I found my son’s first pay slip folded inside my mother’s Bible

Dear Delyara, My mother died eight months ago. I have been clearing her house slowly because every drawer seems to contain a version of my family I was not invited to know. Today, inside her Bible, I found my son’s first pay slip from the supermarket where he worked at sixteen. He died five years later in a motorcycle crash. I had forgotten the pay slip existed. His wages were £183.42. At the bottom he had written, in huge teenage handwriting, “NAN — I AM RICH.” My mother had underlined it in red and tucked it beside a psalm. That was exactly like the two of them. He teased her about religion; she prayed for him anyway. I sat on her bedroom floor holding a piece of paper that had once made both of them laugh. Their handwriting was on the same page, one shouting about money, the other quietly marking scripture beneath it. I have lost my son and my mother, and somehow this cheap payroll paper brought them back together more vividly than the expensive photographs framed downstairs. Tonight, I put it inside my wallet. I earn more in a day than my son earned on that first slip. I would give every number in my bank account to hear him walk into a room and announce, once more, that he was rich.