The Book of Little Wishes

The Book of Little Wishes

by Arabez D Smith

'Helloooo!' I call out, dropping my overnight bag at the bottom of the stairs, and kicking off my sneakers by the door.

Teresa pops her head around the corner from the kitchen.

'There you are! She has been waiting all morning. She'll be happy to see you.' She disappears. I hear the snap of the microwave door and she sets it going. 'She is just about to have her lunch.'

'Baked beans?'

'Yes, baked beans,' Teresa smiles and grabs a straw for the iced tea.

Meredith lies propped on half a dozen pillows in her adjustable hospital bed in the living room. The tv is blasting a football game, but she mutes it as I walk in and lean down to kiss her on the top of her head. It's not a proper kiss, through my cotton mask, but old habits die hard. The hair at the crown of her head is ever thinner, and it's my job to perk it up from time to time with a trim and some product. Almost no one ever sees her anymore, but Meredith is not entirely free of vanity.

I've known Meredith and her husband, Roger (late husband now) all of my life. They have been my parents' closest friends, and my godparents, since before I was born. I grew up alongside their boys, but they never had a daughter of their own. I kind of let them adopt me when my parents retired to Florida and I stayed. I wouldn’t own my hair salon outright if it hadn't been for a very generous birthday gift from Roger and Meredith the year I turned thirty-five.

Meredith immediately begins to rummage through the clutter on the white plastic tray which spans her lap. It's on wheels so she can clear the view to the television. Now she pulls it closer, 'It's here somewhere . . .' she murmurs as she lifts and replaces pill bottles and loose bits of paper.

'What are you looking for? Let me help.' I want to intervene before the whole mess ends up in the bed with her.

'The yellow tablet, small one with paperclips down the side.' This is how Meredith stays organized, but the sheer number of yellow tablets often defeats their purpose. 'The dining room. Check the table in there. I must have left it next to the computer.'

Once a day, Teresa operates the lift to transfer Meredith from her bed into a wheelchair, so she can sit at the table in the dining room, work at the computer, and basically get a change of scenery. It's a slow and painful process, so once out and once back into bed is more than enough for both of them, but it helps with the bed sores.

There are three yellow tablets on the table. I grab them all and return to the living room.

'Okay – any of these?'

Meredith takes the paper tablets, each with more than a dozen sheets folded back over the top and starts flipping through them. This could take a while. I sit on the couch and watch the silent action playing out across the big screen as the Eagles succumb to the Patriots.

‘Here!' she yells much more loudly than necessary. She's used to hollering every syllable at Roger, who was extremely hard of hearing towards the end of his life. This, added to the volume of the tv, meant that any conversation in that room was completely intolerable to anyone but them.

'I found it!' she says holding the winning tablet out towards me. 'It's the list we made, over the phone, when you said you could help out?'

I remember. Because Teresa needs to see to her own mother this weekend, I agreed to keep Meredith company, prepare meals, empty the uh, personal fluids bag, and generally take care of things. She wouldn't be getting into her chair while Teresa was gone – I can't manage the lift – but she wanted to save the expense of hiring a replacement for less than twenty-four hours.

I look at the list. It's not long, and it's the kind of stuff Ben, her younger son, could take care of, but I really don't mind, and Meredith seems to like giving me jobs to do. Maybe she thinks she's doing me a favor, because my parents are just fine, and far away and not very needy. In her careful and still elegant penmanship, I read:

Prepare vehicle titles for transfer

Print transfer of title docs from MVC website

Contact notary public at bank

Prepare will for probate (Surrogate's Court, Flemington)

Roger died less than a month ago, and I'm just learning how much paperwork is generated by the simple fact of death. Everything is required in triplicate, or even quadruplicate, if that's a word. I'm running a business, so no stranger to paperwork, but death, death is the Grand Poobah of bureaucratic hoop jumping. Meredith, apparently, is keen to get to work.

'So, where do I find the titles?' I ask her, rising from the couch.

'Roger's closet, in the bedroom. You'll see a big safe box in there, with a keyed latch, but it's not locked. Will's in there too.' She says this complacently, like there's just some friendly guy named Will in the bedroom closet. I know better, though. Roger's death had arrived sooner than expected. I'd say we were all pretty surprised, in fact, that he predeceased Meredith, who has been languishing in that bed for going on two years now. Meredith especially had not expected to suffer being a widow.

I pass Teresa coming in with lunch. She gives me a knowing wink: You'll be the one doing Meredith's bidding now, the wink says.

