You still clean, but now you also stop at the pharmacy if she needs a refill and her knees are too swollen to manage the bus. You pick up groceries when the weather turns sharp. Once, in late January, she calls you from a number you do not recognize because she has made it halfway to the corner and suddenly feels dizzy. You leave campus, find her sitting on a milk crate near the alley entrance with one gloved hand pressed to her chest, and take her to urgent care in a rideshare you cannot really afford.
At the clinic, while you wait under fluorescent lights that make everyone look already half-gone, she says, “You should be in class.”
You shrug. “I’ll catch up.”
“People say that before they don’t.”
You do not answer because you are too tired to lie and too respectful to be rude.
After a while, she says, “You remind me of my youngest.”
That gets your attention. Until then, her past has mostly remained behind glass, visible but not available. There are photos, yes, and one Christmas card on the mantel signed Love, Thomas and Gail, but she never volunteers stories, and you never pry.
“What was he like?” you ask.
Mrs. Mercer stares at the TV bolted high in the corner, though it is muted and showing only weather maps. “Bright,” she says. “Softhearted in a world that punishes that.”
She does not say his name.
The months keep moving. Winter in the Midwest becomes the kind of gray that seems to have soaked into the bones of the town. Your grades dip a little, then recover. You juggle exams and shifts and Mrs. Mercer’s house as if they are all separate lives being lived by the same overdrawn body. She still does not pay you. Sometimes she says she will “settle it soon.” Sometimes she says nothing at all.
Any sensible version of you should have quit.
