"I don't care." Her face was crumpling now, all at once, the way it did, from the chin up. "I don't want them. I don't want them." She got up and ran into our room in her socks and slammed the door, and through the door I heard her start to cry, the big, gulping, hiccuping kind, and under it the creak of the bottom bunk as she threw herself onto it.
My mother started to go after her. Abuela said, "Joanna."
Just the name. Not loud. My mother stopped in the middle of the kitchen with her back to us.
"Sit down," Abuela said. "Please. She needs a minute. You and I need more than a minute."
My mother didn't sit. But she turned around. And Abuela took the elastic band off the accordion file, with a snap, and opened it on her lap.
I need to tell you what was in that file the way I saw it, one thing at a time, because that's how she did it. She was a mechanic. She laid out parts.
The first thing she took out was a piece of paper, two pages stapled together, a photocopy, the edges soft from being handled. She laid it on the table in front of my torn shoe, facing my mother. At the top was the same blue eagle I'd seen on the envelope at the bottom of the stairs in sixth grade. SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION. Below that, NOTICE OF AWARD. Below that, my name.
"December 2017," Abuela said. "Eight weeks after the funeral. I drove you to the office downtown, Joanna, you remember. You were in no shape to drive. I brought his tax returns from my house because I was the one who made him file, every year, even for the cash jobs, even when he said it didn't matter, because I said someday it would matter. I sat next to you in those plastic chairs for three hours and helped you fill out the forms. Child's benefits on the record of Eduardo Arriaga. Eight hundred and twelve dollars a month, to be paid to Joanna Vail, at that time Joanna Arriaga, as representative payee for Noemi Arriaga, a minor." She put her finger on the line. "Representative payee. You know what that means. The lady explained it to you. I heard her. It means the money is Noemi's. It means you hold it for her. You spend it on her and you save what's left, and every year they send you a paper asking how you spent it, and you sign your name."
My mother's face did something when Abuela said every year they send you a paper. I saw it. I thought of the mail pile on Friday night, sorted into three piles, and one pile going into her bedroom and not coming out.
"It went up," Abuela went on. She took out a small spiral notebook, the kind that fits in a shirt pocket, with a grease stain on the cover in the shape of a thumb. She flipped it open. Inside, in her square capitals, in a column, were years and numbers. "Every January there's a raise for the cost of living. They print it in the paper. I write it down. Twenty eighteen, eight-twenty-five. Twenty-nineteen. Twenty-twenty. And on and on." She ran her finger down the column. "This year it's twelve hundred and fourteen dollars a month. Twelve hundred and fourteen, Joanna."
"I know what it is," my mother said.