The counselor at Roosevelt Elementary was named Mrs. Alvarez, and she cried openly on the phone when I told her my mother had died in June. She asked if I would come to the school. I said I had a house full of backpacks and no idea what to do with them. She said, very gently, “Please bring them. The first day is Monday. We have two hundred and six children who start with nothing.” I put down the phone and sat on the floor of the closet of my mother for a long time.
My mother, Ruth, was a retired school cafeteria worker. She lived on a pension of nine hundred dollars a month in a small house in Greeley, Colorado, and she never once complained about money. She clipped coupons, mended her own sweaters, and refused to buy anything new. I had spent years worrying that she was going without. Now I understood where her money had gone. Not into her own pockets. Into sixty backpacks every August, each one packed by hand, each one waiting in a quiet closet until school began.
I found her records in a shoebox under the bed. Receipts from Walmart, in her careful pencil. Notebooks at forty cents each, bought on sale in July. Lunch boxes from the thrift store, scrubbed and sanitized. Little toys wrapped in tissue paper, a top, a pack of cards, a bag of marbles. In the box was a ledger with the heading Magic Backpack Day. She had started it in 2004, the year her own husband died. Down the margin, in small letters, she had written the name of every child she knew had received one.
The ledger also held a letter. It was addressed to me, in the shaky hand of her last years, and it said, Janet, if you are reading this, you found the closet. I never told you because you would have worried about the money. I did not need it. A child needs a pencil more than an old woman needs a new coat. Please do not stop. It does not have to be sixty. It only has to be one. All my love, Mother. I read it three times, and then I called the school.
One pencil in a small hand, one notebook on the first day of school, can tell a child that somebody out there was thinking of them.
We drove to the school that Saturday, my husband and I, with the car stuffed to the roof. Mrs. Alvarez met us at the side door in a yellow cardigan. She helped us carry in all sixty backpacks and stack them in the supply room. She said that each August she had found a stack outside the office door, and she had never learned who left them. The staff had a theory that it was an angel. “We call it magic,” she said, “because it is.” She touched my arm. “Your mother was a quiet kind of angel.”
Monday morning I stood in the hallway of Roosevelt Elementary and watched the children come in. Mrs. Alvarez had asked me to come. She stood beside me, quietly marking names from a list. The children who needed a backpack were taken, one by one, to the supply room, where a teacher handed each a bag and said, “This one is for you.” I watched a small boy in a faded shirt hold his backpack against his chest like a treasure. He unzipped it, looked inside, and let out a little gasp when he found the top.
A girl of about nine came out with a pink bag and held it up to me. “Is it really mine?” she asked. “All of it?” I said it was. She looked at the notebook, the pencils, the neat little lunch box. She said, “Who gave it to me?” I knelt on the hallway floor in my good slacks and told her it was from a lady named Ruth, who loved children very much. She asked if she could write a thank you. I said she certainly could, and I would make sure it got to her.
I took the letters home. There were fifty eight of them by Friday, written in pencil on lined paper, with drawings of rainbows and houses. Dear Miss Ruth, thank you for the backpack. I love the marbles. Dear Miss Ruth, my mom cried when she saw the lunch box. Dear Miss Ruth, I am going to be a nurse. I carried them out to the cemetery on Saturday, all fifty eight, and I read every one aloud at her grave. The wind turned the pages for me.
I did not stop. I could not. I emptied a small account I had put aside for a vacation, and I bought supplies in July with the same coupons my mother used. My husband helped me pack. Our daughter came from Denver for a weekend and brought a friend. The ladies at my church heard about it and filled forty backpacks in one afternoon. By August we had two hundred and six, one for every child who needed it, with a name card in each one in careful ink.
This year, on the first day of school, I stood in the hallway again. Mrs. Alvarez had arranged a little ceremony in the gym. The children sat on the floor in rows while the principal told the story of the lady who had left backpacks at the door for twenty years. Then she asked all two hundred of them to say thank you at once. The noise lifted the dust off the rafters. I stood at the back with a handkerchief over my mouth, and I felt my mother standing next to me.
The shelves in her closet are bare now. I keep a single bag there, the very last she packed, with a tag in her handwriting that says, For the one who needs it most. I have not opened it. I do not know who it is for. But every August I take it out and hold it, and I wait. Last year a boy came to the school late, in October, with no coat. I gave it to him. I think she would have wanted that.