I turned the page over, and my grandmothers handwriting went on.
She wrote, Under the velvet you will find the deed to the house on Fourth Street. I recorded a transfer on death in your name in 2015. You will not have to go to court. You will not have to ask your cousin. The house is yours the day I go.
I lifted the velvet tray with two fingers. It was a small square of dark red cloth over a plain wooden board. Under it, folded in thirds, was a recorded deed from the Bernalillo County Clerk, stamped in blue, with her signature and the name Rosalie underneath. Behind it was a small cloth bag, tied with a shoelace.
Dalton had stopped grabbing. He was standing with his hand over the gold chain, and he looked, for the first time since the funeral, like the little boy who used to climb in her lap.
The note went on. She said, Rosalie, in the cloth bag are the words. I never sang them to you because I wanted you to learn the tune first. My mother wrote them in Chihuahua when she was seventeen. The song is a lullaby, and I have written all four verses out. Sing it to someone someday.
My hands were not steady, so Ms. Castillo held the bag open for me. Inside was a single sheet of onionskin paper, soft as cloth, covered in small, careful handwriting in Spanish. And a rosary. A cheap one, with plastic beads gone yellow with age.
I knew it at once. It was the rosary I sold to a boy at school when I was ten. I had never told her. She had known the whole time.
Abuelas last page was for Dalton. I read it aloud because she had asked me to. She said, Dalton, mijo, you were always the one who needed more than he asked for. I will not leave you the house. You would sell it. But I bought this rosary back from that boy at school in 1998 with two dollars from my tamale money, and I want you to have it, because you were the one who sat with me when your mother left. I never forgot.
Abuela had heard the same melody every night for sixty years and never once sang the words, because some songs are kept for the day a child is ready to carry them.
Dalton took the rosary from my hand. He did not say a word. He stood in the vault room on Central Avenue with his hand shaking, and the gold chain slid off his neck and into the box. He set her truck keys on top of it.
I did not ask for them. Ernie says that is the only reason I did not have to. He gave them back on his own.
The envelope marked Rosa held twenty-two thousand dollars in tens and twenties, in a tidy rubber-banded stack. Thirty years of Saturday tamales. I put it in the credit union that afternoon and I did not touch it for a month.
I learned the song that winter. Beatriz, the woman who sold me the box back, came over and helped me with the old Spanish. She said her mother used to sing something like it. Her eyes filled when we got to the third verse.
The music box sits on my dresser now. I wind it twice every night. Once for me. Once for her. Dalton comes by on Sundays, and sometimes he asks me to play it, and he hums along the way she used to, and I let him, because it is the same tune and the same house and, I think, the same love, handed down in a tin box with painted roses.