My grandma cut my mom out of every family photo with kitchen scissors, and when I asked why, she said, “I don’t keep trash in my albums.”
Then she took me to a pawn shop with Mom’s necklace in her purse and asked for four hundred dollars.
She forgot what I keep in my phone case.
The necklace was the only thing Mom had from her grandmother, and she’d spent two days crawling around our house looking for it before she gave up.
Grandma watched her from the recliner.
“Maybe you sold it yourself and forgot,” Grandma said.
“People like you lose things.”
Mom didn’t answer. She just checked under the couch cushions again.
Dad was in the kitchen. He turned up the radio.
Grandma Vicki moved in with us the spring after Grandpa died.
She brought nine boxes, a recliner the color of canned peaches, and every photo album the Cabral family ever owned.
Dad said it was just until she got back on her feet.
That was two years ago.
The albums went on the shelf in the upstairs hallway, and at first I loved them, because there were baby pictures of me I’d never seen.
Then one night in January I pulled down the blue one and Mom was gone.
Somebody had cut her out with scissors, little careful curves around her hair and her shoulders, so there was a hole where she used to stand.
Christmas, a hole.
My fifth birthday, a hole.
Dad at the lake with a hole sitting next to him in the canoe.
I went through EVERY album that night. Thirty-one holes.
I never found the pieces.
I took the blue album down to the garage, where Dad was changing the oil in the truck.
He looked at it for maybe three seconds, then closed it.
“Your grandma’s still grieving, Em,” he said. “Pick your battles.”
“She cut Mom out of my BIRTHDAY,” I said.
“Leave it alone. And don’t tell your mother.”
So I didn’t.
I asked Grandma instead.
She was doing a word search at the kitchen table, and she didn’t look up.
“Your father married down,” she said.
“That’s not your fault. But I don’t keep trash in my albums.”
Then she circled a word.
That night I took one photo out of the blue album and slid it behind my phone, inside the clear case.
I didn’t tell anybody about that either.
Three weeks after the necklace disappeared, Grandma asked Dad to drive us to a pawn shop in Modesto.
She said she had some of Grandpa’s old coins to sell, and she wanted me along for the company.
Dad parked out front and stayed in the truck with his phone.
Grandma kept her purse on her lap the whole drive, both hands on it.
I saw him look at it. I saw him look away.
Inside, the shop smelled like motor oil and carpet, and a stuffed bobcat sat on top of the gun case wearing a Santa hat.
The man behind the counter had a gray ponytail and a name tag that said Reuben.
Grandma took a zipper pouch out of her purse and laid Mom’s necklace on the glass.
The thin gold chain.
The little oval medal.
The green stone, no bigger than a lentil.
I held onto the edge of the counter.
“How much?” Grandma said. “It was my mother’s. Real gold.”
Reuben looked at it through a little eyepiece for a long time.
“I can do three-forty,” he said.
“I was thinking four hundred.”
“Ma’am, three-forty is a good number.”
“That’s my mom’s,” I said.
It came out quiet. Nobody heard it but Reuben.
He put the eyepiece down.
Grandma laughed her church laugh, the one she does when somebody’s baby cries during the sermon.
“She’s mixed up,” she said. “Her mother has a lot of cheap jewelry.”
“It’s NOT cheap,” I said.
“It was HER grandma’s. Mom’s been looking for it for three weeks.”
“Go wait in the truck, sweetheart,” Grandma said.
I didn’t go.
I was so pissed I couldn’t feel my fingers.
I pulled the clear case off my phone and put the photo on the glass, right next to the necklace.
My christening. Me in a long white dress on somebody’s lap, and beside me a hole shaped like my mother.
But the scissors had stopped at my blanket.
Mom’s hand was on it.
Her hand was still in the picture, holding something up to me between two fingers.
A thin gold chain.
A little oval medal.
A green stone no bigger than a lentil.
