“Of course Grandma left you the junk,” my cousin Brad said, tossing the heavy, rusted black Singer sewing machine onto the lawn while he clutched the keys to her three-bedroom brick home.

My other cousin, Sarah, didn’t even look up from her phone. She was already busy taking photos of Grandma’s solid oak dining set, listing it on Facebook Marketplace before the body was even in the ground.

I stood there on the grass, my arms aching under the weight of the old cast-iron machine. It was a Singer 66 with a peeling wooden base, the belt worn down to a gray thread. It was the only thing she had left me.

They got the brick house. They got the five thousand dollars in savings. They got her Buick. I got the rattling antique that skipped every third stitch.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t say a word. I just carried the heavy machine to my old Buick and put it in the trunk.

I was the one who drove out to her house every single Sunday for the last six years. I was the one who cleaned her gutters, changed her lightbulbs, and brought her the soft peppermints she liked from the dollar store.

My cousins only showed up on holidays, usually asking her for loan money they never intended to pay back. But when the lawyer read the simple will, they smiled.

In their minds, it made perfect sense. They were the successful ones with the nice suburban homes, and I was just the quiet granddaughter who lived in a rented duplex and drove a rusty car.

The night before their estate sale, I set the heavy machine on my small kitchen table. The kitchen smelled of old grease and Pine-Sol, and the hum of my refrigerator was the only sound in the apartment.

I wanted to oil the old gears one last time, just to hear it run without that awful rattling sound.

It was my way of keeping her close for a little longer.

I tipped the heavy black iron head backward, exposing the silver underside of the mechanism. The metal was covered in decades of dried, honey-colored oil and gray lint.

As I reached for my small can of 3-in-One oil, something caught the light. A small piece of yellowed paper was tucked up inside the hollow casting of the machine arm, wrapped tightly around a small brass key.

My fingers were trembling as I pulled it loose. The paper was stiff, folded into a tight little square.

When I unfolded it, Grandma’s shaky, cursive script stared back at me. She had written: “I sewed it back together. You’ll know what to do.”

Tucked even deeper into the wooden cabinet, resting in a narrow slot behind the iron drawers, was an old black cardboard ledger. It wasn’t a record of sewing patterns or alteration prices.