My husband’s cousin called me Free Lunch every school day for six years, and at his grandmother’s funeral she leaned over my plate with a stack of little cards and said, “There’s stuff on there under twenty bucks, Free Lunch, so even you can manage.”
An hour later, her own mother opened Nana’s wallet at our table.
Kurtis and I got married seven months ago at the county clerk’s office, because every spare dollar I had was going to my mom’s dialysis bills.
Yasmin told the whole family I was pregnant.
I wasn’t.
Nana never asked. She mailed us a card with a twenty in it and two lines in blue ballpoint that said she was proud of me.
Nobody under sixty called her Janet.
She ran the register in the cafeteria at our middle school for twenty-two years.
She had a hole punch shaped like a little star.
When the free-lunch kids handed over their cards, she punched the star and said “Next, sweetheart,” the same as she said to the kids paying cash.
The other ladies read your number out loud so the line could hear it. Nana never did.
Yasmin made sure everybody knew mine anyway.
The lunch after the burial was at the VFW hall in Kokomo.
Ham buns, three crockpots of baked beans, a sheet of folding tables with white paper over them.
Magdalena, Yasmin’s mom, had made a photo board and leaned it against the coffee urn.
I got halfway down it before I found the hole.
It was a picture from Yasmin’s eleventh birthday.
Eight of us in paper crowns behind a sheet cake on Nana’s back porch.
The one on the far left had no face.
Somebody had cut a neat little oval right where it should be.
That one was me.
We were friends for exactly one summer.
Seventh grade started three weeks after that picture.
Yasmin’s wedding is in June.
Two hundred and thirty guests, a barn venue, Erik’s parents covering the bar.
She’d printed the cards herself.
Her and Erik on the front, a square code on the back.
She started with Nana’s church friends.
“Nana always said she wanted to see me married RIGHT,” she said to an old man with an oxygen tube.
“It’s all on there. No pressure.”
She hit EVERY table.
Kurtis put his sandwich down.
“Not today, Yas,” he said.
“It’s literally what she’d want.” She slid a card under his coffee cup.
“You two didn’t do a registry. Or a wedding.”
My card went straight onto my plate, face down in the beans.
That’s when she said the line about twenty bucks.
The man with the oxygen tube laughed, because he didn’t know what else to do with his face.
I fished the card out and wiped it on a napkin.
I don’t know why. I just didn’t want beans on her face.
Then she saw me glancing at the board.
“Oh, you found it,” she said.
“Mom. Come look what SOMEBODY did to Nana’s pictures.”
Magdalena came over with the coffee pot still in her hand.
“That’s where she was standing.”
Yasmin tapped the hole with one long pink nail.
“SHE CUT HERSELF OUT OF NANA’S PICTURE. At Nana’s FUNERAL.”
“I never touched it,” I said.
“You’ve been standing over here twenty minutes.”
“Because I was looking at Nana.”
Half the hall had stopped chewing.
Kurtis stood up so fast his chair banged the table behind him.
Magdalena looked at the hole. Then at me.
She kept her mouth shut and went back to pouring.
That was worse.
The funeral home had sent Nana’s purse back in a plastic bag with the paperwork.
It sat on the end of our table.
“Somebody has to go through that,” Magdalena said when she came back around.
“Her license goes back to the BMV.”
Yasmin reached right across my plate for it.
“I’ll take the wallet,” she said.
“She’d want me to have SOMETHING of hers on my wedding day.”
Magdalena moved it out of reach.
It was a red vinyl wallet with a dead snap.
Nana bought it at a church rummage sale in 2009 and refused to replace it. Kurtis tried twice.
Magdalena worked the snap open.
The license. A Kroger card.
The prayer card from Grandpa’s service, soft as cloth.
Then something small slid out of the photo sleeve and landed face up on the paper tablecloth.
An oval of photo paper. Smaller than a quarter.
A paper crown. A gap in the front teeth.
Mine.
Nobody at that table moved.
Behind it, folded in four, was a check.
Magdalena opened it. Her lips moved while she read.
Then she turned it around so I could see.
Pay to the order of Ariella. The same blue ballpoint.
EIGHT THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.
Dated two weeks before the courthouse.