I stand at the foot of the unused bed, stripped of its sheets and pillows, a blank slab of expensive mattress, going to waste. In the week after Roger's death I found a single stray pillow beneath the bed, stained with the residue of his final moments. It wasn't pretty. I quickly stuffed it into a trash bag and dumped it in the bin by the garage.

Across from the bed, the closet door is ajar and I easily find the lock box on the floor inside. I slide it across the carpet and lift the lid to find a neat stack of legal-size manila envelopes, their contents clearly identified on each. I lift the corners one at a time, finding “vehicles,” “legal documents'' (which I presume means wills) and sandwiched between them, a small black notebook, unadorned except by a blue sticky note which reads “Maggie.”

Maggie. I'm Maggie. Well, Margaret-Louise in full, but everyone calls me Maggie.

The notebook looks crisp and new. But there is an unlikely bulk to it, something crammed between the covers besides its own clean sheaves of lined paper. I open it all the way to the back and a bank envelope falls out onto the floor. It's fat with bills, as I can see because the folded flap is ineffectual against the dense wad of cash.

I flip back to the cover where my name is clearly printed on the sticky note in Roger's sloped, left-handed writing.

'Maggie!'

I startle, and realize it’s Meredith, not the sticky note, yelling at me.

Mechanically, I gather the necessary manila envelopes and head back to the living room, leaving the notebook and the envelope of cash in the lock box.

Not until after dinner, after Teresa has left for the night, and Meredith is dozing through The Good Doctor, do I return to the bedroom and approach the lock box, left out in the middle of the floor. I can't quite bring myself to believe what I hope to be true. That looked like a lot of money, I think. I remove my mask – somehow it feels like an obstacle to clear thinking, and I feel the absolute need for clarity just in that moment.

I kneel and open the box. The cash is there, it's real, and I pull it from its envelope. The bills are new, and for some reason I lift them to my nose. They smell good, clean, like optimism. It doesn't take as long as you might think to count twenty thousand dollars. All $100's. A stack about an inch thick. Thick enough to feel like something in my hand. Thicker after I've counted them and disturbed the original exactness of the alignment. I just sit there holding the cash for a long time. I don't know how long.

Finally, I turn to the notebook itself. It holds the shape of the bills, the phantom wad deflecting the back cover. I was wrong to think its pages were empty. When I open it to the first page, I see the same sloped print walking confidently across the top few lines.

Dearest Maggie,

This is a gift, but not for you.

You will know what to do.

It looks and reads like a little poem. I never knew Roger to read or refer to poetry, ever, so I think it must be a coincidence that he has written a couplet here. It doesn't scan properly anyway.

This is a gift, but not for you.

Then who?

It’s no great puzzle really. We’ve talked of little else, in recent months, besides the enormous struggle this cursed pandemic has brought into the lives of so many people.

I get to work, both literally and figuratively. I'm in the salon, chatting with a long-time client who tells me she lost her job at the bakery. Not enough business to maintain a front-end staff, now that no one stays to eat, hang out, drink coffee for hours. She doesn't know what she's going to do, in fact, she's sorry to say that this will probably be her last cut for a while.

'I just wish I could afford one great gift each for my kids at Christmas,' she tells me. 'Is that so much to ask?'

No, I think, not so much. That night I turn to the first blank page in the black notebook. I write Little Wish #1 at the top of the page.

Two days after that, I'm waiting for a load to finish up in the laundromat. A guy I know to say hi to, but not much more, is bent over pulling his clothes from the dryer. He holds up a pair of jeans, worn through at both knees, and gives me a sheepish smile.

'I wish I could replace these, but things are a little tight, you know? Maybe I can get a few more months out of 'em?' Little Wish #2.

I start pulling the wishes in, like a fly catcher, or a magnet among iron shavings. Wishes are voiced in my hearing and I snatch them out of the air, like that!

Little Wish #3: I wish we had one of those heavy duty wheeled carts; it would be so much easier to deliver library books to the curb in the snow.

Little Wish #4: I wish we didn't have to eat this crap day in and day out, but my husband got laid off, and can you believe how expensive fresh vegetables are?

Little Wish #87 (not so little, but I can afford it, because even though it takes just a couple of minutes to count $20,000 it takes several months to spend it on little wishes): I wish I could afford to replace that headstone, I mean, I know it's an indulgence and all, but we're going to be there a long time.

When Meredith dies, the new headstone she shares with Roger reads:

Roger Maxwell & Meredith Maxwell

Beloved parents and godparents

Who bestowed all the little wishes