By KP Vogell

The woman who’d bought the storage unit in which our father had stashed our mother’s urn was in her late forties. Her living room was full of dreamcatchers, so many we had to duck around them to get in.

“We paid good money for that unit,” she said. “The lowest I can go is a grand. Frankly, there isn’t much else in there we could sell to recoup our loss.”

“We don’t have a grand,” I said. “And even if we did, we shouldn’t have to pay you. What kind of person are you, anyway?”

The woman said, “If it was so important to you, you should have kept paying rent on the thing.”

“You know what, forget it,” I said. “It’s just ashes, anyway. It’s not like it’s her.” I stood up, but Martín, my brother, grabbed my arm.

 “Ma’am, I’m sorry to be nosy but, I noticed you’ve got a lot of dream-catchers. Are you by any chance Native American?”

“Hell no,” she said, giving us a weird look. “I hang them up for my parakeets.”

*

We went back out to the car and drove to a McDonald’s around the corner. It was almost Christmas, and the air was so cold it burned.

“What tribe were you going to say we were from, exactly?” I said to Martín, putting two sugars into my coffee.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Martín said. “You know how Mom was about that Indian stuff.”

I thought of Mom, drunk in our kitchen, pointing at her hairless legs, her nonexistent eyebrows, and saying, “Look at me! Look at me and tell me I’m not Indian!”

But Mom wasn’t close with her family. We’d never been to Nicaragua. The only person who showed up for the cremation was a straight-backed elderly man we’d never met before. He turned out to be her half-brother.

“I just thought, you know, maybe we’ll get a break for once,” Martín said.

“Us? Yeah right.”

“You know, we could just give her the money,” he said.

“Except we don’t have it. And anyways, no. We shouldn’t have to. That’s beyond messed up.”

“We may not have a choice. She’s just mad that there wasn’t anything in there worth a damn.”

“Then she shouldn’t have paid so much.”

“It’s like gambling. They don’t know what’s in there. It was a big unit, pretty much everything from the old house. She probably thought there was a lot of good stuff in there that she could turn around on eBay.”

“She didn’t reckon on Dad’s taste,” I said. My mood darkened. “Speaking of whom. Why didn’t he pay the rent on it? How much could it have been?”

“Well, that’s Dad.” Martín sipped his coffee.

I looked away. There was a group of kids at the next table. One girl, maybe five years old, had three ketchup fingerprints on her peachy cheek. It reminded me of those two months after I dropped out of community college, when I lived with Stevie in the mountains—our lost weekend, Stevie called it. One night we got really high and opened up cups of chocolate pudding and dabbed it on our faces like warpaint and recited Emily Dickinson poems to each other in growls. That was before we got bored and started going to our sketchy neighbor’s parties.

And then Martín called. I came home and started working again, figuring that Mom dying was the worst thing that was ever going to happen to me. And then a year later Dad drops this bomb on us, in his harmless-bumbling-old-red-neck way. Yeah, he couldn’t make the payments on the unit. Yeah, they’d been sending him letters, something about an auction.  And what was in the storage unit? we’d asked. Anything important?

And all that time we thought he was keeping the urn somewhere in his bedroom, to be near to her or something. Yeah right.

“So, what’re we going to do?” Martín said.

I hunkered down in the booth. “Fuck, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to raise the money. Ask people we know.”?

“I think we’ve begged enough people for help this year, Jacky,” he said.  “Anyways, we have the money.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said. Inside, I was cowering like a roach, waiting for the slipper to come down.

“How much you got put away?” he said softly.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“There’s a bank around the corner. Why don’t we just get the money so we can get out of here?”

“Why don’t you eff yourself.”

After a few seconds, he said, ”It would only take you a few months to save up again. I’ll help you out.”

I hated it, but my eyes began to water. I was saving to move to the city. The grand I’d scraped together over the last year, in between helping Martín with rent and paying down Dad’s credit card debt, was my ticket out. Enough for a deposit and one month in a shared house in some cheap, slightly dangerous neighborhood, and a little extra to get me to my first job. I wasn’t going to give it up, not even for Mom. No way.

“You know I’ll help you,” Martín was saying. I looked up. His eyes are the same shiny, bird’s-eye black as Mom’s. “I promise, Jacky.”

Martín’d had money at one point. All that time, while I was at Stevie’s place, going on spirit quests and hooking up with the mountain crazies, my trusty brother had been substitute teaching and waiting tables on the side. He lived with friends while our parents drank and clawed at each other. And I knew exactly where all his money had gone: an extra day on life support and the cheapest cremation in town.

I propped my elbows on the table and hid my face in my hands. For one second I thought, I can do this. I can be an evil person. And then my nose began to sting, and tears squirmed out of the corners of my eyes.

I put my hands down. “I’m never going to get out of here,” I said, louder than I meant to.  All the little kids at the next table turned and stared.

Martín reached over and put both his hands on my shoulders.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

We made it to Bank of America at 4:56. The security guard almost didn’t let us in. “It’s an emergency,” Martín said gently. I’m lucky he can be calm and hold it together when things get crazy.

The teller, a small brown woman, another lone descendant of a great and fallen tribe, counted out the bills. I could tell I was freaking her out. I was letting myself really cry now.

Martín stood next to me with his arm around me, rubbing my shoulder.

When the woman finished counting, she said, very quietly, “Todo bien, hija?” The stacks of money were still on her side of the counter.

She seemed like an okay person, but for some reason her use of Spanish, like it was some code language of a secret brotherhood, got under my skin. I said, “No, todo is not fucking bien.”

