My mother-in-law told me I was raising a soft little brat and said, “Give me Jazmin for spring break and I’ll hand you back a real granddaughter.” I’m a widow, I was worn out, and I let my fifteen-year-old go. Four nights later a deputy called me at 3:40 in the morning and wouldn’t say why.
Her dad’s been gone three years. Jazmin is all of him I have left.
Since the funeral Arlene had said it to anybody who’d listen: I never raised her RIGHT.
The pink hair set her off. So did the braces I was paying off at forty-two dollars a month.
“She needs one week with somebody who SAYS NO,” Arlene said in my kitchen, her keys already in her hand.
I didn’t want to. I said yes anyway, because maybe I had gone soft.
Jazmin packed one duffel and the green spiral notebook she’d carried everywhere since August.
The house went quiet.
Wednesday, 3:40, my phone lit up on the nightstand while a moth kept hitting the lampshade.
A man said he was Deputy Quiroz with the county.
“Your daughter’s here at the sheriff’s office, ma’am. You need to COME NOW.”
I said, “Is she okay?” and he said, “Just come down here.”
I put my shoes on the wrong feet and had to start over on the stairs.
From the driveway I called Arlene seven times. Voicemail, every time.
Fairbury is forty minutes away. I made it in twenty-eight.
Inside, tube lights buzzed and the floor squeaked under my sneakers.
Quiroz walked me down a hallway that kept going past where it should have ended.
At the end was a door with a small square of glass in it.
Jazmin sat on the other side, alone at a steel table, shoulders up by her ears, pink hair hanging over her face.
No duffel. No notebook.
I grabbed the handle.
Quiroz stepped in front of the door. Down by his leg he held a clear plastic bag, and the green cover was inside it.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Before you go in there, I need you to SIT DOWN AND READ what she wrote at your mother-in-law’s house.” ⬇️
The folded corner
I didn’t sit. He didn’t make me.
He took me into an office across the hall with a desk, a box of tissues and a calendar from a towing company. He put the bag on the desk and slid the notebook out.
“She folded a page,” he said. “She said start there.”
The corner was folded down hard, the way she folds library books after I’ve told her a hundred times not to.
At the top, in her handwriting: Night 2, Sunday, 8:40 pm.
Grandma put a typed paper and a pen in front of me at the kitchen table. It says Mom leaves me alone overnight and doesn’t keep food in the house and spends Dad’s money on herself. Grandma said if I sign it I can live here for good, and Thursday she’ll drive me to the courthouse to sign it again in front of the clerk. I said I’d read it in bed. I copied it here word for word. I did not sign it.
Under that was a page and a half in her careful print. I, Jazmin Munro, age 15, state that my mother…
I read it to the end. Then I read the part about food again, because there were three kinds of cereal in my pantry and she had picked out every one of them.
“She walked here,” Quiroz said. “From your mother-in-law’s place on the north end. That’s two miles. She came in at 2:50 and asked for whoever was in charge.”
“Why didn’t Arlene call me?”
“I was going to ask you that.”
He reached over and turned the pages back. Past the spring break entries, past March, past Christmas, all the way to the front.
The first entry was dated August 9. It had one name in it, and the name was Arlene’s.
Dollar General, August
She bought that notebook herself, a dollar twenty-nine, the week before school started.
I was behind her at the register with a cart of loose-leaf and glue sticks, and she held up the green spiral one like a fish she’d caught.
“Dad had this kind,” she said.
He did. Her dad kept a green spiral notebook on the dash of his truck for six years. Gas, mileage, and every phone call with the insurance people, with the time and the name of whoever he talked to.
“If somebody’s jerking you around, Jazzy,” he used to say, “write down the time. They hate the time.”
She was twelve when he died. I didn’t know she’d been listening.
After the funeral, Social Security started sending a survivor check for her. Eleven hundred and eighty dollars, the third of every month, made out to me as her payee.
I have never spent a dollar of it. It goes straight into a savings account at the credit union with her name on it, and I don’t touch it. Not for the car, not for groceries, not for the braces. The braces come out of my own checking at forty-two dollars a month, because that account is for after. College, or a car, or a first apartment with a lock that works.
Arlene knew about the check. The Christmas after the funeral she asked me across her own dining table, between the ham and the pie, “What do they send you for her?”
I told her the number. She’d just buried her son.
She nodded and passed the rolls.
Arlene is the woman everybody at First Methodist calls first. A casserole when you’re sick, a card on every birthday, a twenty-dollar bill folded small and pressed into Jazmin’s hand at the door, every visit, for fifteen years.