In the memo line, Nana had written “a real one.”
Yasmin’s hand was still out over my plate, where the wallet had been.
“She didn’t even,” Yasmin said. “That’s not, she never said…”
Magdalena didn’t look at her.
She reached into the back of the wallet one more time and pulled out a sheet of notebook paper folded down to the size of a stamp.
She read the first line to herself.
Then she held it out across the table to her daughter.
“This one’s got your name on it,” she said.
The first line
The paper said, “Yasmin, about your wedding.”
Underneath, Nana had written, “I need you to hear this from me.”
Yasmin took it before I could read another word.
She opened it against her chest.
Her eyes went down the page, then back up.
One nail pressed into the fold.
“That’s private,” she said.
I put my napkin over the wet place beside my plate and reached for the oval.
Magdalena covered it with her hand.
“Let me keep everything together.”
“It’s my face.”
“It was in my mother’s wallet.”
That stopped my hand.
She was right about whose wallet it was, and I hated her for making that useful.
The check lay between us.
Eight thousand five hundred dollars looked ridiculous beside a paper plate.
I wanted Nana back.
I also wanted to know what eight thousand five hundred dollars felt like without a bill waiting underneath it.
Both things were true.
I wasn’t going to make myself prettier for this story.
Kurtis moved his chair beside mine.
“Whatever that says, she didn’t cut the picture,” he said.
Yasmin folded the letter.
“I didn’t say when.”
“You said at the funeral.”
“I’ve buried my grandmother today. Can I get a word wrong?”
She could get a whole speech wrong and still expect somebody else to apologize for the acoustics.
Magdalena slid the check back toward the wallet.
“Let’s not do this here.”
The man with the oxygen tube turned his chair slightly.
He could hear every word.
“Then tell them I didn’t do it,” I said.
Magdalena put my face beneath the check.
“Please don’t make me choose today.”
The twenty in the card
Two weeks before our wedding, Nana sat beside me on her porch while I showed her the dress on my phone.
I kept enlarging the picture so she couldn’t see the price.
She took the phone from me.
“I bought underwear before you were born,” she said.
“I know what a sale looks like.”
The dress was blue.
I could wear it again, which seemed like a good quality in something I was buying while my mother was counting rides to dialysis.
Nana held the phone farther away.
“Does it have pockets?”
“One.”
“For half your troubles.”
She handed it back and asked what we wanted for a wedding present.
I said nothing.
She made a face.
“People say that, then you buy them towels and find out they hate yellow.”
I told her we didn’t need a present.
We needed everyone to understand that the county clerk was the wedding, not a rehearsal for something we could afford later.
“I understand,” she said.
Magdalena came through the screen door with Nana’s purse.
She was taking her to an appointment.
“Mom means a proper present,” she said. “A real one.”
Nana tapped my wrist.
“That’s what I mean.”
Yasmin was getting eighty-five hundred from Nana toward June.
Magdalena said it without lowering her voice, then added that she was matching it herself.
“Same from her grandmother, same from me. That’s my limit.”
Nana held out her hand for the purse.
Magdalena kept talking. The barn needed an answer about chairs.
Yasmin wanted something called a lounge area.
Apparently two hundred and thirty people couldn’t sit down without a concept.
I stood to leave.
Nana caught the side of my dress between two fingers.
“Send me a picture afterward. Both of you. Feet included.”
She couldn’t manage the courthouse stairs comfortably.
We offered to change the place, but she wouldn’t have it.
“I’m not having you rearrange a wedding around my knees. They’ve had enough attention.”
I sent her the picture that afternoon.
Her card came the next week.
A twenty inside, the two lines about being proud, and a note on the back asking whether Kurtis owned a comb.
I thought that was the whole present.
Now her check lay under Magdalena’s hand, seven months late.
“She asked what we wanted,” I said.
Magdalena kept her eyes on the wallet.
“I remember.”
“Did you know she wrote that?”
Yasmin pushed her folded letter into her palm.
“Mom, put this away.”
The coffee urn
I got up and went to the board.
It took more effort than it should have.
My knees had been perfectly capable of carrying me through a cemetery.
Apparently ten feet of folding chairs required a different department.
Kurtis followed.
The birthday picture was held by two pins.
