Dad calls at 11:47 on a Tuesday, which is how I know something's wrong because Dad doesn't call during work hours unless someone's dead or dying, and even then he'd probably text first to ask if I was available to receive bad news.[^1]

"Your mom's got the flu," he says, and I can hear the factory noise behind him, the hum and clang that's been the soundtrack of his life for thirty years. "I can't get home until six. She won't eat anything. Won't get up to drink water."

"Okay," I say, because what else do you say.

"I'm not asking you to—" He stops. Starts again. "She needs someone to check on her. Bring soup maybe. I can call Mrs. Patterson from church, but—"

"I'll go."

The silence on his end is loud. I can hear him deciding whether to warn me, whether to say she might not want you there or don't expect too much or any of the other things we've learned to say around the edges of what we actually mean.

"Thank you, Rena."

He hangs up. I stand in the middle of The Hot Mess holding my phone, two customers at tables and a third browsing the book exchange shelf, and I realize I'm going to close the shop in the middle of a Tuesday because my mother has the flu.

This is not a good business decision. This is, in fact, the kind of decision that makes accountants cry.

I do it anyway.

"I'm so sorry," I announce to the room, already moving toward the door to flip the sign. "Family emergency. Nothing serious, but I need to close for a few hours."

The browsing customer nods. The couple at the window table gathers their things with the easy grace of people who have other places to be. Within five minutes, The Hot Mess is empty and I'm locking the door and I'm in my car before I can talk myself out of it, pulling out of the parallel spot I've gotten surprisingly good at navigating, heading toward the town I grew up in and the house I left and the woman who hasn't spoken a complete sentence to me in over a year.

The drive is twenty minutes. I know this because I've made it exactly four times since I moved out—twice for holidays where Dad orchestrated neutral ground, once to pick up a box of things Mom had packed without asking me, and once just to sit in the parking lot of the old church and cry, which probably doesn't count as a visit but felt significant at the time.

I stop at the grocery store on the edge of town and buy chicken soup, the canned kind she used to make when I was sick as a kid because she always said homemade took too long when someone was suffering. I buy saltines. A bottle of Gatorade because hydration matters even if she'll probably refuse anything I bring her. I buy a small container of honey for tea and then stand in the medicine aisle for seven full minutes trying to remember if she's allergic to anything, which she isn't, but my brain has decided this is the moment to forget everything I've ever known about my own mother.

I also bring a thermos of tea—chamomile with honey, light and gentle, nothing that'll upset her stomach. It feels like a betrayal to my entire identity, bringing tea instead of coffee, but sick people don't need single-origin Ethiopian pour-overs. They need someone to show up.

The house looks the same. Of course it does. It's only been a year and change, but some part of me expected it to reflect the distance between us—sagging gutters, peeling paint, physical evidence of the fracture. Instead it's just the house. White siding. Blue shutters. The same welcome mat that's been there since I was twelve.

I knock, which feels absurd. I have a key somewhere. I used to live here.

No answer.

I try the door. Unlocked, because this is still the kind of town where people don't think about locks during the day. I step inside and the smell hits me first—the specific combination of her cleaning products and Dad's aftershave and something baking-adjacent that's just home, even when home isn't sure it wants you anymore.

"Mom?"

Nothing.

"Mom, it's me. Dad called."

A sound from the bedroom down the hall. Not words. Just acknowledgment that she heard me and hasn't called the police.

I deposit the grocery bags on the kitchen counter and get to work heating the soup, and this is when I knock over the entire container of wooden spoons she keeps by the stove. They clatter across the linoleum like I've announced my presence with a percussion solo, rolling under the table and the refrigerator and somehow behind the trash can, and I'm on my hands and knees retrieving them when I hear it.

"Rena LeeAnn."

Her voice. Weak and raspy from the flu, but still her voice, from the bedroom, carrying that specific weight that my full name has always carried. Not angry. Not welcoming. Just—

Mom. Saying my name the way she's said it for twenty-nine years. Like I'm hers. Like that was never the question.

Something cracks open in my chest.

I get up. Finish heating the soup. Pour it into a bowl I've eaten from a thousand times. Carry it down the hallway to the bedroom where my mother is lying in bed looking smaller than I've ever seen her, wrapped in a quilt I recognize from the guest room, her face pale and her eyes glassy with fever.

She watches me set the bowl on the nightstand. Watches me pour water from the pitcher Dad must have left. Watches me put the thermos of tea next to it, and her eyebrows furrow slightly at that because she knows I don't do tea, which means I did this specifically for her.

I don't say anything. She doesn't either.

I find a washcloth in the bathroom, run it under cool water, fold it the way she used to fold them for me. I bring it back and hesitate, because I can't just—she's my mother, but she's also the woman who hasn't touched me in over a year except for the stiff hug at Christmas that felt like obligation—

She closes her eyes.

I lay the cloth on her forehead.

Her hand comes up—slowly, weakly—and rests on top of mine. Just for a second. Just long enough to press my fingers against the cool fabric, against her warm skin.

Then she lets go.

"The soup will get cold," she says. Her voice is barely there. "Eat something. You're too thin."

It's not I love you. It's not I'm sorry. It's not I forgive you or please come home or any of the things I've imagined her saying in the conversations we've never had.

It's my mother, sick and stubborn, telling me to eat.

I stay for an hour. I don't eat the soup—I make her eat it, one slow spoonful at a time, while I sit in the chair Dad usually occupies and watch her pretend she's not watching me. I refill her water twice. I find the remote she'd dropped and put a nature documentary on low volume because she's always liked those, the ones about birds.

When I leave, I wash the dishes. I write a note for Dad: Soup in the fridge. She ate half. Took her temperature at 2pm - 101.2. Gatorade is in the door.

I don't write: She held my hand.

I don't write: I think she might still love me.

Some things you just have to believe without proof. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things. That's what the verse says. I never understood why "believes all things" was in there—it sounded naive, gullible even. But driving home, I think maybe it means this: you keep believing in the love, even when the love can't say its own name.

The drive back to the shop takes twenty minutes. I cry for nineteen of them, which is probably a safety hazard, but I make it in one piece. I flip the sign back to OPEN, but nobody comes in for another hour. Just me and Betsy and the quiet.

That's okay.

Some hours are worth losing revenue for.

[^1]: This is not an exaggeration. When Grandma died, he texted: "Call me when you have a minute. Not urgent but important." GRANDMA WAS DEAD. That was urgent, Dad.