Sunday evening. Shop's dark below me, the last of the day's coffee smell rising through the floorboards the way it does when the building exhales. The wood remembers footsteps. The ceiling remembers voices. The apartment is small and warm and mine.

Mabel is on the cozy chair, which is Mabel's chair now in every way that matters. Piano hymns on my phone, low. I'm making French press — Brazilian, the one from Riverside that Marcus described as "basically a hug in a cup," which is not how coffee professionals typically describe roast profiles but the description isn't wrong. Low acid. Gentle. The kind of coffee you make when the day is over and you're not trying to taste the world, just trying to be warm.

I pour. I hold the mug with both hands. The apartment smells like Brazilian coffee and old wood and the faintest trace of lavender from the detergent I use on the sheets, which is not the same detergent my mother uses, which is something I think about more often than I should.

I find the package when I go downstairs to check the back door. It's on the step. Brown paper. No return address. My name in block letters that aren't block letters — they're trying to be, but the L in LeeAnn has a loop at the bottom that the writer couldn't suppress, and the R in Rena curls slightly at the top, and I know this handwriting the way I know the sound of the bell on my door. I've been reading it my whole life. On grocery lists, on Scripture cards left on my pillow, on birthday cards that said To Our Daughter in the same careful print every year for twenty-nine years.

Mom.

I pick up the package. It's light. Soft. Not a book, not a kitchen tool, not the jar of preserves she sent in November that arrived with a Bible verse taped to the lid — Proverbs 31, because of course, because my mother cannot resist Proverbs 31, because in her world the virtuous woman is the ceiling and the floor and every wall in between.

I carry it upstairs. Mabel watches me from the chair with the specific alertness of a cat who has opinions about packages but will not be sharing them. I sit on the bed — on the quilt, the one Mom made when I was twelve, the one with the tiny uneven stitches in the corner where she was learning a new pattern and didn't go back to fix it because — I don't know why. Because she ran out of time. Because she decided it was good enough. Because maybe, once, my mother looked at something imperfect and let it be.

I open the package.

Dish towels. Four of them, white cotton, soft from being washed before they were sent because Mom would never send unwashed fabric, that's not how things are done, and I can smell it — her detergent. Not lavender. Something older, something that doesn't have a name on a bottle so much as a name in my memory: clean. The smell of clean in my mother's house, which was always clean, which was the one thing she could control when she couldn't control whether her daughter wore jeans or drank coffee at 10 PM or left.

The towels are embroidered along the edges. I hold them up to the lamp and look.

Flowers.

Not Bible verses. Not Proverbs 31:25 or Philippians 4:13 or any of the Scriptures she's stitched into every piece of fabric she's ever given me. Flowers. Small ones, delicate, in thread colors that are soft and specific — pale purple, yellow, white, the faintest green for stems. Wildflowers. The kind that grew along the back fence at my parents' house, the ones that came up every spring without being planted, the ones my mother called weeds until my father said they were pretty and then she let them stay.

She embroidered wildflowers on my dish towels.

I hold them in my lap and I don't do anything.

The apartment is very quiet. The piano hymns have moved to something I don't recognize — slow, minor key, the kind of melody that doesn't resolve so much as rest on an unfinished chord, waiting. Mabel has shifted on the chair, one paw hanging over the armrest, her eyes half-closed in that state between watching and sleeping that cats occupy like a country they've colonized.

I'm sitting on the bed holding dish towels embroidered with wildflowers, and I'm looking at the apartment, and I'm seeing it.

The quilt under me. Mom made it. Twelve years old, she sat at her sewing machine in the back room of the house while I did schoolwork at the kitchen table, and I could hear the needle going — that rhythmic mechanical heartbeat — and she didn't talk while she sewed, she just worked, and the quilt appeared on my bed one morning without announcement, like weather.

The chair. Mom sent it after I moved — no note, just David saying it was from her, that she wanted me to have somewhere to sit. An entire language in seven words that I'm still learning to translate.

The blanket, folded at the foot of the bed. Mom's hands. The sage green scarf hanging on the hook by the door. Mom's hands. The kitchen basket that was waiting when I first moved in — coffee filters, homemade biscuits, a note that said only For the apartment. Mom's hands.

I'm sitting in a room full of my mother.

