The patch was supposed to be temporary.
That’s what I told Daniel, anyway. He was thirteen, and he’d come home from school with a long tear across the front of his denim jacket, right over the chest pocket. He’d climbed the chain-link fence behind the gas station on Garfield Avenue to get a baseball back, and the top of the fence caught him on the way down.
He stood in the kitchen doorway holding the torn flap of fabric against his chest like he was holding in his own heart.
“Mom,” he said. “Can you fix it? Please? I know it’s ruined. But can you try?”
That jacket was the only nice thing he owned. I’d bought it for his twelfth birthday at the Sears in the mall, on layaway, two dollars a week for four months. He wore it every single day. To school. To church. To bed, once, when he had the flu and said it made him feel better.
“Give it here,” I said.
I didn’t have any denim to patch it with. I didn’t have money to buy any. But I had a scrap of red canvas left over from a Halloween costume, and I had my mother’s old sewing kit, and I had a whole Saturday afternoon.
I cut the red canvas into the shape of a little sailboat. A triangle sail and a curved hull. I don’t know why I picked a sailboat. We’d never been on a boat in our lives. We lived in a two-room apartment above a laundromat in Toledo, Ohio, about as far from the ocean as you can get. I think I just wanted to give him something that looked like it was going somewhere.
I stitched it over the tear with white thread. It came out crooked. The sail leaned to the left like it was caught in a strong wind. One of the stitches on the bottom of the hull was bigger than the others.
I held it up. I thought he’d hate it.
He put it on. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror for a long time.
“It’s like it’s sailing away,” he said.
“Is that okay?”
“Mom,” he said, “it’s the coolest thing anyone’s ever done to anything I own.”
He wore that jacket with the crooked red sailboat for four more years. Until his arms got too long for it and his shoulders got too wide and the sleeves came halfway up his wrists. Even then, he didn’t want to give it up.
Then, a month before he got sick, he came home from church with an empty garbage bag in his hand.
“I gave it to the thrift shop,” he said. “The jacket.”
I stopped stirring the soup on the stove. “Daniel. Why?”
“Because it doesn’t fit me anymore. And Pastor Ruth said there’s a lot of kids who don’t have coats this winter. And I thought, somebody else should get to sail away in it.” He shrugged. “I don’t need it. I’ve got the sweatshirt you got me.”
I was a little sad. But I was proud of him. Seventeen years old, and he gave away the one nice thing he owned because somebody else might be cold.
“Okay, baby,” I said. “That was a good thing you did.”
I didn’t know it was the last month I’d ever have with him.
My name is Nora. I was thirty-five years old in the fall of 2000.
I’d had Daniel when I was eighteen. His father was a boy named Rick who played bass guitar in a garage band and told me he’d love me forever. Forever lasted until I told him I was pregnant. He moved to Florida. I never saw him again.
So it was just me and Daniel. From the very beginning.
I worked a lot of jobs. Waitressing. Cleaning offices at night. Stocking shelves at a grocery store. When Daniel was fifteen, I finally got a steady job at Kessler Printing, running the front counter and answering phones. It paid eight dollars and fifty cents an hour. It was the most money I’d ever made.
We weren’t rich. We weren’t even close. We lived above a laundromat, and the whole apartment smelled like dryer sheets, and the floor rumbled every time somebody ran a load of towels. But we were happy. We had spaghetti on Sundays and watched game shows on the little TV and Daniel did his homework at the kitchen table while I paid the bills.
He was a good boy. A really good boy. Funny and gentle and a little shy. He wanted to be a nurse. Not a doctor. A nurse. He said doctors only see you for five minutes, but nurses are the ones who actually take care of you.
“That’s what you do, Mom,” he told me once. “You take care of everybody. I want to do that.”
He was seventeen that fall. A senior in high school. He’d just applied to the nursing program at the community college.
On a Monday in October, he came home from school with a headache.
He said it was just a headache. He took two aspirin and went to bed early.
On Tuesday morning, he had a fever of a hundred and three. His neck was stiff. He said the light hurt his eyes. He couldn’t keep anything down.
I called in to work and drove him to the emergency room.
The doctors did a spinal tap. They said it was bacterial meningitis. They said it was very serious. They said it moves very fast.
