The Button From Grandma

 

My son was six years old when something happened on Halloween that I still can't fully explain.

That night, he went trick-or-treating around our neighborhood while I followed a short distance behind. He was old enough to knock on doors by himself, but I wasn't ready to let him disappear completely into the crowd of children.

About halfway down the street, I watched him stop in front of a house and start talking to an older woman.

I couldn't hear the conversation. From where I was standing, it looked completely ordinary. The woman smiled, my son pointed toward her coat, and they talked for several minutes before he thanked her and continued down the street.

I didn't think about it again until we got home.

While he was emptying his candy onto the kitchen table, I asked, "Who was that woman you were talking to?"

He looked up at me.

"Grandma."

I laughed.

"Which grandma?"

"My grandma."

I stopped laughing.

My mother had died six years before my son was born. He had never met her. He knew what she looked like because of the photographs around our house, especially one that sat in a frame on the living-room mantel.

It was a photograph from Halloween many years ago. My mother was standing outside our old house, holding a bowl of candy and wearing her favorite green wool coat.

I had shown my son that picture countless times.

"That's Grandma," I had told him.

He knew the story behind the coat, too. My mother wore it almost every Halloween.

I used to joke, "Your grandma always dressed up as Grandma. She never needed another costume."

Now my six-year-old was sitting across from me, telling me he had just spoken to her.

"That wasn't Grandma," I said gently. "Grandma isn't here."

He didn't look upset.

Instead, he reached into the pocket of his costume and pulled something out.

"She said you'd say that."

He placed a small button on the table.

"She told me to give you this."

I picked it up.

It was an old coat button, slightly scratched and worn smooth around the edges.

"Where did you get this?"

"From her coat."

I looked toward the photograph on the mantel.

"Was she wearing a green coat?"

He nodded.

"Just like Grandma's."

I asked him to tell me everything that had happened.

He explained that he had noticed the woman's coat and immediately thought of the photograph. He walked up to her and said, "You're dressed like my grandma."

The woman apparently laughed.

She told him, "Well, I guess I'm your grandma tonight."

That was enough for him.

Before he left, the woman noticed that one of the buttons on her sleeve was loose. She had apparently been planning to repair it, but my son liked the coat so much that she decided to cut the loose button off and give it to him.

She told him to give it to his mother.

She had no idea why that little button might mean something to me.

The following morning, my son and I went back to the house.

We found the woman outside.

As soon as my son saw her, he pointed.

"That's her."

The woman smiled.

"You're back."

I introduced myself and explained what my son had told me. When I showed her the button, she immediately recognized it.

"Yes," she said. "That's the one from my sleeve."

I asked her where she had bought the coat.

She told me she'd found it at a secondhand store several years earlier. She had liked the color and bought it because it was warm. She had no idea who had owned it before her.

Then I showed her the photograph of my mother.

She studied it carefully.

"That's incredible," she said.

I looked at the two coats.

They weren't identical. They couldn't have been the same coat. My mother's photograph had been taken years before this woman had ever bought hers.

But they were remarkably similar.

The same deep green color.

Almost the same style.

And the buttons were close enough that I could understand why my son had made the connection.

I thanked her for being kind to him.

She seemed almost embarrassed by the attention.

"He was such a sweet little boy," she said. "He really liked that coat."

On the way home, my son held my hand.

After a few minutes, he looked up at me.

"See? I told you she was Grandma."

I smiled.

"Yeah," I said. "You did."

I never told him that the woman wasn't really his grandmother.

There was no reason to frighten him or take away something that had clearly meant so much to him. As far as he was concerned, he had met Grandma on Halloween, and she had given him a button from her coat.

I kept that button.

It's still in my bedroom, inside the same small box where I keep a few things that belonged to my mother.

Sometimes I take it out and look at it.

I know there is probably a perfectly ordinary explanation for what happened. A child saw a familiar coat, recognized something from a photograph, and a kind stranger played along.

Maybe that's all it was.

But I still find myself wondering about one small detail.

Of all the coats on our street that night, why did my son walk up to the one that looked so much like his grandmother's?

I don't know.

Maybe coincidence really can be that precise.

Or maybe, on one Halloween night, my mother found a way to leave her grandson something small to remember her by.

Either way, I still have the button.

And I still can't bring myself to throw it away.