And on her finger, the wedding ring with the chip in it that Dad still teases her about.
“THAT’S MY MOM’S HAND,” I said. “You cut her out of it YOURSELF.”
Reuben leaned over the photo.
Then he picked up the medal and held it next to her fingers.
He looked from one to the other three times.
“That could be anybody’s hand,” Grandma said.
“Ma’am,” Reuben said. “I’m going to hold onto this for a minute.”
He slid the necklace to his side of the glass before she could reach it.
The bell over the door rang.
Dad. He’d finally come in to see what was taking so long.
Grandma turned around with her purse pressed against her stomach.
“Karl,” she said. “Tell this man whose necklace this is.”
Dad looked at the necklace on Reuben’s side of the counter.
He looked at the photo, at the hand, at the chipped ring he’d put on that finger himself.
Then he looked at his mother.
And he opened his mouth.
Mr. Cabral
“That’s my wife’s, Ma,” Dad said.
That was it. Four words and a Ma.
Grandma’s mouth went small, like a drawstring. “Karl.”
“It’s hers.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Reuben.
“It was her grandmother’s. She’s been tearing the house apart for it.”
Reuben didn’t say anything for a second.
Then he picked the medal up by the chain and laid it back in the zipper pouch, careful, the way you’d carry a bug outside.
“I never wrote a ticket,” he said.
“Nothing’s signed. So I’m not holding anything for anybody.”
He zipped the pouch.
“But I’m not handing it back to her, either.”
He held it out across the glass.
Dad took it and put it inside his jacket.
“So this is how it is,” Grandma said.
“In front of a stranger. I raised you better than to shame your mother at a pawn counter.”
“Let’s go home, Ma.”
Her purse was still pressed to her stomach.
There was nothing in it now that anybody wanted.
I took my christening picture off the counter and tried to slide it back behind my phone.
My hands were shaking so bad I had to do it twice.
There was a crease in it now, right across the blanket, right under Mom’s fingers.
The lady by the door who’d had her hand over her mouth went out first.
The bell rang for her too.
Grandma pulled her cardigan straight.
She walked past Dad without touching him, and at the door she turned around and gave Reuben the church smile.
“God bless,” she said.
“Uh huh,” Reuben said.
Dad put his hand on the back of my neck and steered me toward the door.
His hand was cold, and it smelled like the orange soap he uses after he works on the truck.
We were almost out when Reuben said it.
“Mr. Cabral.”
Dad stopped walking.
Nobody had said our last name in there. Not Grandma. Not Dad.
Nobody had shown an ID.
“You still got my card?” Reuben said.
The jewelry box
Mom keeps her jewelry in a wooden box with a ballerina that doesn’t spin anymore.
The music still plays if you wind it, but slow, like it’s tired.
When I was nine she sat me on her bed and took everything out of it, one piece at a time, and told me whose it was.
Most of it was from Target. She said so.
“Target,” she’d say, and drop it on the bedspread, and I’d laugh.
Then she got to the bottom, where the velvet was worn through, and took out the chain.
“This one’s not Target,” she said.
It was her grandma’s.
Great-Grandma Irma came up from Jalisco when she was sixteen and worked thirty years at a cannery on the south side of Modesto, peeling peaches, and she wore that medal every single day.
“Under her shirt,” Mom said.
“So the foreman wouldn’t see it and think she had money.”
The green stone was supposed to be an emerald.
Mom said it was probably glass. She said she didn’t care.
She held it up between two fingers, the same way she does in my christening picture, and let it swing.
“When you’re fifteen,” she said, “it’s yours.”
I asked if I could have it at fourteen.
“Fifteen,” she said. “That’s the rule. Irma’s rule.”
Next to the chain, in its own little velvet slot, were the earrings.
Gold hoops with red stones, from her own mom.
My abuela died when I was six.
I remember her bathrobe, and that she called me by Mom’s name the last few times we visited.
“She started with keys,” Mom told me once.