One went through the porch railing. The other went through Nana’s sleeve.
I put my finger beside the hole, without touching it.
“You brought this from her house,” I said to Magdalena.
She stood behind us with the wallet.
“Yes.”
“Was the hole there?”
Yasmin came around my other side.
“Nobody’s accusing you of anything now.”
“You accused me in front of everybody.”
“And now we know the piece was in her wallet. So can we stop?”
The man with the oxygen tube set down his cup.
Magdalena looked toward him, then toward the kitchen.
There were dishes in there. Dishes had never called anybody Free Lunch.
She clearly preferred their company.
“Was the hole there when you pinned it up?” I said.
“Yes.”
I waited.
She rubbed the wallet’s edge with her thumb.
“All right? Yes. It was.”
Kurtis took one step toward her.
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“I was trying to get through my mother’s funeral.”
“So was I,” I said.
Yasmin made a noise through her nose.
I turned toward her.
“Say it.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I just think there’s a difference.”
Magdalena closed her eyes.
There it was, out where the coffee drinkers could hear it.
Nana belonged to the people born into the family.
I was permitted to miss the lunch lady.
I wanted to take the board outside and keep walking.
Instead, I asked for the photograph.
Magdalena shook her head.
“It’s part of the display.”
“Afterward, then.”
“We haven’t sorted her things.”
“I don’t want her things. I want that picture and the piece from her wallet.”
Yasmin pointed at herself in the photograph.
“It’s MY birthday.”
She was eleven in that picture, with frosting on one finger.
I remembered being allowed a second piece of cake without having to pretend I didn’t want it.
Nana stood behind us with a knife in her hand.
I hadn’t seen that picture since the summer it was taken.
“Then make a copy,” I said.
“We can talk about all of this another day,” Magdalena said.
Another day was her favorite place to put something she didn’t want to touch.
Kurtis reached for the top pin.
Magdalena caught his wrist.
“Don’t dismantle my mother’s board.”
He let go at once.
That hurt more than if he’d never reached.
Yasmin leaned close enough that only our little group could hear.
“You’re making yourself look bad over a picture.”
Behind her, the man with the oxygen tube stood up.
He took his registry card from beside his cup and put it on the coffee urn.
The wet ring from his cup covered half her face.
Kurtis’s coat
Kurtis took my coat from the chair.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve had enough.”
I’d been waiting for him to say something like that all afternoon.
I thought it would feel good.
Then he held the coat open.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
Magdalena put the wallet in Nana’s purse.
Yasmin went back to gathering the cards she’d left near our plates.
Everyone had a job again.
My husband would remove the troublesome wife, and the funeral could finish without her.
“No,” I said.
Kurtis lowered the coat.
“We don’t have to sit here and take this.”
“I haven’t finished saying goodbye.”
He looked toward the board.
“We went to the service. We went to the burial.”
I knew what he meant.
He wanted to get me out before I cried in front of Yasmin.
But Nana’s face was on that board.
The woman with the hole punch, the woman on the porch, the woman who wrote that she was proud of me.
I wanted to stand in front of her pictures without having to defend my right to be there.
“Put my coat down.”
“Ariella.”
Yasmin stopped gathering cards.
I hated hearing my name become a warning while hers stayed a nickname.
“Please,” I said.
He kept holding it.
Magdalena put a hand on his arm.
“Take her home. I’ll bring you some food later.”
I almost laughed. She’d just watched her daughter throw my childhood onto my plate, but there would be ham buns in a plastic tub.
Nobody could accuse this family of leaving a person hungry after an argument.
Kurtis looked at his aunt.
Then he said, “Maybe that’s best.”
I sat down before my legs could do something embarrassing.
He bent toward me.
“I mean for us.”
“I know.”
“I can’t make her behave.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
He put the coat over the chair.
Yasmin spoke from the other side of the table.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t know Nana had the piece.”
I looked up.
“I haven’t asked you for anything yet.”
She blinked.
“I said I didn’t know.”
“I heard you.”
Kurtis sat beside me.
He reached for my hand, and I moved it to my lap.
His hand stayed on the paper tablecloth.
I wanted to take it. That was the miserable part.
I wanted comfort from the person who’d just agreed I should go.
