The Book No One Knew She Was Writing

Surprises on a thumb drive.

It had been a long, but entertaining day. A visit to a gallery, tea, lunch, an escape room group activity. At each point, she was handed birthday gifts to open. Timed out to fit the activity. The four of them returned to the apartment she shares with her fiancé, and though the day had been joyful, she felt something lingering in the air.

Her brother and his boyfriend had handed her a large, heavy box, and she carefully opened it. An entire collection of graphic novels for a story that was right up her alley. But she noticed another gift bag, sitting next to her brother on the couch, where her brother's hand had remained gripped since they sat down.

"There's more." He said. He handed her a rectangular object wrapped in tissue with her name written on the paper. Just her name. Samantha. Before she could ask who it was from, her brother piped up, a different tone to his voice, almost a dismissal. "It's from Melissa. You can probably guess what it is."

She scoffed as she tore the tissue apart, not caring to save the tissue for later use, like she did with any gift she received. "Of course..." she thought to herself. Another family picture being doled out as Christmas gifts. A Christmas gift that arrived six months after the fact. Not shipped to her, but given to her brother, who then delivered it. Despite the fact that she lived minutes from her family, and it would have cost them a dollars worth of gas and twenty minutes to deliver it to her themselves.

She glanced at the picture. It was a photo of her with her two brothers and three cousins. The OG grandkids. She felt a deep sadness washing over her. She said flippantly, "None of this means anything anymore, and you know it."

I think it caught them all off guard. "When I needed them, they slammed the door in my face. As far as I am concerned, they will never see me again." Her brother's frown said it all. His boyfriend lowered his head and nodded.

He reached his hand into the bag, and produced a small box. Inside was a Batman thumb drive. "What's this?" she asked.

"Mom was writing a book." he said. She knew her mother was a poet, a thinker, an idea machine. But she hadn't known that at some point her mother had dedicated time to writing an actual book. A book.

"Don't read it now. Wait until I leave. I found it, but cannot bring myself to look at it." he said. So she waited until he left about an hour later.

She popped the thumb drive into her laptop and downloaded the files onto a secure folder, just to be safe. Then she started opening the files one at a time. There were fourteen chapters. She started with chapter one.

Her mother had a bad habit of typing in all lowercase, so the words on her screen frustrated her at first. "Really, mom?" she thought. But then, she chalked it up to mom just being mom.

It was a story about a nurse named Katie. She got through two paragraphs before the next character in the story was revealed. Katie's best friend was a woman named Debi. It had to be a way for her mom to honor her own daughter's best friend, also named Debi.

Samantha sat staring at the sentence for a few minutes, feeling her mother there with her. Tears welling up in her eyes, losing focus on every word but the name, Debi. She closed the laptop and decided to leave reading any further for another day.