"I know you know." Abuela turned a page in the notebook. "And it comes on the third Wednesday of the month. Do you know why it comes on the third Wednesday?"
My mother didn't answer.
"Because my son was born on the fourteenth of March. If the man who paid in was born between the eleventh and the twentieth, the money comes on the third Wednesday. That's the rule. I looked it up the first year, because I wanted to know what day to think of him." She closed the notebook. "I know because I was there on both days. The day he was born and the day he fell. And I think of him every third Wednesday, Joanna. Every single month for nine years I think: today Lalo is still taking care of his girl."
She looked at the shoe boxes stacked on top of the refrigerator.
"This Wednesday was the eighteenth," she said. "The third Wednesday. You came home that night with three pairs of shoes and told her Brent paid."
I had been standing the whole time, on one bare foot and one sneaker, holding the edge of the table. Somewhere in there I sat down without meaning to. The chair with the wobbly leg rocked under me. I said—and I remember how stupid it sounded, how young—"What comes on Wednesday?"
Abuela turned and looked at me.
I'll never forget her face. It wasn't angry. It was worse than angry. It was the face of someone who has walked into a room expecting to find a thing broken and has found it broken in a way she hadn't imagined.
"Mija," she said slowly. "You don't know?"
"Know what?"
She looked at my mother. "You never told her. Nine years. You never even told her."