“She’d put them in the freezer.”
Mom wears the ring with the chip every day.
She chipped it on the tailgate of Dad’s truck the week they moved into our house, carrying in a box of plates.
Dad says she married him and broke the ring in the same month and he should’ve known.
Every time he says it she flicks him in the ear.
Last summer the earrings went missing.
Mom took the whole bedroom apart. Then the bathroom.
Then she sat on the edge of the tub and cried, which I’d never seen her do over a thing.
Grandma had been with us a year by then.
She stood in the bathroom door in her church clothes.
“People like you lose things,” she said.
“It’s not your fault, honey. Some people just aren’t careful with nice things.”
That was the first time she said it.
A week later Mom found the earrings under the couch cushion.
She came running into the kitchen holding them up and laughing so loud that Grandma put her word search down.
“Under the cushion,” Mom kept saying. “I checked under there.”
“See?” Dad said. “Always turns up.”
He’d been gone most of the Saturday before, getting a part for the truck.
He keeps every receipt for that truck in the glovebox, rubber-banded, for taxes, even though Mom is the one who does the taxes.
At church everybody calls Grandma Miss Vicki.
She brings lemon bars to every potluck in the same foil tray and takes the tray home.
Aunt Brandy, Dad’s sister, calls from Fresno every Sunday night and tells her she’s a saint for living in a house with “all that going on.”
I never found out what all that was. Mom, I think.
The recliner’s side pocket is stuffed with Grandma’s finished word search books.
Every word circled, every page.
Now Grandma sat in the front seat of the truck with her purse on her lap, flat and empty.
And Dad drove us home up 99 with one hand on the wheel and the other one inside his jacket, holding on.
Highway 99
Grandma talked the whole way.
“I was holding it for her,” she said.
“She leaves it on the bathroom sink, Karl. On the sink. With the plumber in and out of the house.”
We hadn’t had a plumber since August.
“I was going to bring her the ticket and say, now you know what it feels like. That’s all. A lesson about taking care of things. My mother would’ve done the same to me.”
Dad changed lanes.
“And you,” she said over her shoulder.
“You embarrassed me in front of that man. In front of that woman with her hand on her face. I took you along for company.”
I looked at the back of Dad’s head.
“Why did he know your name?” I said.
Dad’s eyes came up in the mirror, then went back to the road.
“It’s Modesto, Em. Everybody knows everybody.”
Grandma looked out her window. She didn’t say anything about that.
It was the only thing she didn’t say anything about the whole way home.
When we pulled into the driveway she got out before the engine stopped and went in the front door without waiting for anybody.
Dad didn’t move. Neither did I.
The engine ticked.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said.
He took the pouch out of his jacket and turned it over in his hand.
“I’m going to put this in the couch. Your mom finds it. She’s happy. Done.”
“Grandma TOOK it.”
“I know what Grandma did.”
“She cut Mom out of thirty-one pictures.”
“And you didn’t tell your mother,” he said.
“And that was right. You saw what she was like over a necklace, Em. You want her to see the albums?”
I didn’t say anything.
“If you tell her, it’s not about a necklace anymore,” he said.
“Then it’s your mom in the kitchen saying she goes or I go, and me standing there having to pick. You want to watch me pick?”
He waited like he really wanted me to answer.
Then he got out and went inside with the pouch.
I sat in the truck until the windows started to fog.
Then I went in and straight up the stairs, because I’d decided.
Not the necklace. The albums.
Mom could look at thirty-one holes herself, and then Dad could pick all he wanted.
The hallway shelf was empty.
Just dust in nine rectangles where the albums had been, and one of Grandma’s bobby pins.
Grandma’s door at the end of the hall was shut.
I stood there with my hand flat on the empty shelf.
Then Mom screamed downstairs.
Not a bad scream. I ran down anyway.
She was on her knees in front of the couch, with the cushion on the floor next to her and the necklace in both hands, laughing and crying at the same time.
