Chimetime Fans

My sister had always been good at asking for a small favor in a way that hid the much larger one underneath, but even I didn’t expect to find that out while waiting for a flight with her dogs.

By the time the little white dog climbed onto my shoulders in the airport waiting area, I had already missed three calls from my nephew. I was trying to untangle her leash from the handle of a pink shopping bag while keeping her brother, a brown dog named Fig, from eating a cracker off the floor.

My sister had described the trip as “getting the dogs to Adrian.” Sitting there with both of them and a delayed flight on the screen, I realized she had never told me whether Adrian knew we were coming.

Poppy settled across the back of my neck as if I were a piece of furniture. Fig sat on the seat beside me, watching people roll suitcases past our gate.

I called Adrian back.

“Hey, Aunt Nell,” he said. “Where are you?”

“At the airport. Your mother said she sent you the flight information.”

There was a pause. I could hear traffic on his end.

“She sent me something,” he said. “I thought it was for next month.”...My sister was frightened, but she still should have told us the truth. Say “CORA” and I’ll send you the full story in the comments.

My mother had agreed to move closer to me after her second fall, but when I arrived to help her pack, her living room was full of boxes marked with names I had never heard.

“Don’t put that one in the truck,” my mother said.

I was standing in her living room with a box against my hip. It was heavy enough that the tape on the bottom had started to pull loose.

She pointed to the wall behind me.

There were already six boxes along that wall. On the other side of the room, near the front door, sat the seven boxes we were taking. My mother had made the distinction clear when I arrived that morning, though she hadn’t explained it.

My brother, Grant, came in from the hallway carrying an empty plastic bin. “Are we loading or redecorating?”

“Loading,” I said.

“Good. Because the truck’s been here an hour.”

Mom was sitting on the couch in her old blue sweatshirt, watching us. She was moving into an apartment ten minutes from my house, with no stairs and a bathroom she could get into without turning sideways. After she fell twice in one winter, she had finally agreed it was time.

I knew leaving her place would be hard. She had lived there for twenty-three years. I’d expected her to argue over the furniture, maybe insist on keeping the chipped dining table. I hadn’t expected her to pack boxes she wouldn’t let us touch.

Grant picked up the one I’d just set down. “What’s in this?”

“Put it back,” Mom said.

He looked at me. I looked at her.

“Mom,” I said, “we have to be out by Monday. If these aren’t coming with you, we need to know what to do with them.”...Would you have opened the box after your mother told you to leave it alone? Say “MARLENE” and I’ll send you the full story in the comments.

At seventy-eight, my father could still remember the score of every high school football game he’d coached, but that afternoon he pretended not to know my name.

My Father Asked for His Daughter at the Hospital. He Wasn’t Talking About Me

My father had been in the emergency room for six hours when he told the nurse he had another daughter.

I was standing beside his bed with his coat over my arm, waiting for someone to bring the discharge papers. Dad had slipped on the back steps while carrying a bag of birdseed. He’d hit his head hard enough to frighten us both, but the scans were clear. He had a bruised hip, a headache, and a lecture coming from me about climbing icy steps in slippers.

He’d barely spoken since we arrived. Whenever I asked if he needed anything, he said he was fine, then put his hand against the side of his head and stared at the dark red wall across from the bed. I thought he was tired. I was tired too. His heart monitor kept making a small, regular beep, and every time someone opened the door, I expected them to say we could go home.

Then the nurse came in with a clipboard and asked who would be staying with him that night.

“Mallory,” Dad said.

The nurse glanced at me. “Is that you?”

“My name’s June,” I said.

Dad turned his face toward the wall. “Mallory lives closer.”

For a moment I thought he had mixed me up with somebody from church. Dad had coached basketball and helped with the county fair for years; half the town had been through our kitchen. But he reached into the pocket of his blue flannel shirt, pulled out a folded paper napkin, and held it toward me.

There was a phone number on it. Underneath, in Dad’s careful handwriting, were three words: My daughter Mallory....

I was halfway through a night shift when someone put a key on the counter and told me my mother had wanted me to have it.

