It did.
I sat next to his hospital bed for nine days. I didn’t go home. I slept in the chair. I ate crackers from the vending machine. I called Mr. Kessler at the print shop every morning to tell him I wouldn’t be in.
The first few days, Mr. Kessler was understanding. “Take all the time you need, Nora,” he said.
By day six, his voice had changed. “Nora, I’ve got nobody on the front counter. I’ve got customers waiting. I need you back.”
“My son is in the ICU, Mr. Kessler.”
“I understand that. I do. But I’ve got a business to run.”
On day nine, Daniel’s heart stopped.
They tried for forty minutes. I stood in the corner of the room with my back against the wall and watched them try. A nurse held my arm the whole time. She was older, with gray hair in a bun. She didn’t say anything. She just held on.
When the doctor finally stopped and looked at the clock and said the time out loud, the nurse put both her arms around me.
“He wanted to be a nurse,” I told her. I don’t know why. “He wanted to be just like you.”
She held me tighter.
It was November 3rd, 2000. My son was seventeen years old.
I buried him on a Saturday.
There weren’t many people at the funeral. Some of his friends from school. Pastor Ruth, from the church. Two of the nurses from the hospital, including the gray-haired one who held my arm. A couple of neighbors. That was it.
Rick didn’t come. I don’t even know if anyone told him.
I didn’t have money for a real headstone. I put a little metal marker on the grave, the temporary kind the funeral home gives you. I promised Daniel I’d buy him a real stone someday.
On Monday, I went back to work.
I don’t know why. I couldn’t stand being in the apartment. Everything smelled like dryer sheets and Daniel. His shoes were still by the door. His backpack was still on the kitchen chair. His toothbrush was still in the cup by the sink.
So I put on my work clothes and took the bus to Kessler Printing.
Mr. Kessler called me into his office before I even took my coat off.
He was a heavy man with a red face and a mustache. He didn’t look at me. He looked at a stack of papers on his desk.
“Nora,” he said. “I’m very sorry about your boy. I truly am.”
“Thank you.”
“But you missed twelve days of work. Twelve days. I had to bring in a temp. I had to pay her overtime.” He shuffled the papers. “And honestly, I can’t have somebody on the front counter who’s going to be crying all day in front of customers. You understand. It’s not personal. It’s business.”
I stared at him.
“You’re firing me,” I said.
“I’m letting you go,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
There wasn’t a difference. Not to me.
He gave me an envelope with my last paycheck. Two hundred and twelve dollars. After rent, that would leave me with almost nothing.
I walked out of Kessler Printing at nine-thirty in the morning. It was cold and gray. The wind was coming off Lake Erie and it went straight through my coat.
I didn’t take the bus home. I walked. Two and a half miles. I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting on a bus full of people. I walked down Madison Avenue with my hands in my pockets and tears running down my face, and I didn’t care who saw.
I had lost my son. I had lost my job. I had eleven dollars in my wallet and two hundred and twelve in an envelope that was already spent on rent.
I didn’t know how I was going to keep living.
I’m being honest about that. I didn’t know. I thought about it, walking down Madison Avenue in the cold. I thought about how easy it would be to just stop.
And then I saw the boy.
He was sitting on the sidewalk outside an old shoe repair shop that had closed down. His back was against the brick wall. His knees were pulled up to his chest. There was a paper coffee cup on the sidewalk in front of him, with a few coins in the bottom.
He was young. Very young. He couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than Daniel. Nineteen. Twenty, maybe. He had brown hair that needed cutting and a thin face and dark circles under his eyes. His sneakers had holes in both toes.
People were walking past him. A man in a suit. A woman with a stroller. Two teenage girls laughing at something. Nobody looked at him. Nobody stopped.
I almost didn’t stop either.
I was walking fast. My head was down. I was crying. I didn’t have anything to give anybody. I could barely give myself one more step.
I was almost past him when I saw it.
His jacket.
