While my grandmother lay d*ing, my parents and sister never visited — not once — and at her fun*ral they mocked me for inheriting nothing but a cedar music box.

He brings his own coffee and sits on the porch and does not talk about his brother, and I have decided that is enough.

The portrait is gone.

I took it to a dealer in Ridgeline who buys oil paintings, and he gave me eleven hundred dollars for it, and I found, driving home, that I felt nothing at all about a picture that had put me at the edge of the frame.

In its place is a photograph.

Just two people.

Grandmother, at the store’s register, 2003, mid-laugh, one hand on the same drawer that had scratched her bracelet nine years earlier — and me, age six, on the counter beside her, holding a roll of receipt tape like a trophy.

Bernadette found it in the safe.

It was under the cake recipe.

On the back, in the pencil my grandmother used for inventory, a single line I didn’t see until I went to frame it.

“The one who stays gets the store.”

The safe is still behind it.

I keep two things in it.

The real bracelet, on Sundays, when I’m not wearing it.