At 2:17 in the morning, a woman walked into our emergency room carrying my mother’s old blue recipe box. I recognized the chipped corner before I saw her face. My mother had dropped that box on our kitchen floor when I was twelve, sending index cards and flour dust everywhere. We had laughed so hard that neither of us cleaned it up until my father came home. Mom had been dead for eleven years, and I had last seen the box on the top shelf of her pantry the day we cleared out her house. I thought my brother had taken it.

The woman set it on the counter in front of me. She was about sixty, with rainwater on the shoulders of her brown coat and a paper hospital wristband hanging loose around one wrist. Behind her, two nurses were helping a man into a wheelchair. A doctor was speaking quietly to the ambulance crew. Our waiting room was full, the phones were ringing, and I was supposed to be entering a patient’s medications into the computer. Instead, I put my hand on the box to make sure it was real.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

The woman looked past me at the crowded nurses’ station. Then she leaned close enough that I could smell rain and the coffee she must have spilled on her coat.

“Your mother kept her promise,” she said. “I need you to keep yours.”

I had no idea who she was. I told her my name was Claire, and she gave a tired little nod, as if she had known I would say that. Then the overhead lights flickered. Every monitor at the desk went black for half a second before the backup power came on. Somebody down the hall called for a flashlight. The woman reached into the recipe box, pulled out a folded sheet of yellow paper, and slid it toward me....

My mother could barely breathe, but she was more frightened of the closed ambulance doors than of the helicopter waiting for her.

The helicopter was coming for my mother when she grabbed my wrist and told me to check the ambulance for a child.

She was lying on a stretcher in the parking lot behind the Sugar Creek fire station, with an oxygen mask over her face and a blanket tucked around her legs. Two paramedics were getting ready to move her to the helicopter landing in the ball field across the road. The whole place shook with its noise. Dust blew across the pavement, the ambulance lights flashed against the trees, and I had to lean close to hear her.

“There’s a boy,” she said.

I told her I knew. My son, Caleb, was at home with my husband.

She pulled the mask away. “In the ambulance.”

I looked over my shoulder. The red ambulance sat thirty feet away, its rear doors closed. A volunteer firefighter was standing beside it, speaking into a radio. The paramedics had already taken their equipment out. Nobody else was supposed to be inside.

“Mom, you rode in that ambulance,” I said. “They would’ve seen him.”

Her fingers tightened around mine. For the first time since I’d found her on the kitchen floor, she looked fully awake....

My husband didn’t look at me when he brought the little girl into my hospital room, and that scared me more than the surgery had.

The morning after my surgery, my husband walked into my hospital room holding the hand of a little girl I had never seen. He was still wearing the jeans he’d had on the day before.

His hair was flattened on one side, like he’d slept in a chair, and he had a paper grocery bag tucked under his arm.

The girl looked about eight.

She wore a red sweatshirt with a school name across the front and sneakers with one lace dragging behind her. She didn’t look frightened until she saw me in the bed. Then she stopped so suddenly that my husband nearly stepped on her heel.

I reached for the button that raised the bed. My abdomen hurt, and the plastic cuff on my finger kept slipping loose.

“Cal,” I said, “whose child is that?”

He shut the door with his foot. “Her name is June.”

That told me nothing. I looked from him to the girl and back again. My husband and I had been married nineteen years. We lived in a town outside Wichita where people knew whose truck was parked at whose house.

If he had offered to help a neighbor, he would have told me. If something had happened to one of our friends, he wouldn’t have brought their child into my room without calling first.

June took a step behind him. The grocery bag made a faint metal sound when Cal set it on the visitor’s chair.
“I was going to explain,” he said.

“Then explain.”

He pressed his lips together and pulled a dented yellow lunchbox out of the bag. It had a picture of a horse on the lid and a strip of blue tape covering one corner. I hadn’t seen it in twenty-seven years. ...

My mother had been dead for six years when a dentist found her handwriting inside my mouth.

The dentist had my old crown in his hand when he asked whether my mother was still alive.

