Sometime around three a.m., I can’t stand it anymore. I pop one eye open, roll onto my side, and open Slack—all the names with the circles next to them grayed out in the sidebar, mine lit up green.
And in the DM with myself, I write:
ruby.ocampo:
Mom? Is that actually you?
God, this is ridiculous. This is—
sampaguita72:
Of course it’s me! Who else would it be?
Ay I forgot to tell you—check in my desk, the one with the roll top. The back of the drawer comes off.
I should have written it down! I forgot to write it down.
It’s hard to think of everything.
I’m barely breathing as I make my way through the dark hallway of our one-story ranch-style house, walking on tiptoes like I’m about to ambush an intruder.
I turn on the light in the living room, where the desksits next to the couch. All of the hairs on my arms stand on end.
After Mom died, I did all these things—took care of paperwork, bagged up clothes to donate, went to the Social Security office. But I barely remember doing them, now. It’s like a giant hand was playing Barbies with my body, shuttling me around.
Tita Wendy is the one who encouraged me to slowly get rid of things, if I’m keeping the house. “So you won’t feel so weighed down,” she said, pointing with her pursed lips to the clear storage boxes piled against the walls, at once neat and chaotic. Then she whispered like Mom would still be able to hear:Adela was always a bit of a hoarder.
But I’m relieved that I kept this desk, even if I never use it.
I pull up the roll top and jump back, half expecting something horrifying to spring out. But there’s just the inlaid set of drawers—not even any clutter, since I cleared out the years’ worth of mail and receipts she used to keep in here.
I slide open a drawer and push on the wood in the back, trying the corners, and—
It comes loose. There’s a space behind.
And an envelope nestled there. Fat with something inside it.
I pull it toward me and my eyes grow wide, seeing that it’s stuffed with cash.
Susmaryosep.Itisthe kind of thing Mom would do, stashing emergency reserves in random places.
Could someone still be scamming me? They could have broken in and put this here, and—you have to spend money to make money,so maybe—
I turn the envelope over in my hands and there’s Mom’s handwriting in black felt-tip pen, her unmistakable shaky looping script.
I’m trying so hard to breathe normally when I sit down at the kitchen table and pop open my laptop screen.
sampaguita72:
Did you find it? I really should have written it down.
I close the laptop again and slump forward, face buried in my folded arms, and for the first time since Mom died, I have a good, long cry.
Chapter
7
I have no idea how to talk to my mother’s ghost. It wasn’t easy talking to her when she was alive. I always folded before the crushing sense of disappointment wafting off her when we would sit around this kitchen table—the slump of her shoulders, her trembling lower lip. But I lift my head, open the laptop again, and start to type.
