The Packages My Son Said Were Nothing And The Key I Never Wanted

My son told me a stranger would be starting in my house on Monday, and then he handed her a key to my front door. I thanked her and asked her to leave her purse by the door. She does not know that I have kept every delivery slip that has come to this address since the fourth of April, or that one of those boxes is in the trunk of my car right now.

“Mom, don’t start,” Brett said, hovering in the hallway with his briefcase already half-zipped.

“I’m not starting. I’m asking her to put her purse down.”

“She’s not going to steal from you.”

“I didn’t say she was.”

“You said it with your face,” my son said, standing right there in my kitchen, in front of her.

The young woman laughed a short, defensive sound and tossed her keys onto the counter, letting her purse settle right where I asked. “It’s all right, Brett. My grandma was the same way.”

So now I am somebody’s grandma who is the same way. That is the category they put you in the second you need someone to help you tie your shoes or reach the top shelf of the pantry.

My name is Faye. I am 71. I fell one time, eleven months ago, on wet leaves by the side garage, and I did not break anything and I got myself up off the damp grass without calling for help.

I have spent the last eleven months enduring that one fall becoming my entire personality. I have endured my son telling the agency on the phone, while I sat four feet away on the floral sofa, that I “get anxious about people in the house.” I have endured being handled like a fragile plate that someone found at a thrift store. I have endured watching a stranger learn where my dessert spoons go before she even bothered to learn my last name.

And I have endured one thing since the fourth of April that I did not tell anybody. The first time I brought up a box in that kitchen, my son looked at me the way you look at a smoke alarm chirping in the middle of the night, not with worry, but with a tired calculation of how much trouble it was going to be to fix.

The boxes started during the second week of April. Small ones mostly, packed tightly in padded manila envelopes, along with two distinct shoe boxes wrapped in brown paper. None of them had my name on them. The very first one had a man’s name I had never heard in thirty years of living on this street, and I stood on my front step holding it in the morning chill, thinking the regular driver had erred in his route.

Krystal came out behind me, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and took it right out of my hands. “Oh, that’s mine,” she said too quickly. “I have things sent here so my roommate doesn’t get into them.”

It was a whole sentence with a reason tucked neatly inside it, and people who are telling the truth do not usually hand you the reason before you even open your mouth to ask.

I called my son that night while the television droned in the background. “She’s having packages sent to my house,” I told him.

“So? Her building gets stuff stolen,” he said, sounding like he was reading a grocery list.

“There have been six, Brett.”

“Six packages. Okay.”

“Six packages in nine days with four different names on them.”

He gave me the sigh that he must save specifically for my phone calls. “Mom. Do you know how tired you sound right now?”

The delivery driver usually comes between two and three in the afternoon, and by the end of April he knew me well enough to hesitate on the top step.

“Ma’am, you want me to stop leaving these here?” he asked one Tuesday, holding a flat, heavy mailer.

“Can you?” I asked.

“Not if the address on the label is right. I can hand them to you first, though, if you’re standing right here at the door.”

“Why would you offer me that?”

He shifted the box to his other arm and looked down at the welcome mat. “Because I run this route in three towns, and I’ve seen this.”

I asked him what he meant by this, my throat tightening up against the dry air.

“I’m not allowed to say what I mean by it,” he said, stepping back toward his van. “But if I lived here, I’d be at the door.”

So I was at the door. On the fourth of April I took one of the packages and I did not open it and I did not say a single word about it to Krystal, and I walked it out to my car in a gray grocery bag and tucked it deep in the trunk under the tangled jumper cables.

Krystal came in at nine the next morning like always, hanging up her lightweight jacket and putting her purse by the door without missing a beat.

Then she said, without looking up from the kitchen sink where she was rinsing a glass, “You didn’t get anything yesterday, did you, Faye?”

“Not that I know of,” I said, keeping my hands steady around my coffee mug.

“Because the app says it came at 2:40.”

“Then I guess it went to the wrong house down the block.”

She turned the water off. She stood there with her back to me for about four seconds, which is a very long time to stand in silence in a small kitchen.

“You’d tell me if you saw it,” she said, her voice dropping into a register I hadn’t heard before.

“Of course,” I told her.

That was the first morning I was afraid in my own house, and I have not told my son that part yet, because I know exactly what he would do with it. He would write it down as another symptom on his imaginary chart.

Here is where I have to be fair to everybody, including her. If that box in my trunk has a cheap curling iron in it, then I am just a 71-year-old woman who stole a package from a girl making fourteen dollars an hour, and my son is entirely right about my mental state, and I will apologize to her with my whole chest until she forgives me.

But if it is not a curling iron, then my son gave a house key to a person who is using my residential address for something she has to hide, and he did it entirely over my active objection, and he told an agency I get anxious about people so he wouldn’t have to listen to my judgment.

On Thursday the agency called at ten past eight in the morning. Krystal was out sick with a stomach bug, and they were sending someone else for the day to cover her hours.

The substitute was maybe fifty, with her name printed clearly on a bright blue lanyard and her own ceramic travel mug of coffee. She stopped dead in my kitchen doorway and did not put her canvas bag down on the floor.

She looked past me at the little stack of padded envelopes I had left out on purpose near the telephone table, and something went across her face, a quick, heavy shadow, that I have not stopped thinking about since she walked in.

“Ma’am,” she said, her voice dropping as she stepped closer. “How long has she been having these sent here?”

“Since April,” I said.

“And your son set this placement up for you?”

“He did.”

She finally set her bag down on the linoleum then, looking around my clean kitchen as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Okay. Before I touch anything in this house, I need you to sit down right now, because at the last address she worked, the family didn’t find out until the police came to the front door looking for stolen identity mail.”

I looked at the little stack of envelopes, then down at the worn toes of my slippers. The kitchen was entirely silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator in the corner.

“I have one in my trunk,” I said.

The substitute nurse stopped unzipping her canvas bag and stared at me. “You have what?”

“A box,” I said. “From the fourth of April. It’s under my jumper cables.”

She let out a long breath that sounded like she had been holding it since she walked up my driveway. “We need to call your son right now, and then we need to call the local station before she comes back on Monday morning.”

“No,” I said, standing up straight against the counter. “We aren’t calling Brett yet. We are going to go out to the garage together, and you are going to help me open that box so I know what I’m looking at before anyone else tells me I’m losing my mind.”

She looked at me for a long moment, taking in my slippers and my gray hair and the way my hands weren’t shaking anymore, and then she nodded slowly. “All right, Faye. Let’s go see what’s in the trunk.”