I was lying in the chair with a paper bib clipped around my neck. My mouth was numb, my shoes were sticking out past the end of the blue seat, and a young assistant named Marcus was holding the little suction tube beside my face. Until that moment, the appointment had been completely ordinary. I had cracked a crown on pecan pie at my sister-in-law’s Sunday dinner, and Dr. Patel was replacing it before it caused me any more trouble.

Then he turned off the drill.

He held the crown closer to the light and asked Marcus for a small metal tray. Neither of them looked at me.

“My mother?” I said. It came out thick because of the numbness. “She died six years ago.”

Dr. Patel set the crown down gently. “I’m sorry. Did she arrange for you to have this tooth repaired when you were younger?”

I nodded. I was nineteen when I got it. Mom drove me to a dentist two towns over because, she said, he charged less. She sat in the waiting room doing a crossword puzzle and bought me a milkshake afterward. I remembered complaining about the appointment all the way home.

Dr. Patel glanced at Marcus, then back at me. “I’d like you to see something.”...

At 10:14 on a Tuesday morning, I learned that my mother and my daughter had been keeping the same secret from me.

The nurse looked at the empty hospital bed, then at me, and asked, “Didn’t your daughter come to take your mother home?”

My daughter, June, was supposed to be in second-period chemistry.

I checked my phone. No missed calls. No text from June. Just a message from her school, sent twenty minutes earlier, saying she had been marked absent.

Mom’s sweater was gone from the chair beside the bed. The paper cup of water I’d left on the nightstand was still there, with the little bend in the straw where she’d chewed it.

“June was here?” I asked.

The nurse nodded. “A little after nine. Your mother was dressed and ready. They left together.”

My mother had spent the night in the hospital after falling in her kitchen. She had bruises and a mild concussion, and the doctor had told me she could go home if somebody stayed with her. I had arranged to leave work early. I hadn’t asked June to miss school, and Mom knew that....

My eight-year-old son refused to look at his father for three days, and I knew exactly why. I also knew the part of the story I hadn’t told him.

The hospital called while I was buying my son a clean pair of pajamas. The nurse said there was a German shepherd on his bed and my son had finally started talking.

I left the pajamas on a shelf in the middle of Walmart and ran to my car.

For three days, my eight-year-old son, Owen, had barely said a word. He would answer the nurses if they asked whether something hurt. He would let them check the burns on his hands. But he wouldn’t talk to me, and he wouldn’t even turn his head when his dad came into the room.

The last thing Owen had said to either of us was in the ambulance.

“Dad left Ranger.”

Ranger was our dog. A big, gentle German shepherd who slept outside Owen’s bedroom door every night.

Our house had caught fire while Owen was asleep. His father, Cal, had carried him out through the back door. I’d been working the closing shift at the grocery store, and by the time I got to our street, the firefighters were still spraying water through what used to be our kitchen window.

Nobody could tell me where Ranger was.

So when Owen asked about him the next morning, I told him Ranger was gone.

I thought a clear answer would be kinder than letting him wait for news that might never come. I had no idea how wrong I was.

When I reached the hospital, Owen’s door was half-open. I could see the foot of the bed, the white blanket, and a long, dark tail hanging over the side....

My dad was injured inside a bowling alley our family had supposedly sold six years earlier.

The nurse asked which of us was Warren Keene’s daughter, and two women raised their hands.

I had never seen the other woman before in my life.

She was standing beside the vending machines in a damp denim jacket, holding a set of keys so tightly they had left marks in her palm. She looked a little older than me. Her hair was coming loose from a braid, and there was a dark smear on her sleeve that I was trying very hard not to look at.

“I’m his daughter,” I told the nurse.

The woman lowered her hand. “Nora should go in first.”

That stopped me. She knew my name.

My dad was sitting on the edge of an ER bed when I entered. There was a bandage around his head and a spot of dried blood near his ear. His hospital gown had fallen open at one shoulder. He looked tired and embarrassed, which was at least familiar. The doctor held up a scan while Dad pressed both hands to his head, as though he could keep everything inside it from moving.

“He’s alert,” the doctor said. “The scan looks reassuring, but we want to watch him for a while. He took a hard fall.”

“Where?” I asked.

Dad looked at the blanket over his knees....