My Father Cast My Grandmother’s Ledger Into Her Casket Declaring It “Valueless”… Yet When I Visited the Financial Institution, the Clerk Became Ashen and Summoned Law Enforcement. -YILUX

“That register is meaningless. Let it decay with the elderly woman.”

My father hurled my grandmother’s passbook onto the exposed casket, just before they lowered the container into the moist earth of the burial ground.

No one uttered a word.

Not my paternal uncles. Not my relatives. Not even the clergyman who had just completed the funeral rites.

They all gazed at that small blue booklet, soiled with dirt, as though it were refuse. As if it hadn’t been the final thing Doña Guadalupe, my grandmother Lupita, had bestowed upon me in this existence.

I was twenty-seven years of age, clad in a borrowed black garment, and my hands were so chilled I could scarcely perceive my digits.

My father, Victor Salazar, adjusted his black gloves and grinned at me like he used to smile when I was young and told me that weeping was “creating a disturbance”

“There lies your legacy, Mariana,” she stated. “An aged register. No residence, no property, no currency. Your grandmother was always skilled at being enigmatic.”

My stepmother, Patricia, emitted a chuckle from behind her dark spectacles.

“Poor thing,” she whispered. “She still believes the lady left her a fortune.”

“If you bring fifty pesos, you’re purchasing the tacos.”

Some relatives chuckled.

I didn’t.

Attorney Arriaga, the family legal representative, was pallid beneath the funeral canopy.

He had perused the testament twenty minutes earlier: “I bequeath my savings account and all associated rights to my granddaughter Mariana Salazar.”

He left my father nothing.

That’s why he was enraged.

My grandmother had nurtured me since my mother perished in a collision when I was five years of age.

She instructed me how to prepare red rice without it becoming mushy, how to examine utility statements, how not to endorse documents without reviewing them, and how to gaze directly at individuals who attempted to intimidate me.

A week before he died, in the IMSS medical facility, he grasped my hand with his slender fingers and murmured to me:

“When they ridicule you, disregard them. Then proceed to the bank.”

At that moment I didn’t comprehend.

Now, observing the register on his coffin, I began to quiver.

I took a step towards the excavation.

My father seized my arm.

“Don’t even contemplate it.”

I looked at him.

“Release me.”

“Don’t disgrace yourself before everyone, Mariana.”

“You’ve already done that for me.”

The silence descended heavier than the precipitation.

I carefully descended, plunging my heels into the mire, and retrieved the register. It had soil adhered to the cover and emitted a stale odor. I pressed it to my chest.

“It was hers,” I said. “Now it’s mine.”

My father approached so closely that I could detect the tequila on his breath.

“Your grandmother couldn’t even preserve her residence. Do you believe she preserved you?”

Something within me deactivated. Or perhaps it activated.

I placed the register in my bag and walked towards the cemetery exit.

Diego obstructed my path.

I looked at the corroded gate and the damp street beyond.

“To the bank.”

He looked at me as if he had just witnessed a spark fall into fuel.

An hour later, drenched, I entered the Banco del Bajío establishment in downtown Querétaro. The clerk, a bespectacled woman named Maribel, opened her register, read my complete name, and became white.

Then she picked up the phone, her hand trembling.

“Summon the police,” she told another employee. “And secure the entrance. The young lady cannot depart.”

I felt the floor shift beneath me.

I couldn’t comprehend what was about to transpire…

PART 2

“Why did you summon the police?” I inquired, the register still on the counter. “Did I commit an error?”

Maribel leaned out of the window and lowered her voice.

“No, Miss Mariana. But this account has had special directives for many years.”

“What directives?”

The branch supervisor appeared, a stern-looking woman named Carmen Rivas. She guided me to a small office with frosted glass walls. She closed the door and placed the register on the desk as if it were evidence in a trial.

“Your grandmother established this account when you were a child,” she said. “She stipulated that if you ever arrived with the original passbook, we should verify your identity, notify the authorities, and safeguard the related documents.”

“Safeguard them from whom?”

Carmen did not respond.

It wasn’t necessary.

“From my father,” I said.

She lowered her gaze.

My mouth became dry.

“What did he do?”

Carmen took a deep breath.

“He attempted to terminate this account three times. The first time he presented a death certificate in the name of Mariana Isabel Salazar.”

I felt a blow to my chest.

“That’s impossible. I was alive.”

“You were thirteen years of age,” she said. “The document was counterfeit. Your grandmother arrived with you the following day, weeping, and requested that nothing ever be released without seeing you personally.”

A hazy memory flashed through my mind: my grandmother squeezing my hand inside a bank, a woman giving me a tamarind ice pop, my grandmother crying on the bus journey home and saying it was allergies.

My father had attempted to erase me.

Before I could speak, two state police officers arrived. One of them, Commander Valeria Montes, explained that I wasn’t under arrest. That the alert was for my protection.

Then Licenciado Arriaga entered, drenched, with a yellow envelope in his hand.

“Your grandmother requested that I give you this only if you arrived here of your own free will,” he said.

I snatched the envelope from him.

Inside there was a small key and a letter composed in my grandmother’s firm handwriting.

“My child: if you are perusing this, it is because you were braver than they believed. That register isn’t currency. It’s a portal. Your father pilfered what your mother left for you.