“Hi, Mom, I’m home.”

She calls back from her office upstairs, which is more like a big closet. “Hi, sweetheart. I’ve got a Skype meeting in about ten minutes—get yourself a snack, okay?”

“Okay.”

I go to the kitchen, but food is the last thing on my mind. I open the door to the laundry room, then dig around inside the broom closet until I find the sewing box that Ben and I gave Mom for Mother’s Day four years ago.

Mom doesn’t sew for fun or as a hobby or anything like that. But she does have some basic sewing stuff. She used to keep it all in a couple of plastic containers from a Chinese restaurant—until we got her this deluxe, denim-covered sewing box. It still looks brand-new.

I open the lid and lift out a plastic tray loaded with spools of thread. And then, under a large pincushion and three packets of needles, beneath a package of iron-on patches and some loops of flat elastic, way down on the very bottom of the sewing box, I find what I’m looking for: loose buttons.

Ben comes into the kitchen about fifteen minutes later. “Um…what’s going on here?”

“I’m recording family history.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure that you’re taking pictures of buttons.”

I straighten up and wave my hand over the table. “See this? Mom and Dad have been married for nineteen and a half years, and these are the family’s unattached buttons—the Hamlin Family Button Collection. There are one hundred and thirty-four of them. That works out to about seven buttons for each year they’ve been married.”

I pause to let the information sink in.

“Okay, I’m with you.”

“Of course, I really wish I knew the order the buttons had been saved in, so I could make an exact timeline from the very first button, right up to the most recent one. But I don’t know that—and wishing is not scientific. And I also don’t know which buttons came from whose clothes, except for a few. See these five pewter buttons with the rose design? They used to be on that red-and-white handmade sweater Mom has, but then one got lost. So she snipped off these five and tossed them in with the sewing junk, then sewed six new matching buttons back onto her sweater. I could probably figure out what year that happened….”

I turn to Ben. “Do you think Mom and Dad started finding more stray buttons once they had you and me?”

“Makes sense—more people, more clothes, more buttons.”

He picks up a large silver button with a harp design stamped onto the metal.

“This one is mine, for sure. I lost a button off my middle school band uniform. Mr. Clift made me buy a new one, and Mom taught me how to sew it on myself. Then about a year later she found a button under the cushions of the family room couch. And here it is.”

That gets me thinking. “You know, every single button here has some kind of a story.”

Ben squints at me. “Well, yeah…but I bet a lot of these were just extra buttons that came with a pair of pants or a sweater or something. Not much of a story.”

I’m not giving up. “But every button’s story started way before any of them got to our house, onto our clothes. Because all these buttons had to get designed by somebody, and then each one got made somewhere, right? And then each one got moved around by people and then sewn onto something, or dropped one by one into tiny plastic bags and stuck inside the back pocket of some new pants—right?”

“Yeah,” Ben says, “except stuff like that happens to everything—like this chair, or my shoes, or that lightbulb. Every single thing in the whole world has a story of how it got made and how it got to be somewhere. And a button is just one other thing.”

“Okay,” I say, “but tell me this: If you stop using a lightbulb, do you put it in a box in the broom closet and leave it there for nineteen and a half years?”

“No….”

“So there is something different about buttons, right?”

“Yes, because when you stop using a lightbulb, it’s probably because it doesn’t work anymore, so why keep it? But a button can always do what it was made to do, unless it gets crushed or broken in half or something. Which doesn’t happen much. Put an old shirt button onto a different shirt, and it’ll still work.”

“Exactly!” Then I pause a second to get the next bit right. “And that’s why people hang on to buttons, even if there’s no way they’ll ever use them again. They don’t keep them to use them; they keep them because they might!”

It feels like I’ve just solved a mystery.

Ben nods, stroking his chin as if he had a beard. “And I guess figuring out all this proves once more that we are a couple of total geniuses!”

I laugh and then say, “Except I’m the one who has twenty-seven boxes full of buttons in my bedroom, and you don’t. Which probably makes me a little bit more of a total genius than you are.”

“Interesting theory,” he says. “But having twenty-seven boxes of buttons in your bedroom probably just means that you’re a crackpot!”

“Hmm…you could be right.” Then I remember something. “Oh! Could you do me a favor? Please don’t tell anybody that I’ve got all those buttons, okay?”

“How come?” he asks, but then quickly whispers, “Ohhh, right—the crackpot thing. Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. And, like, if you want to tiptoe upstairs and live in Mom and Dad’s attic for the rest of your life? I’m cool with that, too.”

I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.

Then I turn back to the kitchen table and use my phone to take some more pictures.

Of buttons.