It was a denim jacket. Too small for him. The sleeves came halfway up his wrists. The shoulders were too tight.
And sewn over the chest pocket, there was a red sailboat.
Crooked. The sail leaning to the left, like it was caught in a strong wind. One big stitch on the bottom of the hull, bigger than all the others.
I stopped dead on the sidewalk.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I stood there in the cold and stared at that red sailboat on a stranger’s chest.
The boy looked up at me. He saw where I was looking. His face changed. He went pale.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. My voice came out strange. High and thin.
He put his hand over the sailboat. Like he was trying to hide it.
“The church,” he said quickly. “The thrift shop. On Woodruff. They gave it to me. They said it was free.” He was starting to take it off. His hands were shaking. “I didn’t steal it. I swear. If it’s yours, I can give it back. Here. You can have it back.”
He had one arm out of the sleeve.
“No,” I said. “No, sweetheart. Keep it on. It’s cold.”
He stopped. He looked at me with big, scared eyes.
“It looks good on you,” I said.
And then I did something I didn’t expect.
I sat down next to him. On the cold sidewalk. In my work clothes, with my purse in my lap. With my back against the brick wall of the old shoe repair shop.
And I started to cry.
I don’t know how long I cried. A long time. The boy didn’t say anything. He just sat there next to me. After a while, he took his arm the rest of the way back into the sleeve and pulled the jacket tight around himself.
When I could finally talk, I told him.
I told him about Daniel. About the fence behind the gas station and the torn jacket and the red canvas left over from a Halloween costume. About the crooked sailboat. About Daniel looking in the bathroom mirror and saying, It’s like it’s sailing away.
I told him about the thrift shop. About Daniel coming home with the empty garbage bag. Somebody else should get to sail away in it.
I told him about the headache. The fever. The nine days. The forty minutes. The gray-haired nurse.
I told him about the funeral, and the little metal marker, and Mr. Kessler saying it’s not personal, it’s business.
I told him that I still caught myself, every single day, wanting to tell Daniel things. Little things. Something funny on the bus. Something I saw on TV. I’d turn around to say it, and he wasn’t there.
The boy listened to all of it. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t look away. When I said Daniel’s name, he looked down at the sailboat on his chest.
“He sounds like a really good guy,” he said quietly, when I was done.
“He was,” I said. “He was the best person I ever knew.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “I’m really sorry.”
We sat there for a while longer. The wind was blowing. A bus went by. Somebody’s car radio was playing an old Motown song.
Finally, I stood up. My knees were stiff from the cold. I brushed off my skirt.
I opened my purse. I took out my wallet. I had eleven dollars in it. A ten and a one.
I took out the ten.
I held it out to him.
He looked at it. Then he looked up at me. And he looked frightened. More frightened than when he thought I was going to take back the jacket.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “No. I can’t. You need that more than I do. You just lost your job. You just lost your…” He stopped. He couldn’t say it.
“Maybe I do,” I said. “But you need supper tonight. I can see it. I’ll manage.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I always do.”
He stared at the ten-dollar bill for a long time.
Then he took it. His fingers were ice cold.
He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the jacket. Daniel’s sleeve.
“I’m Owen,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Nora.”
He reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. It was a torn bus schedule. The Number 22 route. He dug in his other pocket and found a little stub of a pencil.
He wrote my name on the back of the bus schedule. NORA. In big capital letters. He underlined it twice.
“I’m going to find you someday,” he said. “I’m going to pay you back. I promise.”
I smiled. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t give him the money because I wanted it back. I didn’t give it to him for any reason I could have explained.
I think it was because, for a few minutes, sitting next to him on that cold sidewalk, I didn’t feel quite so alone. I’d been alone in a hospital chair for nine days. Alone at a graveside. Alone in Mr. Kessler’s office. And for a few minutes, a stranger in my son’s jacket had sat with me and listened.
I hoped I’d done the same for him.
“You don’t have to pay me back, Owen,” I said. “Just go get some supper. Something hot.”
