My mother slapped my daughter’s hand away from the photo album at my grandmother’s wake. My daughter is thirty-one, and she was only looking for a picture of a woman she loved. The whole table went quiet when it happened. My mother didn’t apologize; she pulled the album onto her lap and put both arms over it. “These are mine now,” she said, as if that settled it.
My daughter said sorry, and that was what got me. She apologized, at thirty-one, for reaching toward her own great-grandmother’s photographs. My cousin got up and walked around the table and asked my mother for the album, quietly. My mother refused and told him there was nothing in it that concerned him. He looked at me and then asked whether I remembered the photograph my grandmother had kept beside her bed for years. I said I did, but I couldn’t remember who was standing beside her in it.
My cousin said that was exactly the photograph my mother didn’t want anyone to see. He told us he’d seen it once as a child, and there had been a woman in the picture whom nobody ever mentioned. My daughter immediately asked who the woman was, and my mother stood up so quickly that the chair scraped the floor. She said the woman had nothing to do with our family and that everyone needed to stop asking questions. Then my cousin said one sentence that made my mother sit back down.
He said, “She isn’t a stranger—she’s the reason Grandma stopped speaking to your mother in 1987.” Nobody said anything after that. My daughter looked at me, and I realized I had never been told why my grandmother and my mother had gone nearly a decade without speaking. My cousin finally got the album open while my mother was distracted, and we found the photograph tucked between two pages. On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting, were two names and a date. One of the names was my mother’s, and the other belonged to a woman my mother had spent thirty-seven years insisting she had never met.
