“I’ve never seen a single dollar of it,” I replied, the words tasting like old ash in my mouth.
Nonna didn’t blink. She lowered her heavy, black leather purse to the floor and asked me for my mother’s phone number.
It was the safety pin that had betrayed my poverty. The nurse at Henrico Doctors’ Hospital had shown me how to zip little Marigold securely against my chest to keep her body temperature up. Out of sheer necessity, I’d bridged the gaping zipper with a massive, brass safety pin salvaged from the dusty depths of my diaper bag.
I was secretly proud of that brass pin. But Nonna spotted it from across the linen-draped table, and the joy of her birthday celebration extinguished as swiftly as a blown-out candle.
It was a brisk Sunday, March 8th, her seventy-eighth birthday. My two aunts were there, alongside a pair of cousins, chatting loudly over a sheet cake frosted with a photograph of Nonna’s face—a gaudy gesture she secretly adored but publicly complained about.
I’d arrived forty minutes late because Marigold, barely five weeks old, had demanded to be fed twice in the icy front seat of my beat-up Corolla. When I finally reached the table, Nonna wordlessly extended her arms. Marigold was furious and squirming, bundled in a pill-covered gray fleece bunting that had undoubtedly belonged to three other infants before finding its way to me. I’d scored it at a Broad Street church thrift store for exactly four dollars. It harbored a stubborn bleach stain near the left cuff, which I’d carefully rolled inward to hide.
My grandmother cradled Marigold with practiced grace, resting the tiny head against her silk shoulder. As she rhythmically patted my daughter’s back, her dark, sharp eyes locked onto mine. She saw everything. She saw the frayed cuffs of the men’s jacket. She saw the concealed bleach stain. She saw the exhaustion bruising the skin beneath my eyes.
Leaning forward, she pitched her voice just beneath the chaotic chatter of my aunts. “Jana, wasn’t the trust your father left you enough?”
