The rain was doing that thing to the streetlights where it blurs them into long yellow smears. Jeremy sat behind the wheel of his delivery van with the engine off, counting what he had against what he owed, the way he did most nights on this curb outside his mother’s apartment building.
The numbers never came out right.
He grabbed the grocery bag and the small paper sack from the pharmacy and climbed the three flights.
His mother opened the door before he knocked, the way she always did.
“You shouldn’t be out this late, dear.”
“Ma, I’m fine. Brought your blood pressure medication and that soup you like.”
She held his face in both her hands. Her palms were warm the way they had been his whole life, the way warmth gets associated with a specific person so completely that you feel it as something separate from temperature.
“You look tired, Jeremy.”
“I’m okay, Ma.”
He wasn’t.
He went home that night and tried to figure out the next month the same way he’d figured out the last six, and came up with the same absence where a solution was supposed to be.
The Man Who Sat Down Without Being Invited and the Stack of Bills He Slid Halfway Across the Table
The next morning, Jeremy picked up a coffee shop run between shifts. He was on his second cup when the man sat down across from him without asking.
He looked expensive in the particular way of men who have stopped thinking about whether their clothes cost too much.
“You’re Jeremy? A friend of mine mentioned you. Said you could use some extra income.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is I have a problem and I think you might be able to solve it.”
Jeremy should have stood up and walked out. He drank his coffee instead.
“My mother is in a nursing home,” the man said. “Her name is Rosie. She has dementia. On her good days, she tells everyone within earshot that her son never comes to see her.”
“So go see her.”
For half a second, the man’s eyes drifted toward the window. Something moved behind them that wasn’t quite guilt and wasn’t quite grief but lived somewhere in between.
“I can’t watch her like that. Business obligations. Relatives are asking questions. Family friends. It’s becoming a situation.”
He slid a folded stack of bills halfway across the table.
“Five hundred a week. Weekend visits. Call her Mama. Pretend you’re Tim. That’s my name. She won’t know the difference — she doesn’t know who’s in front of her anymore.”
“That’s not right, sir.”