The man with the oxygen tube came over.
“I shouldn’t have laughed,” he said.
Yasmin’s mouth opened.
He held up one hand without looking at her.
“I know your name isn’t what she called you.”
“It’s Ariella.”
He repeated it, then nodded.
“I’m sorry, Ariella.”
I thanked him. My eyes filled immediately, which was inconvenient.
I had survived the cruelty without crying and then been finished off by an apology delivered beside baked beans.
He went back to his chair.
Kurtis slid my coat farther away.
“I’m sorry too,” he said.
Magdalena reached for the purse.
“We should put this in the car before something gets lost.”
Yasmin held out her hand.
This time, her mother gave her the wallet.
The back of the chair
Yasmin slipped the folded letter beneath the wallet’s strap.
The check and my face were still inside.
“Leave those,” I said.
She kept her hand closed.
“You can’t just take money from someone’s wallet because your name’s on a check.”
“I said leave the papers.”
“They’re Nana’s.”
Kurtis stood.
“Put it down, Yas.”
She looked at Magdalena.
Her mother held out a hand, and Yasmin gave the wallet back with a sigh so long it ought to have required a chair.
Magdalena put it on the seat behind her.
“Nobody’s taking anything today.”
“You were letting her take it.”
“Because she’s my daughter.”
Kurtis said his aunt’s name.
Magdalena rubbed both eyes with the heels of her hands.
“I can’t do this. I have arranged everything. I’ve made every call. I’ve stood there while people told me she was in a better place.”
Her mouth shook.
“I know how that sounds. I don’t care. I want my mother.”
That took the anger out of me for a second.
Only a second.
“I want her too,” I said.
Yasmin folded her arms.
“You knew her through school. And then through Kurtis. That’s lovely. But you’re acting like she raised you.”
I could have told her about the lunches Nana set aside when I came late.
About the days she asked whether I’d eaten breakfast without making it sound like a survey.
I didn’t want to hand Yasmin anything else she could repeat in a funny voice.
“I want you to tell those people I didn’t cut the picture.”
“I’ve said that.”
“No. You haven’t.”
She glanced toward the room.
The tables nearest us had gone quiet again.
Someone began folding a length of the paper covering, then stopped because there were still cups on it.
Magdalena put a hand against her daughter’s elbow.
“Just say it.”
Yasmin pulled away.
“I am sorry that you thought I meant you did it today.”
Kurtis said, “That’s not an apology.”
“I can’t help what she hears.”
I took the registry card from beside my plate.
The napkin had dried onto its back.
I peeled it off in strips while Yasmin waited for me to accept what she’d offered.
My hands needed a job that didn’t involve throwing anything.
“Read Nana’s letter,” I said.
“It’s addressed to me.”
“Then tell me whether it mentions me.”
She stared at me.
Magdalena turned toward the chair.
“That was written when Mom was upset.”
Yasmin’s shoulders dropped a little.
There. Her mother had found the door.
“Exactly,” Yasmin said. “She was tired. People put things in her head.”
Kurtis took the wallet off the chair before Magdalena could lift it.
“Who?”
“Nobody said you,” Magdalena said.
“I asked who.”
She reached for the wallet, but he set it on the table between us.
I couldn’t look at the check anymore.
Nana had written my name.
She’d kept my childhood face beside Grandpa’s prayer card.
Somehow, with all that sitting in front of us, I was still the woman making a scene.
Magdalena touched the notebook paper.
“Please let your grandmother rest.”
Yasmin picked up her stack of cards.
“We’ll talk when you’re calmer.”
She turned toward the next table.
The folded page
I stood in front of her.
“No more cards until you correct what you said.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“Then walk past me and say it again.”
She looked over my shoulder.
Kurtis was beside the wallet.
Magdalena had the letter halfway out of the wallet.
“Give it to her,” I said.
Magdalena shook her head.
“She’s read it.”
“I know. Let her read it again.”
Yasmin held out her hand.
Her mother didn’t move.
“Mom.”
Magdalena unfolded the paper.
“Read it,” I said.
“Or give it back to her and tell everyone I’m the problem.”
I hated putting that on a woman who’d buried her mother.
I hated that she’d made me.
