"But also." She swallowed. "My mom lied to me for, like, two years about my grandpa being sick, back home, because she didn't want me to worry during school, and when I found out I didn't talk to her for a week. And then I figured out she hadn't been protecting me. She'd been protecting herself from having to watch me be sad. And then I figured out that those were kind of the same thing." She looked at me sideways. "Sorry. That's probably not helpful right now."
"It's a little helpful," I said.
She rode home with me as far as the bottom of our street. At the corner she stopped and put one foot down and looked at me like she wanted to say something else. Then she just said, "Text me," and turned around, and I watched her pump up the hill toward her house, standing on her pedals, her headscarf a bright yellow flag against all that green.
The orange pack was where I had left it, by the back door. Nobody had moved it. I think nobody had been able to look at it either.
My father was in the backyard, kneeling in the dirt along the fence line, pulling weeds out of the tomato bed with a kind of controlled violence, as if each one had personally insulted him. My mother was at the kitchen table, in my chair, the wobbly one, with a shoebox in front of her. It was an old Payless box, the lid soft as cloth at the corners. I had never seen it before. Next to it was a small brass key on a loop of red yarn.
She looked up when I came in. She had washed her face. She looked older without the concealer, and also, somehow, younger, like a picture of herself.
"Your father opened the drawer," she said. "Last night. He took the key from my jewelry box. Fifteen years I've kept that key, and he just went and took it." She said it without any anger, as if she were reporting the weather. "I was so angry I couldn't breathe. And then I lay in bed and I thought, thank God. Thank God somebody did it. Because I never would have."
I didn't say anything. I sat down across from her, in my father's chair.
"You can look at all of it," she said, and pushed the shoebox an inch toward me. "Everything in there is yours. It's your life. I'm sorry it fits in a shoe box."
It was mostly paper. My Ecuadorian birth certificate, the long kind, with a red seal and a typed list of everything: the hospital, the hour, the doctor's name, my weight in grams. My mother's teaching certificate from the University of Cuenca, with her photograph on it, twenty-four