What She Carried

My sister’s purse remembered

I remember the day I bought my sister that purse. She was so excited and proud ’cause she picked it out all by herself. It was a coral color — the color of the lipstick our Mom used to wear back in the day. My sister said she wanted it ’cause no one else had that color and she liked being different, but I knew the real reason.

I made my sister lunch every day, usually just peanut butter and jelly, but sometimes ham — or even turkey — when I could scrape some up. And every day, I put a sandwich and a picture in a brown paper sack for her. Some days it was her favorite cartoon character, Pokémon. Other days it was a stupid sketch I did of some flowers or Pepé, the dog down the street we used to love to play with before he ran away. The one time — the last time — it was a photo of our mother.

When I first started doing it, I thought she’d just throw the pictures away with the sack. I mean most of them were ripped out of magazines I found in the neighbors’ recycling bins or scribbled on some loose leaf. But she didn’t. She kept them all in that coral color purse, every last one of them.

Her teacher told me that, every day, she would lay the pictures out on her desk as soon as she got in. Her teacher said that sometimes they made my sister cry, but most times, they made her smile. My sister never told me she did that, and I never let on that I knew. Growing up like we did, with our Pop always working and our Mom just gone, we didn’t have a lot of secrets from each other, so I let her keep that one.

There was some stuff I kept from her too, like that our Mom was gone for good. No one really told me that ever, but I knew it as sure as I knew all the players on the Dubs and to never bring her up to Pop. “I don’t wanna hear about no ghosts, son,” he’d yell when I’d make the mistake of mentioning her.

I used to make that mistake a lot, on purpose. I wanted him to tell me what happened. I wanted to know why. But all that got me was his belt across my butt and my sister screaming from underneath the Pokémon blanket I bought her for Christmas for him to stop.

I had fished that only photo of our Mom out of the trash when one night when Pop went to work. She looked pretty in that picture, wearing that coral lipstick and smiling like she loved us. I hid under my mattress and would look at it every night before I went to bed. To this day, when I close my eyes, I can still see it.

One night my sister came into my room and caught me looking at it. “You got a girlfriend?” she asked.

“Nah. No girlfriend for me.”

“Who is she, then?” my sister asked. “I like her lipstick.”

“That’s Mom,” I whispered. “That’s her.”

We sat quietly together and stared at that picture for a long time, until it was time for my sister to go to bed.

The next day, we were walking to the Food Mart, and we passed one of those guys who sells a little bit of everything. He had his wares all laid out on a Mexican blanket — you know that guy, even if you never met him. I had a few dollars in my pocket that I stole from the wad of money in Pop’s underwear drawer he thought he hid real good, so I told my sister to pick out something for herself.

“Look!” she shrieked. “I want that one!”

She was pointing to that coral colored purse. You couldn’t miss it in that mess of black and brown pocketbooks. It stood out like a sore thumb. Or a mother’s smile.

I paid the man, and it was all hers. “If Pop sees it and asks where you got it,” I said, “tell him Josie on the corner gave it to you.” She nodded, but I knew she wasn’t listening. She was too busy admiring the color of her purse.

Months went by and we started to see less and less of Pop. The underwear drawer money was gone, and so was the bottle of bourbon he had stashed under the sink. My sister came into my room at night a lot more after that, always asking to see Mom’s picture again.

“You gotta go to school,” I told her when she didn’t want to get up in the morning. “You gotta keep going.”

“It’s not fair,” she cried. “Why did they leave us? Why couldn’t we have nice parents like everybody else does?”

Truth be told, I wanted to cry too. And, of course, I had those same questions. So I did what I always did when I felt bad like that. I dug out that old photo of Mom. This time though, instead of putting it back under my mattress, I decided I’d put it in my sister’s lunch sack as a surprise for her. Then I remembered there was no food in the house to make lunch with. I still wanted her to feel better though, so I slipped it into her purse and walked her to the bus stop. We waved to one another when the bus pulled out into the street.

Later that day, my phone was blowing up, so I figured maybe the school had finally gotten wind of Pop being gone. It was the principal, Mrs. Harris.

She told me that my sister was crying, inconsolably, because she had to change seats on the bus, and when she did, she forgot to take her purse with her, and when she got to school she realized she didn’t have it.

I was sweating and everything was turning black. I tried to revive myself.

“Maybe…maybe someone turned it in,” I stammered hopefully.

“We called the Lost and Found, but they said they don’t have it. They’ll notify you if it turns up, but I wouldn’t count on it. It’s a shame because she loved it so much, but she said she didn’t have any money in it. She didn’t, right?”

“No. No money,” I choked.

“Well, thank goodness nothing of value was lost then.”

“No, no, no,” was all I could say. I closed my eyes and saw my Mom smiling as I sunk to the curb.