“Hand it over!”
I heard the shout from two aisles away. A man’s voice. Loud and sharp, the kind of voice that makes everybody in a store stop pushing their carts.
I’d just left my mother by the fruit display for one minute. One minute. I’d told her to wait right there while I ran to grab a gallon of milk.
Then I heard her.
“Sir! Sir! You’re hurting me!”
I dropped the milk.
I ran back down the cereal aisle so fast I knocked a box of oatmeal off a shelf. I came around the end of the aisle, and there she was.
My mother. Eighty-five years old. Five feet tall. Wearing the lavender cardigan I’d given her for Mother’s Day.
A security guard in a gray uniform had her by the wrist. He was holding her arm up in the air like he’d caught a pickpocket in a movie. Her walker was lying on its side on the floor, one wheel still spinning.
Her face was white. Her whole body was shaking.
“Let her go!” I shouted.
My name is Claire Whitmore. I’m fifty-two years old.
I teach high school history. Twenty-six years at Lincoln High. American History, mostly, and an elective on genealogy that the kids call “Dead People Class” and fight to get into every fall.
In my spare time, I research family trees. Mine, my friends’, anybody’s. I’ve traced people back to the Mayflower and back to Irish villages that don’t exist anymore. I’ve found a horse thief, two bigamists, and a woman who ran a speakeasy out of a church basement in 1924. I spend most weekends in the county archives with my reading glasses on top of my head, smelling like old paper.
“It’s not as fun without someone to be wrong,” she said, when I asked her about it.
About two months ago, she started sorting through Dad’s things.
His clothes, first. Then his books. Then the big oak desk in the den where he used to grade papers and pay bills and do his taxes with a pencil and an adding machine he refused to replace.
One afternoon in April, I let myself in with my key and found her in the den, bent over that desk. She was pulling out drawers, one after another. Riffling through papers. Her hands were moving fast. Almost frantic.
“Lose something, Mom?”
She jumped. She closed the drawer quickly.
“Just an old envelope.”
“Want help? I’m good at finding things. It’s literally my hobby.”
