Behind my mother, there was a knock on the apartment door, and her face went white, because someone from the state industrial commission was standing in the hallway, about my fathers death benefit, the one she told me never existed.
For years I was my fathers voice in English, and after he died my mother counted on me not knowing what the law owed us. This time the truth came from a judge, because I interpreted for a family whose father died just like mine.
My father died on a construction job site in 2019, and there was a workers compensation death benefit owed to his family, but my mother told me there was nothing, when in fact the benefit existed and she had been handling it without ever telling me it was there.
The letter from the state industrial commission was in my backpack, found in a shoebox of my dads papers under my mothers bed. Judge Morales, after she saw me go pale interpreting a case just like my fathers, wrote down his name and had me come to chambers, and helped me find what was owed.
My mother threw the blue legal dictionary my father gave me off the balcony into the pool and told me to translate that, that I would be nothing without her. She did not know the industrial commission was already at the door about my Papis benefit.
Rick stood up asking what benefit. My mothers face said the rest.
I did not stay. I went down the stairwell, and at eight the next morning I sat my court interpreter oral exam, and I passed, because my mother could sink a dictionary but not twenty years of translating for my father since I was a child.
I am a certified court interpreter now, working in the same courthouse where Judge Morales sits. My fathers death benefit is being sorted out by the commission, on paper, where you will be nothing without me does not help my mother.
The dictionary is the thing I grieve. My father bought it for me the day I started interpreter school, so proud, and it is at the bottom of a pool. But I carry what he gave me that a pool cannot ruin, which is his language and his name, and I say it in every courtroom now.
You will be nothing without me, she said. I am something because of him. And my mother went white before the knock finished, because the law my father earned with his life finally found its way to his door.