Chapter 2 - The Wax Paper Bundle
My heart thudded against my ribs like a trapped bird as my hand sank into the cool, crushed down. The feathers clung to my knuckles like wet snow. I pinched the package firmly between my fingers and pulled it out through the frayed slit in the pillowcase.
It was heavy—much heavier than something that size had any right to be. The wax paper had turned brown and translucent with age, smelling faintly of old lard, cedar shavings, and salt. The twine knot was tied tight and precise, the kind of knot farm folk used to secure grain sacks against winter rats.
I sat down heavily on the creaking wooden kitchen stool, the old linoleum cold beneath my socks. Upstairs, the floorboards groaned beneath my husband David's pacing. He was arguing softly on the phone with his older sister, Clara, about burial costs and whether they should sell off Fiona’s small, overgrown plot of land near the county line.
"I don't care what Mabel thinks, David," Clara’s distant voice drifted down through the floor vents. "We need to clear the estate quickly before the back taxes pile up."
I ignored the murmur of their greed and turned my attention back to the kitchen table.
My hands trembled as I picked up a pair of kitchen shears. I snipped the twine. The old string snapped with a sharp dry click. I carefully peeled back layer after layer of the stiff wax paper.
Inside were three distinct items.
The first was a heavy velvet pouch, stained black around the drawstrings from decades of oil and grease. The second was a thick ledger notebook with a blue cloth cover, its edges worn down to the grey pasteboard underneath. The third was a folded document sealed with a dried dab of dark red wax.
I opened the ledger first.
The pages were filled with Fiona’s neat, slanted handwriting—a style taught in one-room rural schools back in the 1940s. Page after page was a meticulous record of every penny spent and saved since her husband died thirty-eight years ago.
1988: Sold the northern five acres to Miller. $4,200. Paid off tractor loan. Saved $300.
1992: Clara’s college tuition installment. $1,800. Julian’s bail money. $600. Remaining: $120.
1998: David’s truck repair. $850.
Page after page showed a mother bleeding herself dry for children who never looked back. But as the ledger approached the year I married into the family, the entries changed.
2012: Mabel moved in. She made me chamomile tea without asking. She washed my apron.
2015: My legs are giving out. The boys don't call. Mabel spent her own grocery money to buy my blood pressure medicine.
2018: Mabel cried by the sink today. She thinks I am sleeping. I am a burden to her youth, yet she rubbed my knees with camphor until three in the morning.
A lump formed in my throat, thick and painful, making it impossible to breathe. I turned to the back of the ledger. The last entry was dated just three weeks ago, written in a shaky, spider-web hand that barely pressed into the paper.
May you like
I have gathered what was taken. I have kept what was earned. Not one penny of my youth went to waste, though my children think I died a beggar. Everything inside the pouch belongs to the woman who washed my feet.
I reached for the velvet pouch.
