KEEP THE OLD
My gramma was rich—proper rich. I never saw her without her obscene strand of pearls (she never let a Thanksgiving pass by without shoving them into some poor in-law’s face) and those dainty lace gloves that she never took off even though they were mottled yellow and crumbled if you pulled at the loose threads a little too hard. That’s how we knew she was proper rich because she told us that rich people like to keep old things—the fancy closets (or, ah-mwahs, like she used to say before they stuffed her full of tubes), the faded china, the tattered tigerskin (Gramps shot it twenty-seven years ago and died a week later and left her his fortune) in front of the fireplace that dark all year-round.
Poor people like to keep new things, she’d say, flicking her head and then I could smell the wilted flower scent that clung to her tighter than her sagging skin, just look at them asking for more money when they’re off sporting those gaudy handbags, and then she’d make us all pinky-promise her to never be poor because she’d leave us her fortune.
The money from her side had stemmed from the short-lived Californian gold rush and then her grandfather ran up to New York and made it big in the newly-built obelisks of concrete and steel. Gramps’ fortune was old money, she said, you are descended from noble blood and don’t you ever forget that, you hear me?
She told us stories about the attic full of jewelry and bonds and heirlooms and patched our scrapes up and snuck us treats because despite everything else, she was a good gramma. Generous to a fault and spoiled us all rotten, imported Belgian chocolate tunneling into our baby teeth. Because if there was anything Gramma was, it was dependable.
We could always depend on her to come bail us out of a county jail at two in the morning after a rager or float us through a rough month where we had blown through thousands in a bad roll of the dice.
There was a saying among us grandkids: luck wasn’t on our side, but Gramma sure was. No fortune followed her through life (apart from the money that she ended up with—heaps of it) and that was common knowledge: husband dead after ten years, four squalling children dressed by maids with stiff upper lips, a summer house burnt down. Gramma was fierce and not always right, but she made it. And she always stood by what she said: even plugged up to half a dozen machines that she could not name, she was still fighting to keep the old until her very last breath.
Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese teenager who has lived in Malaysia all her life. Her current favorite self-descriptory adjective is “culturally-confused.” She has been previously published in The Heritage Review and the bitter fruit review. When she is not overthinking things, she can be found binging Doctor Who or playing the flute.