Mabel hadn’t been expecting an Amazon package, but one was leaning against her apartment door.
She’d been on her way to the grocery store. It was Tuesday morning, and her shift at the diner started at 4 on Tuesdays. Tuesday and Thursday, just the dinner rush. Mondays off, thank goodness, because the other four days she worked ten to nine, long days on her feet.
Which meant Mondays were for resting. Catching up with the housework. No shopping, though.
Now that Daniel was old enough, at least he could help out with that stuff when he wasn’t at school. Which, of course, he usually was on Mondays. He was usually out before Mabel had even woken up.
When Daniel had first been diagnosed, age six, Mabel had worried about how things would turn out. She’d been trained by society to hear “Autism Spectrum Disorder” as a curse. Would he ever hold down a job, would he ever be able to have normal relationships? Or would he require lifelong care, and with his father out of the picture and Mabel not having many career prospects, the future looked bleak.
At least at that point, she had had health insurance, having been a secretary at the corporate sales office of Winker and McGee, the Midwest’s largest manufacturer of supply chain extrusion equipment. Or something like that. Mabel had honestly never really been clear. She just typed letters and answered phone calls.
So: Bad news, Winker and McGee had closed down when Daniel was ten. Good news, Daniel’s Autism didn’t need the level of supports that Mabel had been trained to believe where necessary. He managed fairly well at school, despite the school’s best efforts to undermine him. He was the same sort of “weird kid” his mother had been in her day, but unlike her, he had a few friends, mostly other “weird kids”.
Now that he was in high school, he could normally manage to pack his lunch on his own, to get to the bus on his own, and to get home on his own. He was even on the school’s junior varsity baseball team, even though he spent a lot of time on the bench. Summers, he worked at the Ice Cream Castle.
Lou, the manager of the diner, was also understanding. He didn’t really know the details, he just knew that Mabel’s kid was disabled and that she sometimes needed to leave work to take care of emergencies. The diner’s glory days were in the past anyway, along with the rest of the town, and there were two other servers.
But she didn’t have a lot of money beyond the basics, so a package from Amazon generally meant a gift from her sister.
Mabel brought the package back into the living room and sat down on the couch to open it. Sure enough, there was a gift card note inside: Mabel: It’s April, so I thought you’d love this! Colleen.
She saw the blue of the shirt and winced. She didn’t like where this was going, but Colleen really did mean well.
She unfolded the t-shirt, which had a big heart filled with puzzle pieces and the text “Autism Mom! I speak because my son can’t!”
“Daniel can speak just fine,” Mabel said, rolling her eyes as she pushed the shirt back into the envelope. As she did so, she noticed that it was two sizes too large.
Colleen really did mean well, she tried to remind herself, but the second time felt less convincing.