It was the last piece of my family I still owned, and I had carried it through every eviction pressed flat against my chest like a promise.
I took it to a pawnshop on the edge of the city and I set it on the glass counter and I sold it, and I used the money to buy my son the navy shirt with the embroidered moon, because he had pointed at it once in a window and I could not bear for him to have nothing new on the one day of the year that was supposed to be his.
I want to be honest about that morning.
I did not feel noble.
I felt like I was failing so badly that I had to sell my dead grandmother to fake, for one afternoon, a life I could no longer provide.
I did not know, standing at that counter, that I was buying the exact object that would one day save us both.
I only knew that my son deserved something clean and new, and that I had nothing left to give him but the last thing I had.
I remember the walk home from the pawnshop that day with strange clarity.
I had the shirt in a paper bag under my arm and my grandmother’s locket gone from around my neck for the first time in fifteen years, and I kept reaching up to touch the empty place at my throat, the way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be.
I told myself it was only an object.