Every time I said her name, you changed the subject. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I went quiet even with myself.”
I looked up at the wall. At her eyes.
“I have to sign the papers for her house tomorrow,” I said. “At ten. At the title company. I kept thinking that after tomorrow, there’d be nowhere left where she was. Nothing that was still hers.”
Mark squeezed my hand.
“Now there’s here,” he said.
I leaned my head against his shoulder. He smelled like hardware store and coffee.
“I was ready to leave you,” I said. “In my head. Down there on that step. I was practicing what I’d say. I was thinking about lawyers.”
“I know,” he said. “I’d have thought the same thing, if I saw what you saw.”
“No. You wouldn’t have.”
“Maybe not.” He kissed my temple. “But I’d have wanted to.”
That made me laugh. A real laugh, the first one in a long time.
“What was the errand?” I asked. “Wednesday morning?”
He looked away, embarrassed.
“I drove to your mom’s house on Alder Street. Before the closing. I asked the realtor to let me in. I wanted one of the bricks from the back porch. The loose one by the steps, where she used to hide the spare key.”
He pointed to the windowsill.
There, between two jars of paint, was a single old red brick. Chipped at one corner. Moss still clinging to the side.
“Nora’s going to paint it into the garden part of the wall,” he said. “Then I thought we could put the real one out in our yard. By the swing set.”
I couldn’t say anything at all.
The next morning, I drove across town to the title company. Mark took the day off and came with me. Leo stayed with our neighbor.
The closing agent was a brisk young woman named Tamara in a gray blazer. She had everything laid out on the long conference table in neat little stacks with yellow sticky flags.
“Mrs. Hughes, as the executor of your mother’s estate, you’ll be signing the deed and the settlement statement today,” she said. “Sale price, two hundred thirty-six thousand. After the mortgage payoff, the realtor’s commission, and the closing costs, the net proceeds to the estate will be one hundred ninety-eight thousand, four hundred twelve dollars.”
She slid the deed across the table to me.
The young couple buying the house sat across from us. The woman was very pregnant. She kept one hand on her belly the whole time. Her husband kept looking at her like she was the only person in the room.
I picked up the pen.
Yesterday morning, I would have signed that deed thinking it was the end. That the last place where my mother still existed was being handed to strangers.
Now I knew she was on my wall at home. Looking out her kitchen window. Waiting for me under a ceiling full of my son’s crooked stars.
I signed in all the places Tamara pointed to. My hand was steady.
When we were done, the pregnant woman reached across the table and touched my arm.
“We’ll take good care of it,” she said. “I promise. I saw the bird feeder in the backyard. We’re going to keep it filled.”
“She’d like that,” I said. “She’d like that very much.”
In the car afterward, I took the envelope with my mother’s life insurance check out of my purse. It had been riding around in there all week. I’d brought it to the closing without really knowing why.
“Can we stop at the credit union?” I asked Mark.
“Sure. What for?”
“I’m going to open a college account for Leo,” I said. “Grandma’s money. She’d want it to go to him.”
Mark reached across the console and took my hand.
At the credit union, I opened a 529 education savings account in Leo’s name and deposited the full $50,000. My manager Denise processed it herself. She cried a little when I told her why.
“Your mom would be so proud,” she said.
That afternoon, we added the last of the estate money to our own savings. Enough to replace the money Mark took for the mural. Enough to fix the roof. Enough for a little left over.
Gerald Pruitt called around four to tell me the estate paperwork would be wrapped up within a month. Then he paused.
“How are you doing, Kate? Really?”
“Better, Gerald,” I said. “Today, I’m actually better.”
Nora came back the following Tuesday to finish the wall.
I took the day off work. I wanted to watch.
I sat on the guest bed with a cup of coffee while she painted my mother’s tomato plants and her porch swing and the red brick by the back steps. She asked me questions while she worked. What color were Mom’s gardening gloves? Green with yellow flowers. What did she plant every year? Tomatoes, basil, and marigolds to keep the bugs away. Did she wear her reading glasses on her head? Always. And she always forgot they were there.
Nora painted them right on top of my mother’s head, perched in her hair.
I laughed so hard I spilled my coffee.
Before she left that evening, I wrote her a check for the last $1,700. She tried to give some of it back.
“After the parking lot,” she said, “I feel like I owe you a discount.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “You gave me my mother back.”
She hugged me at the front door. A real hug, the kind you give someone you’ve known a long time.
On Saturday, our tenth anniversary, I gave Mark the watch.
He turned it over and read the engraving on the back. Ten years. Always. He was quiet for a long time.
“I almost didn’t give it to you,” I admitted. “Thursday, on the stairs. I thought about taking it back to the jeweler.”
He put it on his wrist and buckled it.
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Me too.”
I made my mother’s pot roast that night. I followed her recipe card exactly, her handwriting slanting across the old index card, with a grease stain on the corner from thirty years of Sunday dinners. It came out almost as good as hers. Almost.
After dinner, Leo tugged on my hand.
“Mommy. Come on. Come upstairs.”
The three of us went up to the guest room. Mark turned on the lamp on the nightstand. The light caught the silver paint on the ceiling, and all those stars lit up at once.
There was still one bare spot in the corner, right above my mother’s head. A little pencil circle Nora had left.
Leo climbed up onto the guest bed. He dipped Nora’s slender brush into a small jar of silver paint. He held it out to me with both hands, very seriously.
“Mommy,” he said. “Come finish the last one with me.”
I climbed up onto the bed beside him. Mark stood behind us and held both our shirts so we wouldn’t fall.
I put my hand over Leo’s hand, and together, we painted the last star.
It came out crooked. A little lumpy on one side.
It was perfect.
My mother looked down at us from her kitchen window, her reading glasses perched in her hair, the cardinals at the feeder, and above her, a whole sky full of stars.
That night, for the first time in three months, I slept all the way through until morning.