She read the first two lines again, this time aloud.
Then she stopped.
Yasmin said, “Don’t.”
Magdalena kept going.
“I have given you the eight thousand five hundred dollars I promised. Your mother brought it to you. That is your wedding present, with my love.”
Yasmin put the cards against her chest.
“Nana gave everybody money.”
Magdalena read over her.
“But I won’t come in June if you keep calling Ariella that name. I heard it on Sunday. I heard you say her marriage didn’t count.”
Kurtis sat down.
“I should have stopped you years ago,” Magdalena read.
“I thought you would grow out of it. That was a poor excuse.”
Her finger slid down the page.
“Her wedding counts. Her place in this family counts. You can tell me you understand when you come to see me.”
Nobody moved toward the food.
Magdalena read the last line.
“Bring this back after you’ve read it. I don’t want another message passed through your mother.”
Yasmin put her cards down.
“You weren’t supposed to read that out.”
I looked at Magdalena.
“You brought it back?”
She nodded.
“Without giving it to her?”
“I thought I could settle it.”
Behind me, Kurtis pushed his chair away.
Magdalena pressed the paper flat.
“Mom asked me again. I told her Yasmin understood.”
Yasmin stared at her mother.
I put one finger beside the sentence about passing messages.
“Now tell her what you told Nana.”
Eight thousand five hundred dollars
Magdalena pulled out a chair but didn’t sit.
“I said she’d apologized.”
Yasmin made a sound halfway between a laugh and a cough.
“You told her I apologized? For what?”
“For calling her that.”
“Oh, come on. That’s what everybody called her. You make it sound like I invented it.”
“You did,” I said.
“We were kids.”
“You said it over my plate today,” Kurtis said.
She turned on him.
“You’ve known me your whole life.”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m your cousin. You’re seriously going to stand there and let her turn Nana’s funeral into this?”
Magdalena sat down.
“I cut that photograph out of its album,” she said.
“The hole was there then.”
“We know,” Yasmin said.
“Mom cut the little piece. She wanted a picture of Ariella for her wallet.”
Yasmin looked at the board.
“She had pictures on her phone.”
“She wanted that one.”
“Fine. Then why put it up with a hole in it?”
Magdalena looked at me.
“Because I liked the picture of Mom.”
I waited.
“And when you accused her, I knew she hadn’t done it.”
Her face crumpled.
“I knew.”
I wanted to ask how much effort it took to keep pouring coffee while somebody stood there saying that to me.
The question would have been for my benefit. She was already crying.
Yasmin pulled out the chair beside her.
“Mom, please. You’ve had a terrible day.”
Magdalena moved the chair back under the table.
“Don’t.”
“I was trying to help.”
“You called her Free Lunch.”
“It was a joke.”
“Go tell them.”
Yasmin looked toward the other tables.
“Everybody heard all of this.”
“They heard you accuse her. Go tell them you were wrong.”
“You want me to walk around apologizing at my grandmother’s funeral?”
“You managed the gift list,” Kurtis said.
She stared at him.
Then she grabbed the cards.
“All right. Fine. I’ll put these away. Are we happy now?”
I shook my head.
“Tell them.”
Her eyes filled.
For years, that would have stopped me.
The second she cried, I became responsible for what happened next.
She looked at her mother.
Magdalena held the letter against the table.
“I’m not giving you my eighty-five hundred,” she said.
Yasmin’s mouth fell open.
“What?”
“The money I said I’d match. I’m not giving it.”
“You promised.”
“I know.”
“We’ve planned around that.”
“You have the money Nana gave you.”
“That’s spent.”
“Then you and Erik will have to change something.”
Yasmin pulled the chair out hard enough that it hit her leg.
“You can’t punish me because she didn’t have a wedding.”
Kurtis stood.
“We had one.”
She began crying properly then.
She wanted her mother to look at her, but Magdalena was looking at the check.
“I talked Mom out of sending this,” she said.
I put my hands flat on my knees.
“Why?”
“I said you’d be uncomfortable. I said you didn’t want people knowing you needed help.”
“I didn’t ask you to say that.”
“No.”
“Did Nana believe you?”
“I told her I knew you better than she did.”
