My son was six the first time he told me he had seen my mother.
It happened on Halloween.
He had gone out to trick-or-treat with a few children from our street, but halfway through the evening, I noticed him standing near the end of the block, talking to an elderly woman I'd never seen before.
I wasn't worried. She was standing in front of her house, and my son seemed perfectly comfortable.
A few minutes later, he came running back with his candy bucket nearly full.
When we got home, he dumped everything onto the kitchen table and started sorting the candy into little piles.
I was putting away his costume when I remembered the woman.
"Who were you talking to?"
He didn't even look up.
"Grandma."
I laughed.
"Which grandma?"
He finally looked at me.
"My grandma."
Something about the way he said it made me stop smiling.
Both of his grandmothers were gone.
My mother had died six years before he was born. He had never heard her voice, never held her hand, never sat on her lap. He knew her only through the stories I told him and the photographs around our house.
"That wasn't Grandma," I said gently.
He frowned.
"Yes, it was."
"How do you know?"
"Because she told me."
Then he reached into the pocket of his costume and pulled out a small button.
He placed it in my palm.
"She said you wouldn't believe me."
I stared at the button.
It was old. The metal had been rubbed smooth in places, and there was a tiny scratch across the center.
"Where did you get this?"
"She gave it to me."
I didn't answer.
Instead, I walked into the living room.
There was a photograph of my mother sitting on the mantel. It had been taken on Halloween when I was a child. She was standing outside our old house, wearing her favorite green wool coat and holding a bowl of candy.
She wore that coat every Halloween for years.
I had told my son the story so many times that he knew it almost by heart.
"Grandma always wore that green coat," I used to tell him.
He had seen the photograph countless times.
I looked back at him.
"Was she wearing a green coat?"
He nodded.
"Yes."
My stomach tightened.
"What did she say to you?"
He shrugged.
"She said she was Grandma."
That was all he could remember.
The next morning, I asked him to show me where he'd met her.
We walked back down the street together.
When we reached the house, the same woman was outside.
My son immediately pointed at her.
"That's her."
The woman smiled.
"You came back."
I introduced myself and explained why we were there.
When I mentioned the button, she immediately understood.
"Oh, that."
She touched the sleeve of her coat.
"I gave that to him."
Then she explained what had happened.
My son had walked up to her and said, "You're dressed like my grandma."
She had laughed and played along.
"Well, I suppose I'm your grandma tonight," she'd told him.
Apparently, he had loved that answer.
They talked for several minutes.
Before he left, he kept staring at her coat.
She noticed that one of the buttons was loose. She had already planned to replace it, so she cut it off and gave it to him.
"I told him he could give it to his mother," she said. "He seemed very attached to the coat."
I thanked her.
Then I asked where she had bought it.
"At a thrift store," she said. "Years ago."
She had no idea who had owned it before her.
I didn't mention the photograph.
Not at first.
But then I pulled out my phone and showed it to her.
She looked at my mother's picture.
Then she looked at her own coat.
"Oh my," she said softly.
The two coats weren't identical.
But they were close enough that, from a distance, I could understand why my son had made the connection.
Then I looked at the button in my hand.
It was almost exactly the same as the buttons on my mother's coat.
For a moment, none of us said anything.
The woman finally smiled.
"Well," she said, "I guess he wasn't completely wrong."
I laughed, although I wasn't sure why.
On the walk home, my son held my hand.
After a few minutes, he looked up at me.
"See?"
"See what?"
"I told you Grandma comes every Halloween."
I looked down at him.
He wasn't trying to convince me anymore.
He was simply stating a fact.
To him, there was nothing strange about it.
He had seen a woman wearing the same kind of coat as the grandmother in his picture. She had called herself Grandma. She had given him a button.
That was enough.
I never found out where that coat had come from.
Maybe it was nothing more than an old secondhand coat and a coincidence that happened to be almost impossible to ignore.
Maybe that's all it was.
But I kept the button.
It's in the same drawer where I keep the few things I still have from my mother.
My son is older now, and he doesn't remember much about that Halloween.
But every year, when the weather gets cold and the Halloween decorations start appearing in the neighborhood, he asks me the same question.
"Do you remember the year Grandma came?"
And I always smile.
"Yes," I tell him.
"I remember."