Chapter 24: Her Seat

My grandmother turned eighty on a Sunday in March, and she woke the whole house at six to say so.

"I intend to be impossible all day," she announced from the kitchen door. "Someone make coffee."

Gael made coffee.

I came down with the framed photograph in both hands, the one of a bald, furious baby in a pink band.

I found her standing in the dining room.

She was looking at the wall.

It was a long wall, white, covered in photographs in dark frames.

There was Humberto at ten with no front teeth, and Paulina in a christening gown, and Paulina in a cap and gown, and a cousin on a pony.

Beside Paulina's christening there was a nail with nothing on it.

"Seventeen years I've kept that nail," my grandmother said. "Every time somebody painted, I told them to go around it."

"Why?"

"Because I knew you'd come back, and I knew what you'd want to look at."

She took the frame from me and turned it over to check the wire.

Then she lifted it with both hands, her arms trembling, and hung it on the nail.

It caught at once.

She stepped back and tugged it straight with one finger.

The wall behind it was a shade whiter than the rest, in a rectangle exactly the size of the frame.

"The sun never got to it," said Abuela. "Look at that. It was waiting."

I put my hand on the glass over the tiny furious face, and I didn't say anything.

Beside me she took my other hand, and we looked at it together until the coffee boiled over.

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