The rain was doing that thing to the streetlights where it blurs them into long yellow smears. Jeremy sat behind the wheel of his delivery van with the engine off, counting what he had against what he owed, the way he did most nights on this curb outside his mother’s apartment building.
The numbers never came out right.
He grabbed the grocery bag and the small paper sack from the pharmacy and climbed the three flights.
His mother opened the door before he knocked, the way she always did.
“You shouldn’t be out this late, dear.”
“Ma, I’m fine. Brought your blood pressure medication and that soup you like.”
She held his face in both her hands. Her palms were warm the way they had been his whole life, the way warmth gets associated with a specific person so completely that you feel it as something separate from temperature.
“You look tired, Jeremy.”
“I’m okay, Ma.”
He wasn’t.
He went home that night and tried to figure out the next month the same way he’d figured out the last six, and came up with the same absence where a solution was supposed to be.