Maya was looking at me, her brow furrowed. “Grandma, why are you crying?”

“Because Great-Grandma was a very stubborn woman,” I said, letting out a wet, breathless laugh. “And she was very, very smart.”

I stood up, my knees popping in the quiet room, and reached for the mixing bowl.

“Come on,” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “Let’s make these biscuits. We have a lot of work to do.”

We spent the next hour measuring flour, cutting in the cold shortening with two knives, and patting the dough out onto the wooden board. I taught Maya how her great-grandmother used the rim of a rusty jelly jar to cut the round dough shapes. I hadn’t used that jar in three years, but my hands remembered the exact weight of it.

While the biscuits were baking, filling the small kitchen with that warm, buttery safety, I went to the hallway closet.

My mother’s old green winter coat was still hanging at the very back, smelling faintly of mothballs and lavender soap.

I reached into the right pocket. My fingers brushed against a small, cold brass key attached to a faded red string.

I held it in my palm for a long time, feeling the sharp ridges press into my skin.

When the biscuits came out of the oven, they were perfect. Tall, flaky, and golden brown. We ate them at the kitchen table, spreading them with the blackberry jam my mother had canned during her final summer.

Maya had flour smudged across her nose, looking so much like my mother had in the old black-and-white photos from the fifties.

“Are they good?” I asked her.

“They taste like Grandma’s house,” she said, her mouth full.

I smiled, but for the first time in three years, the pain in my chest didn’t feel like a physical block. It felt like something soft, something that had finally finished breaking.

On Monday morning, I didn’t go to the grocery store, and I didn’t call the plumber to fix the slow drain in the guest bathroom.

Instead, I drove to the First National Bank. The teller, a young woman who looked no older than my own daughter, smiled as she led me back to the safety deposit vault. The air in the vault was cool and smelled of old paper and brass polish.

I turned the key in the lock of box 114.

Inside, resting on the cold steel bottom, was a single thick blue envelope. My name was written on the front in my mother’s steady, looping script.

Inside the envelope was a passbook showing a balance of twenty-two thousand dollars, and a small, brochures of a painting workshop in Tuscany dated from three years ago. She had tucked a little sticky note to the brochure.

“They have Saturday classes,” she had written.