On to two doors after MiniMaxi. I eye the building. Take my baby out of the stroller, pick up the big bag, and head up to the second floor. Two doors. 2-R has a nameplate: Friedman. 2-L is Greenberg. No Klein. I head back out. Maybe the door that’s connected to MiniMaxi? Another hallway, another flight of stairs. 2-R has a nameplate: Spierer. 2-L has no nameplate. I put the bag near that door, text my sister. I wonder if this is the right door. Call me. She answers 20 minutes after I arrive home. It was the wrong door.

Can Mr. Klein pick up the package? He cannot. We trudge back to pick up the bag. (My son mistakenly leaves his scooter at the not-right house, so we make yet a third[!] trip to retrieve it. Will I lose it? I think I might.)

The acai and vitaminwater are sweating, and so am I. After all this work, it will soon be Shabbos, and the girls will not have the package.

But wait! Mr. Klein is not the only one heading up Route 17.

Sury Weiss! She’s Mrs. Weiss the Head-of-Sports’s daughter, and before the summer, she’d told my daughter that she would be going to camp for Shabbos every week. She’d be more than glad to take a bag whenever I wanted to send something, she had said.

“What?” says Sury Weiss, when I call her. She sounds very tired. “Take a bag? For your girls? I’m sorry, I’m too overwhelmed and tired, I can’t really, not this week, I have too much to schlep.”

The bag seems to droop from all the passing cars that have made their way out of Boro Park without it.

As dusk settles over the almost-empty town, I come up with another plan. I text the school secretary who runs the camp canteen. She does so much for me all year, always giving my kids messages and a good word. She’s so busy, do I even feel right asking her for yet another favor? I decide that I do. Do you know anyone going to camp this week? I want to send a package.

Call my daughter, she texts back.

The daughter picks up the phone. She’s leaving in 15 minutes, and her car is quite full, but can she push in another bag? “I think I can,” she says.

“She thinks she can,” I say to myself as I huff and puff over to her house. (There’s a helpful ten-year-old niece watching my now-sleeping baby, so I only have two children slowing me down as I race across town.) I deliver the bag just in time!

When I come home, I slip into the mayhem of cocoa-swiped counters and onion-streaked floors and a no-longer-sleeping baby. I notice a snack bag that has somehow stayed behind.

I take a deep breath and slowly, slowly start handling the mess.

Baths, bedtime, cleanup, laundry, faster and faster the clock crept to midnight, around the time the package also finally arrived in camp.

The phone call that followed was pure joy and nachas, and the devoted secretary deflected my effusive appreciation.

“Anytime,” she said graciously. “Seriously, call me anytime you want to send a package.”

But I don’t think I’m doing this again anytime soon.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 955)