Dad stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder.
Grandma was already in the recliner, word search open on her knee.
“Told you it’d turn up,” Grandma said.
Mom looked up at me with her face all wet.
“I checked there,” she said. “I checked there four times.”
Dr. Sheridan
Mom wore the necklace to bed.
I know because I went in at ten, when Dad was in the shower, and she was sitting up against the headboard with it on over her pajama shirt, the medal in her fist.
She had a spiral notebook open on her knees.
The green kind, from my school supply list.
She closed it when she saw me, then opened it again, like she’d decided something.
“Come here,” she said.
I sat on Dad’s side.
The notebook was a list.
Dates down the left side in her handwriting, which slants backwards because she’s left-handed.
June. Mama’s earrings. Found, couch.
August. Car keys. Found, laundry room.
January. Kitchen scissors. Not found.
September. Grandma Irma’s chain.
Then today’s date, and couch, and she’d underlined couch two times.
“I checked that couch four times,” she said.
“I took the cushions OFF. And there it is, just sitting there, right on top.”
“Mom—”
“Your abuela started like this.” She wasn’t looking at me.
She was looking at the notebook.
“Keys. Then the stove. She was fifty-one, baby. I’m forty-two.”
She reached over to the nightstand and handed me a card.
It had a drawing of a brain on it, which seemed mean.
Valley Neurology. Dr. M. Sheridan. Tuesday, 10:40 a.m.
“It’s just a scan,” she said.
“Just to see. My doctor said it’s probably stress. Your grandma being here, and work, and everything.”
I held the card.
It was the kind with a little shine on it.
I wanted to say it so bad my teeth hurt.
Grandma took it, Dad put it in the couch, the kitchen scissors are somewhere in Grandma’s room, and there are thirty-one holes in our family and every one of them is you.
But Grandma’s door was shut and the albums were behind it.
All I had was one picture with a hand in it.
That could be anybody’s hand.
Dad would say I was confused.
Grandma would say I was mixed up, that my mother had a lot of cheap jewelry, and she’d laugh her church laugh.
And Mom would look at me the way she was looking at that notebook.
“Don’t tell your dad I’m scared,” Mom said.
“Okay? He’s got enough going on with Grandma.”
She took the card back and put it on the nightstand, face down.
“Okay,” I said.
That made two people that year who’d told me don’t tell.
I went to my room and lay on top of the covers in my clothes and waited.
The shower stopped. Dad’s door closed.
The TV behind Grandma’s door went off at eleven, like always.
Reuben had said Mr. Cabral like he was reading it off something.
Like it was written down.
And Dad keeps everything for that truck.
At eleven-twenty I went downstairs in my socks.
The keys were on the hook by the garage door, on the bottle opener keychain from Pismo.
The truck was in the driveway.
I opened the passenger door, and the dome light came on.
The glovebox
The glovebox stuck, like always.
You have to hit it under the latch with the side of your fist.
Inside were Del Taco napkins, the tire gauge, the owner’s manual still in its plastic, and the rubber-banded stack of receipts, thick as a sandwich.
I went through it in the dome light. Oil change. Tires. Oil change.
Wiper blades. Smog check.
Halfway down there were two papers stapled together with a business card on top.
The card had the name of the pawn shop, and under it, in pen, Ask for Reuben, and a phone number.
The first paper was pink.
It had a box at the top that said PLEDGOR, and in the box somebody had typed CABRAL, VICTORIA.
Grandma’s birthday. Our address. A date in June of last year.
1 pr ladies hoop earrings, 14k, red stones. Loan amt: $180.00.
At the bottom was Grandma’s signature.
The big loopy V she puts on birthday cards.
The second paper was white and had REDEEMED stamped across it in red ink, a week after the first date. $206.40.
Under that was a different signature, small and slanted the other way, the one he puts on my field trip forms.
Karl Cabral.
