Thrifting Wednesdays

Growing up, it was their thing to go thrifting on Wednesdays. It had to be Wednesdays, though, it couldn’t be any other day; Mom worked insanely hard, and his school was very rigorous. But Wednesday was half-day off, and Mom had decided for that day to be their day. She’d reschedule meetings, cancel events, change plans, all so that they could hang out together on Wednesdays. Thrifting was by far their favorite thing, and Mom had even come up with a game to make it fun. Each of them had to find something special; it could be a piece of clothing, a book, an artifact. Then, they would sit down at a diner close by and share a story they’d made up for it. It could be the shirt that a high school teacher had worn on her first date with her now ex-husband, or the vase that a gardener’s grandmother had given him, which he decided to throw away after he found out she’d been the reason his mom had left.

Their stories grew weirder and more complex, as life itself did, but even after he left for college, he’d spend his Wednesday afternoons at the thrift shop, buying stuff. Then they’d meet with Mom, usually via FaceTime over dinner, and talk about what they’d found. Occasionally, she’d surprise him by popping up at his dorm, then, once he graduated, at his workplace. He’d do as she had back in the day, cancel meetings, move plans around, say no to friends just to be with Mom, and he didn’t mind. Thrifting Wednesdays, as they had come to call it, was their thing, their best thing, and then, when mom got diagnosed with stage four cancer, their only thing. It was those Wednesdays afternoon that kept them going when he moved back to San Marcos to be with Mom, and she would fight with the nurses and doctors every single Wednesday so that they’d let her leave the hospital just for a couple of hours, saying there was something she needed to tend to.

And the last story Mom came up with, was by far the most beautiful. It was about a little girl who had been too afraid to love. Nobody ever understood why. She had grown up in a big house, with wonderful parents who loved her. Maybe that was the problem. She was afraid her own love story would fall short of the one she’d grown up in. Once she grew up, however, she fell in love with a young man from a different country, and they lived a short but passionate affair. Even though she asked him to stay, get married, and build a life together, he felt that it was his duty to go back to his country to be close to his family, get married to a woman of his mother’s choosing, and have children, like it was expected of him, even if it wasn’t what made him happy. Before he left, though, he’d given her a necklace, but soon enough the woman would find out he’d left her with far more to remember him by. Pregnancy wasn’t what the woman expected, but she told herself that maybe that was the only way she’d remain bound to her lover forever. The woman kept the necklace for a while, but when the child was born and without asking, her mother decided to give it away. She felt it was meaningless for her daughter to keep something that reminded her of the man who had tossed her aside just like that.

“You don’t remember that story, do you?” Mom told him that time at the diner, looking paler than usual. When he shook his head, she smiled weakly; they both knew this would be the last time.

“It was the first time we went thrifting,” she said, and she took a necklace out of her pocket and put it next to the one she’d gotten that day. “I found the necklace. I told you the story, and then you started crying, and said it was too sad. So I told you I’d made it up, and that’s how our little game started.”

He didn’t know that, he couldn’t remember. Or maybe he did, but he had buried it somewhere in the depth of his brain because it was safer that way.

“When you go through my things.” Mom continued, “You’re going to find a manila envelope with all the information I could gather on your dad. His name, what he does for a living, where he lives,” she swallowed hard, “the name of his wife and children. They are your family, too, if you ever want to find them.”

But he didn’t want to, and after Mom died he just put the manila envelope away with her other things, in the pile of things to keep, though, even when there was nothing he wanted to do more than to trash it. The only thing was that, once he threw it away, there’d be no coming back, and whoever his father was would remain a mystery forever. He decided to keep it, at least while he built the courage to either open it or just get rid of it for good. The remaining things, he loaded them in his car and took them to the first thrift shop ever where they’d been with Mom, the one where everything started.

After he was done, he thought it made sense for him to go around the shop. It was Wednesday after all, and Mom would’ve wanted nothing more. So he went up and down the aisles looking at different artifacts, clothes, even games, and it was in the jewelry section that he saw her, blue jean shorts, black t-shirt, a rose tattoo on her right inner arm, taking a look at a pair of long silver hoops with colorful beads.

“She was wearing those when the football team captain asked her to prom.”

He knew he’d probably startle her, but it was a risk worth taking. Instead, she stayed right where she was and without missing a beat, started, “and she said yes, but she’d actually worn these earrings because her best friend liked them, and she wanted him to ask her to prom.”

“They were special, those earrings,” he continued, “because he’d won them for her when they went to the fair together, that day they’d ditched school to go to San Antonio.”

“In his dad’s beat-up car,” she said, her eyes still on the hoops. “The one that he had given him for his birthday.”

“They had a great day, though.”

“Yes, they did.” She turned at him and smiled, “And before they even made it back home that day, they already knew they were in love.”