She hasn't spoken to me in — I've stopped counting. Months. Since the scarf, there's been nothing verbal, no calls, no texts, and I've stopped expecting them because expecting them is a kind of wound I can choose not to reopen every day. But the silence isn't empty. That's what I couldn't see at first, in the early weeks, when the not-speaking felt like punishment and the apartment felt bare and the chair was just a chair. The silence isn't empty. It's full of cotton and thread and fabric she washed before sending and stitches she made with her hands, sitting at the same machine, the same needle-heartbeat, making something for the daughter she can't call.

The dish towels smell like her laundry detergent. I hold one against my face and breathe.

It smells like the hallway closet where she kept the clean sheets. It smells like Sunday mornings, the dress she ironed for me laid across my bed. It smells like a house I left and a woman who stayed and twenty minutes of highway between us that might as well be the ocean except that packages keep arriving, keep crossing it, and inside them are things that say what she can't.

I don't cry. I want to note that. I don't cry, which isn't restraint so much as — completion? Like the feeling has somewhere to go that isn't tears. It goes into my hands, holding the towels. It goes into my lungs, breathing the detergent. It goes into the room, which holds it the way old buildings hold everything, without judgment, without forgetting.

Mabel opens one eye. Closes it. This is her commentary. I accept it.

My coffee is cold. I don't know when that happened. I was holding it when I came back upstairs with the package and I set it on the nightstand and now it's been — twenty minutes? Thirty? Long enough for Brazilian coffee to go from warm to room temperature, which is the thermal trajectory of neglect and I should know better, but tonight I don't care about the coffee. Tonight the coffee was an excuse to be holding something warm, and now I'm holding something else.

I get up. I fold the towels and put them in the kitchen drawer. They fit perfectly, because Mom knows the dimensions of everything, precisely and without being asked.

I go back to the bed. I pull the blanket up. Mabel, in a move of unprecedented generosity, abandons the chair and jumps onto the bed and settles against my feet, which she does maybe once a month when the barometric pressure is right or she's feeling charitable or the moon is in whatever position governs cat affection.[^1]

The apartment is quiet. Through the window, St. Francis Memorial is a dark shape against the sky, the steeple unlit because it's Sunday night and even churches rest. The brick wall is close enough to touch if I opened the window and reached, which I've never done and won't, but I like knowing it's there — a church I didn't choose, watching over me anyway, the way some things do.

I think about love.

Not the kind in songs, not the kind in sermons, not the 1 Corinthians 13 love that gets read at weddings — patient and kind and keeping no record of wrongs. I think about the other kind. The kind that can't speak and sews instead. The kind that drives twenty minutes to leave a package on a step and doesn't ring the bell. The kind that washes fabric before sending it because sending unwashed fabric to your daughter isn't done, even if you can't bring yourself to send words along with it.

The wildflowers. Not verses. Flowers.

Something shifted. I don't know what. I don't know if Mom chose flowers because she's changing or because she ran out of verses or because the pattern was on sale at the craft store. I don't know if it means she's softening or if I'm reading too much into thread color. I might be reading too much into thread color. I have been known to over-interpret.[^2]

But the wildflowers grew without being planted. She let them stay because David said they were pretty. And now they're on my dish towels, stitched by her hands, in my kitchen, in the apartment above the shop she hasn't visited, in the life she can't say she approves of but keeps furnishing anyway.

That's love. Not the kind I wanted. Not the kind with words and phone calls and a mother who says I'm proud of you and means the jeans and the coffee and the freedom and all of it. It's the kind with towels. With wildflowers that weren't planted but grew anyway.

The kind she has. The kind she can give.

Tonight, in the quiet, with Mabel against my feet and the smell of her detergent still on my hands and the apartment full of everything she's sent and nothing she's said — tonight that's enough.

Not forever. But tonight.

[^1]: I have not cracked the code on Mabel's affection schedule. It appears to be governed by forces beyond human comprehension, like the stock market or why some days the cinnamon cooperates and some days it doesn't. I've stopped trying to predict it and started just being grateful when it happens, which might be a lesson about something but I'm too comfortable to figure out what.

[^2]: My mother once left a specific brand of hand soap in the kitchen basket. I spent forty-five minutes analyzing whether the scent (lavender) was a reference to Proverbs 31 or just a soap preference. Jennifer told me it was just soap. Jennifer was probably right. I'm still not sure.