I almost laughed at that. Magdalena thought she knew how I took coffee.
She was wrong about that too.
“She kept asking whether she should send it,” Magdalena said.
“Then she got ill. And I kept putting it off.”
Yasmin wiped her face with both palms.
“So give her your money. Is that what we’re doing?”
Magdalena looked at me.
I said, “Don’t make me her punishment.”
Her hand stopped over the check.
I pointed toward the board.
“Start with what you can fix.”
Magdalena stood and pulled out the two pins.
Yasmin remained beside her chair.
“Tell them,” her mother said.
Yasmin walked to the man with the oxygen tube first.
The empty space on the board
I could hear her.
“Ariella didn’t cut the picture. Nana did.”
He looked up at her.
“And I shouldn’t have said she did.”
He nodded, without helping her finish.
She took his registry card off the coffee urn.
At the next table, someone handed back another.
Nobody applauded. I was grateful for that.
I couldn’t have survived being the entertainment twice in one afternoon.
Magdalena brought the photograph over.
She laid the oval into the hole.
The edge caught on the paper underneath, and she tried again.
There I was.
A paper crown, a missing tooth, my mouth open because somebody had said something funny.
She began crying over it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I wanted to say it was all right.
The words came so close I had to press my lips together.
Kurtis went to get tape.
Magdalena turned the picture over and held the piece in place while he fixed it from the back.
Then she put it on the board again.
This time, when people came over, she told them who I was.
By the time the coffee urn was empty, Yasmin had collected her cards.
Her mother’s promised contribution was gone: $8,500.00.
Kurtis told her to take the two of us off the list for June.
She didn’t argue with him.
She argued with me by the door.
“You’re really going to let all this happen over something I said?”
I had the repaired photograph in my hand.
Magdalena had given it to me after everyone finished looking.
“No,” I said. “Over what you kept saying.”
She glanced down at it.
“I said I was sorry.”
“I heard you.”
Kurtis opened the door, and I carried the picture out.
The pocket in my dress
Magdalena came to our apartment the following Sunday.
She brought Nana’s check and the letter. She asked before she sat down.
That was new.
I didn’t try to cash a dead woman’s check.
We kept it with the page Yasmin didn’t want read.
Magdalena brought another check, from her own account, for $8,500.00.
I left it on the arm of the couch.
“You don’t owe me a wedding,” I said.
“No. This isn’t Yasmin’s money. I owe you the present I stopped my mother giving you.”
“And if I don’t forgive you?”
She looked at the photograph propped beside our wedding picture.
“It’s still yours.”
I took it then.
My mother’s next bills got paid without me sitting on the bedroom floor subtracting the same numbers until they changed.
We kept some money in our account. Just sitting there, doing nothing.
I checked it twice a day for a week.
Kurtis put the birthday photograph in a frame.
He took it apart once because the oval had slipped, then made me check it before he closed the back.
My face stayed where it belonged.
One evening, he found me beside the dresser with Nana’s card open.
“I should have put your coat down sooner,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I wanted to get you away from her.”
“I wanted you beside me.”
He sat on the bed.
“I know.”
He didn’t ask me to make him feel better.
I moved over and let his knee touch mine.
Our wedding picture stood beside the birthday one.
Nana had been right about the comb.
Kurtis looked like somebody had driven him to the courthouse with his head out the window.
I laughed.
He leaned over to see which picture I was looking at.
“That bad?”
“You should have listened to your grandmother.”
He kissed my shoulder.
I opened the dresser drawer and took out the blue dress.
I hadn’t worn it since the wedding.
The pocket was still turned inside out from where I’d emptied it afterward.
Kurtis held it up against me.
“It still has room for half your troubles.”
I looked at him.
“You remember that?”
“You told me.”
I put the dress on.
He stood behind me and did up the zipper.
Then I picked up his phone.
“What are we doing?” he said.
“Another wedding picture.”
He reached for me.
“Feet included,” I said, and pulled him into the frame.
If this one stayed with you, send it to someone who still remembers the person who called them by their proper name.
Family grudges and treasured belongings have a way of colliding in these stories – read about the cousin who tore a cardigan made by a mother, the father who returned ribbons in a grocery bag, and the sister who had her eye on Mom’s chain.
