Two Mothers

 The last bus home from school left around ten at night, as I remember it.

The commute felt like wasted time, so I moved into the high school dormitory. Fifty-some students to a class, seven classes in all. Most of my friends were, I suppose you could say, obsessed with studying.

The school kept a few rooms for the handful of us who had come up from the countryside. They were small enough that calling them a "dormitory" felt like a stretch. There must have been a cafeteria, but spending money did not come easily to me. My mother gave me money for meals once a week, and I knew what it had cost her to earn it.

There was a friend who brought me lunch.

Evening study hall ended around nine, I think, though quite a few stayed in the classroom past midnight. I could not afford a cram school, and there was no way for me to catch up to friends who were already ahead.

A lunch box, and then a dinner box.

That is how my friend — or rather, my friend's mother — gave me a love I could never repay. Every morning now, when my wife and I get the children's breakfast ready and pack their lunches, I think of her.

And the meal money, with all my mother's hard labor folded into it, I saved for three years. It became my college tuition.

Both mothers are in heaven now.

If the two of them met, what would they say to each other?

I miss them.