I read it again. The windows were fogging.
June. Mama’s earrings. Found, couch.
The kitchen light came on inside the house. Then the back door opened.
Then Dad was standing in the driveway in his sweatpants and no shoes, squinting at the dome light.
“What are you doing in my truck,” he said.
I held the papers up.
He looked at them for maybe three seconds. The same as the album.
“Give me those,” he said.
“She has a doctor.”
“Who?”
“Mom. Tuesday. A brain doctor, for her memory. She thinks she’s turning into Abuela. She’s got a whole notebook.”
Dad put one hand on the roof of the truck.
He stood like that for a long time.
The dome light went off on its own, the way it does, and then it was just the kitchen window lighting him up from behind.
“She told you that,” he said.
“She told me don’t tell you.”
“I didn’t know about any doctor.”
“You knew about the earrings.”
“She’d just lost my dad, Em.”
He said it to the roof of the truck.
“She’d just lost Dad and she was living down the hall from us in a house that wasn’t hers, and she took one thing, one time, and I went and got it back. Nobody got hurt. I got it back.”
“You put it in the couch.”
“I put it in the couch.”
“And then you said see, always turns up.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“Where’s she supposed to go?” he said finally.
“Huh? You tell me. Where’s my mother supposed to go?”
“Aunt Brandy’s,” I said.
He laughed, but not like anything was funny.
He held his hand out for the papers.
I took the case off my phone instead.
I folded the pink one and the white one together, small, and put them behind my christening picture, behind the hand.
Then I snapped the case back on.
Lemon bars
Sunday morning Dad drove Grandma to church at nine-thirty, like always, with the lemon bars on her lap in the foil tray.
He didn’t look at me when they left.
I didn’t know if he’d say something to her in the truck.
I didn’t know what he’d do.
Mom was out back pulling up the dead tomato plants.
Grandma’s door wasn’t locked. Grandma doesn’t believe in locks in a family house. She’s said so.
The albums were in her closet, stacked on her suitcase, and next to them was a shoebox of Grandpa’s coins in little cardboard sleeves.
I carried them down two at a time. Nine albums.
I opened every one of them on the kitchen table, each to a hole.
Christmas. My fifth birthday. The lake. Thanksgiving at Aunt Brandy’s.
Mom’s graduation from community college, Mom in a cap and gown, a hole in a cap and gown.
In the middle I put my christening picture.
Next to it I unfolded the pink paper and the white one.
Then I went to the back door.
“Mom,” I said. “Can you come in here?”
She came in wiping her hands on her jeans and stopped at the edge of the table.
She looked for a long time.
She touched one of the holes, the Christmas one, with her finger, like she was checking if it was real.
“How long,” she said.
“January.”
“January.” She looked at me. “You found these in January.”
I nodded.
She picked up the christening picture and looked at her own hand.
Then she held the medal she was wearing next to it, the way Reuben had.
Then she picked up the white paper and read it, and read it again, and sat down in Grandma’s chair at the kitchen table without seeming to know she’d done it.
That’s where she was when the front door opened.
Grandma came in first with the empty foil tray.
Dad came in behind her.
Grandma saw the table.
“Well,” she said. “Somebody’s been in my closet.”
She set the tray on the counter, very careful.
“Those are Cabral albums,” she said.
“My husband’s family. I can do what I please with my own pictures in my own albums, I don’t care whose house they’re sitting in.”
Mom didn’t say anything. She held up the white paper.
“Oh, the earrings.” Grandma laughed.
“Karl, tell her. No, go on. If we’re doing this, we’re doing all of it. Tell her who drove me to Modesto that day.”
Dad was in the doorway with the keys still in his hand.
“Ma,” he said.
“He drove me. Sat out in the truck with his phone, same as yesterday. I said it was his father’s watch and he never asked to see it.”
She turned to Mom.
