I barely slept that night.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Gabriel standing beside the black SUV.
The expensive coat.
The clean-shaven face.
The way he had looked at the folded paper before putting it away.
None of it matched the boy I remembered.
I kept returning to the same question.
How had his life changed so completely?
I tried to imagine the years between my childhood and that afternoon.
Had he found work?
Had someone taken him in?
Had he left town and built a life somewhere else?
Those were ordinary explanations.
But they didn't explain why he had returned after my mother's funeral.
They didn't explain why he seemed so nervous.
And they didn't explain the secret he said my mother had begged him to keep.
The next morning, I went through the house.
I had intended to sort a few belongings and prepare for the practical things that followed a death.
Instead, I found myself looking at everything as if it might contain an answer.
I opened drawers.
I checked cupboards.
I looked through the old boxes stacked in the hallway.
Most contained ordinary things.
Receipts.
Photographs.
Instruction manuals for appliances we no longer owned.
A collection of birthday cards tied together with string.
I found a photograph of my father standing in the yard.
I was small enough to sit on his shoulders, and my mother stood beside him with one hand raised to shade her eyes.
We were all smiling.
I sat on the floor with the photograph in my lap.
For a long time, I couldn't move.
I had spent so many years remembering my father through the things he left behind that I had forgotten how young he had been when he died.
He hadn't been an old man.
He had been a husband.
A father.
A person who had expected to grow older with us.
I wondered what he would have thought of Gabriel.
I wondered whether he would have welcomed him.
Then I remembered that my father had died before Gabriel became part of our lives.
There was no way to ask him.
I returned the photograph to its envelope.
Behind it, I found a smaller picture I didn't remember seeing before.
It showed my mother standing near the back fence.
The image was faded, and the edges had curled.
Someone had written a date on the reverse, but the ink had blurred.
I couldn't tell whether the picture had been taken before or after my father died.
I placed it beside the first photograph.
Then I continued searching.
In the kitchen, I found an old tin where my mother had kept important papers.
The lid stuck when I tried to open it.
Inside were insurance documents, household bills, and several envelopes.
I sorted through them carefully.
Some were so old that the paper had turned yellow.
Others were ordinary notices from the years after I had moved away.
Then I found a small receipt.
It was folded in half and tucked between two envelopes.
I unfolded it.
The date was from the period when I was still in elementary school.
I recognized the name of a local pharmacy.
The amount was small.
I didn't know what the purchase had been for, because the printed description had faded.
I put it aside.
Then I found another receipt from a grocery store.
And another.
I had expected my mother's papers to tell me something about her finances.
Instead, they reminded me of the years when every small expense had mattered.
I thought about the apple pie again.
I thought about the way she had carried it outside while I stood in the kitchen crying.
I had always remembered that day as proof that she had chosen Gabriel over me.
Now I wondered whether there had been something else I had missed.
I didn't know what that something might be.
I only knew that the memory no longer felt as simple as it once had.
Later that morning, I called a neighbor who had known my mother for years.
She answered after several rings.
When I told her I was going through the house, she offered to come over and help.
I thanked her, but I didn't ask her to come.
Instead, I asked whether she knew where Gabriel had gone.
There was a pause.
"I haven't seen him in a while," she said.
"Do you know anything about his life?"
"Not really. Your mother never told me much."
I looked toward the back window.
"Did she ever say why she helped him?"
The neighbor sighed.
"Your mother was a private person. She didn't help people so they would talk about it."
I knew that was true.
Still, I felt frustrated.
Everyone seemed to know a little about my mother.
Nobody seemed to know enough to explain her.
Before we ended the call, the neighbor said something that stayed with me.
"Your mother never forgot what it felt like to be alone."
I thanked her and hung up.
I stood in the kitchen, thinking about those words.
My mother had been alone after my father died.
I had been there, but I had been a child.
I couldn't help her with bills.
I couldn't understand the hours she worked.
I couldn't know what it meant to keep a household running while grieving the person who had shared it with her.
Perhaps Gabriel had reminded her of someone who had nowhere to turn.
Perhaps she had recognized a kind of loneliness that other people ignored.
That explanation made sense.
But it still didn't explain the secret.
I went back to the tin of papers.
Near the bottom, I found an envelope with my father's name written on it.
I sat down before opening it.
Inside were several documents I didn't recognize.
There was a letter from an office I vaguely remembered hearing my mother mention when I was young.
There were notes written in her handwriting.
And there was a sheet of paper with a date that made me stop.
It was from the year my father died.
I read the date twice.
Then I checked the other papers.
Some were older.
Some were newer.
They appeared to have been kept together deliberately.
I couldn't make sense of them.
I was about to put everything away when I noticed a line written in the margin of one page.
The handwriting was my mother's.
It said only, "Ask Gabriel if the time ever comes."
I stared at those words.
There was no explanation beneath them.
No name other than his.
No hint about what she meant.
I read the line again.
Then I placed the paper on the table.
My mother had written Gabriel's name beside documents connected to my father's death.
I couldn't tell whether the connection was important.
I couldn't even tell whether the note referred to the papers in front of me.
But she had left it there.
And I could no longer pretend that the secret had begun with the meals she carried outside.
For the first time, I wondered whether Gabriel had known my family long before I knew him.
Click here to continue reading: PART 7: I Asked Gabriel About the Note My Mother Left Behind, and His Answer Forced Me to Admit How Little I Knew About the Man I Blamed
I Was Eight When My Mother Started Feeding a Stranger, and the Apple Pie She Gave Him Changed How I Saw Her Forever
Part 6 of 20