“Jacky, please,” Martín said, and then in Spanish, “We’ve had a problem in the family.”

“I’m so sorry,” the teller said in cold English, placing the bills in one of those nylon bank envelopes. “There you go. Good luck.”

At the woman’s house, the light above the front door was on. I took a good look at the place. It was small, beige, and stucco, with a chain-link fence and a dead lawn, and one of those awful brown welcome mats that look like they’re made out of rotting hay. A sad string of red and green bulbs ran over the eaves. Maybe with my thousand bucks they’d bother to water the lawn and paint the house a color that didn’t belong on the walls of a hospital.

The woman opened the door before we even knocked. ”No need to come inside,” she said, blocking the doorway.

“Wonderful,” Martín said, gripping my arm.

“It’s all still at the storage place. I suppose you know where that is. Off the 99 on Hazelnut? It’s a left turn at the exit if you’re headed south. I already called to tell them you’re coming.”

“You just left it all there?” I said.

“What else do you do with junk?” she said. She pressed a paper into Martín’s hand. “That’s the code you’ll need to get in.” She looked at the nylon envelope I was clutching. “I guess that’s for me,” she said. But as her hand came forward, I snatched the envelope away.

“No,” I said. Martín squeezed my arm and I shook him off. “You know,” I began, but I was having trouble meeting her eyes, getting the words out. “Don’t you think you should apologize?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly should I be apologizing for?”

“For calling our stuff junk,” I said. “For holding our dead mother for ransom.”

The woman rolled her eyes like I was some idiot from Greenpeace trying to tell her about whales. “Let’s just finish up this business so we can both get back to our lives,” she said.

I waved the envelope at her. “This is my life,” I said. “This is my whole life. You could have just given her back. You can still do that. Don’t you see?” And there they were again, my silly tears. “Don’t you see that’s the right thing to do? Don’t you see that’s what’s decent?”

For a second, something in her face started to move. But then it stopped just as quick.

Firmly, gently, Martín took my wrist. He pried the envelope out of my hand and gave it to her.

“Thank you very much,” she said.  Then she smiled. “I knew you would come back. I knew it as soon as you said that thing about the dreamcatchers. Indians set a lot of store by their dead.”

She shut the door.

On our way down the 99, I cried like crazy. I mean, like one of those “They took my baby!” Lifetime movie women. Martín drove slowly and didn’t try to drown me out with the radio while I sobbed and banged my head against the window.

“Jacky,” Martín said after one particularly ear-grating howl. “Calm down, okay? It’s all good now. We’re good. We’ve got her back.” Then he said, the words awkward in his mouth, “Sana. Sana.”

I hadn’t expected Martín to come out with that. It was this funny old spell our mother used to say when we got hurt. It started with, “Sana, sana, culito de rana,” and she would run her finger gently over the scrape or bruise, the palm caught in the umbrella shaft. Even in high school, when I hated her and she hated me, she would still say that spell over me if I cut my finger chopping onions or got scratched in a fight at school. It wasn’t really the same coming from Martín, but it calmed me.

The guy at the storage place took our slip and pulled up the metal grate. The thing was packed and dark. I wondered if the woman had really left everything as is, or if she had picked over what was good before abandoning it to us.

“Bro, you got a flashlight or something you could lend us?” Martín asked the guy, another white guy.

He rolled his eyes. “You know how many times people ask me for things like that? Why don’t you people come prepared for once?” I gaped at him, but Martin smiled and nodded and said, “No problem, man. Don’t worry about it. We’ll use our phones.” The man wheeled away in a huff.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Martín said.

Our phone lights flashing, we started rummaging through it, all the junk that Dad had stashed there when he moved into the one-bedroom, after we took Mom off life support. There were all sorts of things in there: my finger paintings from kindergarten. Martín’s first bike. One box was full of old Nescafe cans. Inside them, packed in newspaper, were wooden toys from Nicaragua, little locomotives and tractors and cars.

I started in on another box. At the top was an envelope with a few photos. It was Mom when she was young. I’d never seen her like that: truly pretty, before alcohol stretched out her face and put marks around her eyes.

“Bingo,” Martín said, from somewhere at the back of the unit. I shone my phone at him. He was holding what looked like a canister of fancy tea.

“Great, let’s get this stuff out of here,” I said.

“Wait,” Martín said. He held it out to me. “Take…uh, take it for a second, will you? I wanna see what else is in here.”

Unwillingly, I stuffed my phone in my back pocket and took the urn from him. It was so heavy I almost let it drop. There were words engraved on the metal: “Loving Wife and Mother.”

“Fuck!” I said.

“What is it?” Martín said, looking up from the box he was digging in.

I looked at him. “After all those stupid fights, she finally got what she wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“She begged me not to move out, remember? All she wanted was for me to stay. Like if I just stuck with it a little while longer, we were all going to change.”

“You think you could have done something?” Martín said. “You know better than that, Jacky.”

“I dunno,” I said. “I mean, I know there was no getting between her and Dad. And if you tried to stop her from drinking, she’d just get madder…”

“Stop it,” Martín said. His voice was really gentle. “Just stop.”

But I couldn’t help myself. I kept thinking—if I had just been there, I could have hidden her car keys. Kept her in the house for an hour or two, until she calmed down, sobered up.

It wasn’t true, but I wanted to believe it anyway. That small things like that made all the difference.

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KP Vogell is an artist and writer from California’s Central Valley.