“And then he went back and bought them, and put them in the couch, and let you crawl around on that carpet like a dog for a week. Fourteen months he’s known. Don’t you look at me like I did all this by myself.”
Mom looked at Dad.
“I have a scan,” she said. “On Tuesday. For my brain, Karl.”
Dad’s face went gray.
“She’s being dramatic,” Grandma said.
“She was always dramatic. You married down and I said so at the wedding and I’ll say it at your father’s grave. I cut out what didn’t belong. That’s all scissors are for.”
Nobody answered her.
She picked her word search book up off the counter, and her pen, and she sat down in the empty chair across from Mom and opened it, like she was going to do a puzzle right there.
Mom stood up.
“She sleeps somewhere else tonight,” she said. She said it to Dad.
“Or Em and I do.”
“This is my son’s house,” Grandma said, and circled a word.
Dad looked at the table. At the holes. At me.
I didn’t say anything. I’d put it all out.
There wasn’t anything left in my case but two folded papers.
He set the keys down on the table, right on top of my fifth birthday.
“I’ll call Brandy,” he said.
“Karl. Brandy has a pull-out couch and three dogs.”
“Then get your coins, Ma.” He picked up his phone.
“You can sell those.”
Grandma packed for an hour with her door open.
She took her clothes and the shoebox of coins and the picture of Grandpa off her dresser.
She left the albums on the kitchen table.
At the front door, with her suitcase, she looked at me on the stairs.
“I brought you for company,” she said. “Look what I got.”
Then the front door shut, and the truck started, and nobody turned on the radio.
Thirty-one
The second Saturday in December, Dad and I carried the recliner out to the driveway for the Goodwill truck.
Aunt Brandy didn’t have room for it.
Aunt Brandy didn’t have room for a lot of things, she told Mom on the phone, including us at Christmas this year.
Before the truck came I stuck my hand in the side pocket to get the word search books out.
Grandma had asked for them.
Under the books there was a sandwich bag, the zipper kind, and the kitchen scissors.
The bag was full of Mom.
Little pieces, cut in careful curves around her hair and her shoulders.
Mom in a Santa hat. Mom in a life jacket.
Mom in a cap and gown.
I took it inside.
Mom was at the kitchen table with her coffee.
The card from Dr. Sheridan’s office was still on the fridge under the pizza magnet, with a line through it in her backwards slant.
I put the bag down in front of her, and the scissors next to it.
She didn’t cry. She opened the bag and dumped them out and turned them face up, one at a time, counting under her breath in Spanish, the way she counts my push-ups.
“Treinta y uno,” she said.
Dad came in from the driveway. He looked at the table.
He went over to the counter and turned the radio down, and then he got the tape out of the junk drawer and the albums off the hallway shelf.
Nobody said much. Mom fit herself back into Christmas. Into my fifth birthday.
Into the canoe next to Dad, who held the page flat for her.
When she leaned over, the medal swung out from her collar and I touched it.
“Three more years,” she said.
Around noon, without looking up, she said, “Any more?”
“No,” I said. “That’s all of them.”
She nodded.
The last one was the christening.
I took the case off my phone and slid the picture out.
The pink paper and the white one were still folded behind it.
I left them in the case.
Her piece was the biggest one.
Mom from the waist up in a yellow blouse, looking down at me.
She laid it in the hole.
Her shoulder met her own arm, and her arm met her own hand on my blanket holding up the medal, and the crease from Reuben’s counter ran right through her wrist.
“Hold it right there,” she said.
I held her down at the shoulder with one finger, and she tore the tape with her teeth.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who was ever told “don’t tell your mother” and did what they were told.
For more family stories where old wounds surface at life-changing moments, read My Dad Wore His Church Jacket to My Last Hearing and Wouldn’t Say Why and Her Surgeon Held the Elevator Door and Said My Mother Made the Call. For a very different kind of family drama, there’s also I Missed Rifle Qualification By Four Points That Week. I Laughed The Loudest.
