When Dad and I went to Dallas for Mom’s funeral, Dad gave me his own disposable camera with twenty-four photos. I took two pictures from the window of the plane. I remember thinking that it looked as if animals made of diamonds were floating in water and breaking when they collided with each other.
I used the rest of the camera to take pictures of Mom in her coffin. She was wearing a tight white dress and pink-orange lipstick. There was a garland of lilies on his stomach. In the envelope with Mom’s photos under my bed, I have five photos of her when she was alive and twenty-two photos from her disposable camera when she died.
I don’t remember the church part of the funeral very well, but I do remember the part where everyone saw mom’s body. There was a large air-conditioned room with green and purple carpet and a long line of people in black clothes walking past the mother in her dead body while she was still alive.
A woman said she was my aunt. She gave me a box of cheap crayons that would break if pressed too hard. She took me to a corner of the room where there were sandwiches and small bottles of water and made me search for the words behind the funeral program. They were all words I didn’t know, like “consolation” and “angel.” The only “heaven” I knew was because of the pawn shop.
Aunt held my hand and showed me an exhibition of photos of Mom when she was a little girl, cutting a big chocolate rabbit, driving, holding a parrot on her shoulder and laughing. I kept waiting for aunty to say that mom looked like me, but she never said so, although mom looked exactly like me in some pictures. Then Auntie had to help put out more trays of sandwiches for everyone, and then she had to stand in a line by Mom’s coffin while people hugged her and cried. I also wanted to hug everyone present there, but when I went to stand near aunty, she made me search another word and asked me to sit on a folding chair away from the people who were hugging.
Then someone said it was time to take a family photo. Papa took the sandwich and went to the other room. He knew that no one wanted to see him in the picture. The women went to the bathroom to wipe under their eyes, where their makeup had become smeared due to crying. I went with them, even though I wasn’t wearing any makeup. A photographer set up a big light and had everyone stand against the wall – tall people in the back, short people in the front. I went ahead and stood up. Aunty placed her hand on my shoulders to get some glimpse of the camera. Then she whispered to me, “Can you go over there for a second, darling?”
I sat on the floor near the photographer and looked at everyone else smiling like they weren’t in the same room as a dead person and like they hadn’t left me, their literal family, out of their family photo.
Until then, I had not cried even once the whole day. When people gave speeches about mom and it seemed like everyone was supposed to cry, I tried to make my eyes water by putting my finger on them, but it didn’t help. As I sat alone on the carpet under the flashing lights of the photographer, I finally felt tears welling up in my throat. This was a bad time to cry. Everyone was standing in a queue and looking at me. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, just like Kayla had taught me to do when I had to stop myself from crying at school. My breathing continued the same and I set out to find Papa.
“can we go?” I had said.
“You didn’t want to be in the family picture?” He said.
“No, they didn’t want me to be like that,” I said, and then I finally cried. Father didn’t even say a word. He picked me up. This happened when I was so small that he used to carry me in his lap a lot. He walked me to the car and we drove to Denny’s, which didn’t have any other people in it.
While we waited for our food, Dad made me a card house out of sugar packets. I kept putting him down when I tried to help, but he never got angry. He just kept rebuilding it and he kept letting me help. Eventually it became so big that it took up half the table. We took more sugar packets from the table next to us and built small houses around the main house. Dad made up a story about how he and I lived in the big house, which was a castle, and we owned everyone else’s little houses. There was a pink wing of the castle for me and Kayla, a blue wing for Dad, and a brown wing for Aubrey and Gizelle. When the waitress brought our food she became angry at us.
He said that it is unhygienic for us to put our fingers on sugar packets.
“Then we’ll buy them,” said Dad. I remember thinking he seemed like a really rich guy. We also looked like rich people, because Dad was still wearing his black suit and I was wearing a black dress and tights with a ribbon in my hair and Paradise Pawn’s new bracelet. I didn’t understand money then. I knew we spent a lot of money on plane tickets and I was a little worried about how we were going to buy all the sugar packets, but the look on the waitress’s face made me happy. She was very surprised. I thought he thought he had two millionaires at his Denny’s.
While Dad ate glazed eggs and sausage and I ate French toast sticks, the waitress gave us a little box for all our sugar packets. We carefully separated the castles and houses, placing pink sugar packets in one corner of the box, blue in another, yellow in another and brown in another. Then we sat in the car and we drove to a hotel parking lot.
“Go out,” said Dad, “and get your sugar packets.” He looked at his watch and started counting down from ten. Pink fireworks burst into the sky, then golden, twinkling, dripping fireworks, then fireworks in the shape of smiling faces. It was the most fireworks I have ever seen in my life. They were Six Flags fireworks, but I thought they were just for me. Dad tore a pink sugar packet and gave it to me. I put it in my mouth and it felt as if my teeth were full of sweet sand. After I gathered everything, Dad opened another package for me.
“Are you happy?” Dad yelled at me over the blows.
“Yes!” I screamed. Then, when the sound subsided and the sugar in my throat melted, I remembered that my mother had died and that I shouldn’t have been happy. I was still wearing my black clothes. I was sweating through my underwear and I had spilled sugar on the velvet of my dress.
“why did you do this to me?” I asked Dad when we got back to the car.
“What is the plan?” He said.
“Cheat me to be happy. I should be sad.”
“Babe, no you’re not. You’re eight years old,” he said. “No eight-year-old should be sad.”
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From heaven pawn By Meg Richardson. Copyright © 2026 Meg Richardson. An imprint of Zendo, LLC Reprinted with permission from Tin House
