I bought her medicine if I noticed she couldn’t afford it.

Sometimes, after finishing the cleaning, I would sit with her for a while and listen to stories about her youth, about a husband who had already passed away, and about some children who, according to her, “had their own lives.”

She never spoke badly of them.

That impressed me.

She would only say,

“A mother never stops being a mother, even when her children forget how to be children.”

One day I found, in a half-closed drawer, several old letters returned by the mail.

All addressed to the same place in Monterrey.

All with the same last name.

None opened.

I said nothing.

Neither did she.

But that night, for the first time, when I was leaving, she asked,

“Could you come back tomorrow?”