Original fiction · Chapter 2 of 2
The Bird on the Receipt
I turned the receipt over. The printed side listed a bag of rice, two oranges and a box of tea. She used to buy the oranges one at a time when money was short. I could tell from the price she'd bought these on a good week.
Mrs. Keene said Mom had asked her for help after closing one night. She didn't want a children's book. She wanted the one I kept talking about. They worked on two pages a week at the returns desk. Mom read the difficult sentences twice so she could remember how they'd sounded the first time.
“Why didn't she ask me?”
“She said you were already doing your own homework.”
That sounded like her. She'd sometimes iron my school blouse after midnight because she didn't want me to see her turn on the light.
There were more scraps inside the book. The first ones had short words. Later she wrote whole sentences. One note said the girl in the book should have eaten something before leaving home. Another said the brother probably knew she was coming and was pretending he didn't.
I asked whether she'd ever reached the last page. Mrs. Keene found a bookmark near the end. It was a library program from my high school graduation. On the back, my mother had written that I was wearing shoes I couldn't walk in and had gone up the steps anyway. Below that, in the same pencil, she'd written the page number where she'd finished the book.
I took it home that night. I made tea and read the last chapter at my kitchen table. The girl's brother met her at a station. He'd bought her a sandwich because he remembered she never ate on trains. I could hear my mother telling me that detail, the way she would have told me who came to the door while I was out.
The library reopened in spring. I brought the book back to show Mrs. Keene the place where I'd underlined a sentence. She asked if I wanted her to make a new bookmark for it.
I kept the grocery receipt. I did put one thing on it, underneath my mother's bird.
She found him.
