When Liz got home she noticed straight away that her bed had not been slept in. There was no sign that Maureen had used her house at all. She rang her mother and arranged to visit the next day. Her elderly mother was only too happy to have a visitor.
Knowing that she could not use the medallion again that evening Liz went to bed early after watching a movie.
………
Maureen inspected the boxes in the shed further after Liz had left. She unpacked them and tried to remember which clothes belonged to whom. One box was full of maternity wear. It was obvious who they belonged to and why those clothes had not been worn since. Maureen remembered some comment in rules that had come with the medallion about pregnancy. She resolved to re-read those rules.
There was a box of children’s clothes. Kirsty’s were easy to identify being Maureen’s only daughter. They were all clothes Kirsty would have worn prior to going to school. Mostly pretty dresses that Maureen must have found too hard to throw out. Maureen wondered what it would feel like to be 5 years old once more.
In the bottom of the same box were some toddler boy clothes. They would have belonged to Simon or Andrew. It was hard to know which. Probably all had been worn by both at some stage. The boys were now 22 and 20 and were both at college on the other side of the country.
There was another box which contained a mixture of her own and Roger’s clothes. This was the box Maureen was most interested in. They were ‘good clothes’. Clothes she and Roger must have worn when they occasionally got a baby sitter in to look after the kids while they went out. It was actually a sad reflection of their life that these clothes had been packed away and never retrieved.
Maureen remembered some of the dresses she found there. One was the red dress she had warn to a school dinner dance. She tried to remember when that would have been. It was at the Kirsty’s original school, which Andrew never attended. She looked at the label ‘Size 12’ Now that was very promising. It must have been from after Andrew was born as at one stage she had 3 pre-schoolers at home. So she was definitely no longer pregnant!
She started figuring out dates. Kirsty was 23 now. She would have started at that school when she was 5. 18 years ago. That put an upper limit on the age of the dress. She figured it had not been worn since they moved to this house 15 years ago. So this dress would have last been worn somewhere between 15 and 18 years ago. Maureen would have been between 32 and 35 right in Liz’s perfect age bracket! She guessed it might have been closer to 18 years ago as she put on a lot of her weight over that period.
Maureen repacked the box and carried it into the spare bedroom.