At the funeral lunch she stood up in the fellowship hall with a paper plate in her hand and told the room, “I will ALWAYS be there for that girl.”
People still say it to me at the gas pump. Your mother-in-law, what a blessing.
Last Easter I went into her kitchen for ice and there was a stack of envelopes on the counter from Fairbury Savings and Loan, the top one stamped in red. She came in behind me, slid the whole stack into the drawer with the dish towels and said, “Junk.”
That fall her brother Donnell paid to have her roof done. At church she told everybody she’d saved up.
I sat down in the chair across from Quiroz and read August 9.
Aug 9, 7:15 pm. Grandma called. She asked how much the Social Security is for me. I said I don’t know. She said, “Your mother knows. Ask her what she does with it.”
Under that, in a different pen: Dad said write down the time.
Quiroz let me finish. “She said you’d know what that means.”
4:52 in the morning
“Okay,” he said. “You can go in now.”
Jazmin didn’t get up when I opened the door. She just lifted her arms off the steel table like she was five, and I bent down into them. Her hair smelled like Arlene’s shampoo, the one in the pink bottle she’s bought since the eighties.
“I didn’t sign it,” she said into my shoulder.
“I know. I read it.”
“I left my bag. The zipper’s loud. She was asleep in the recliner with the TV on and I didn’t want the zipper.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“She took my phone Saturday. In the driveway, before you were even gone. Rule one, she said.”
Two miles in the dark, down the shoulder of Route 9, with the notebook under her sweatshirt.
Out in the hall the vending machine hummed. Somebody had bought every bag out of it except the Funyuns.
At 4:52 the front door buzzed, and I knew the heels before I saw her.
Arlene came down the hallway in a burgundy cardigan with her hair done. She’d had time to do her hair. She held her purse in front of her with both hands, the way she holds a hymnal.
“Oh, thank God,” she said to Quiroz. Not to us. “I woke up and that bed was empty and I have been sick, Deputy. I mean sick.”
“I called you seven times,” I said.
“My phone was charging in the other room.” She looked at Jazmin through the square of glass and her mouth went small. “She runs, you know. That’s half of what I’ve been trying to tell her mother. Runs off in the middle of the night and doesn’t even call her own mother. What does that tell you about that house?”
“She didn’t have a phone, Arlene. You took it.”
Arlene didn’t answer that. She opened her purse, and Jazmin’s phone was right on top in its cracked purple case. She moved it aside to get at a manila folder underneath.
“I want this on the record,” she said, and handed the folder to Quiroz. “I filed Monday. There’s a hearing Friday at nine. I’m her grandmother and I have every right.”
He opened it. Petition for Appointment of Temporary Guardian of a Minor. The Fairbury clerk’s stamp in the corner, and Monday’s date.
Monday. Jazmin had been at her house two nights.
“We’re going home,” I said, and I went back in to get Jazmin up from that table.
“Ma’am.” Quiroz put his hand flat on the door. “I’ve got a filed petition and a fifteen-year-old who walked in here alone at three in the morning. I have to call the county intake line before anybody leaves this building. That’s the rule.”
Arlene sat down on the hallway bench and crossed her ankles.
“Ask her,” she said, “where she was the night of January twelfth.”
January twelfth
Quiroz looked at me. He didn’t have to ask it out loud.
The furnace went out the first week of January. The man from the heating place stood in my basement and said thirty-one hundred dollars like he was sorry about it, and I didn’t have thirty-one hundred dollars that wasn’t Jazmin’s.
So I picked up two overnight shifts. The twelfth was the first one.
That afternoon I called Arlene and asked if Jazmin could sleep at her place. She said she had the altar flowers in the morning and couldn’t. I asked Donnell’s wife. She had the flu.
So Jazmin stayed home with the doors locked and her phone on, and she texted me every hour until midnight. I got home at seven with gas station donuts and she was asleep on the couch with every light in the house on.
“Yes,” I said. “January twelfth and January nineteenth. She was home by herself. Arlene knew, because I asked her to take her and she said no.”
“I had the altar flowers,” Arlene said.
Quiroz wrote it down. The twelfth and the nineteenth, the furnace, the donuts. His pen kept going after I’d stopped talking.
That’s the thing about telling the truth to a man with a clipboard. It goes on the clipboard.
“Donnell will tell you,” Arlene said from the bench. “Donnell drove me to the clerk Monday. Donnell knows where that money’s been going, he’s not blind.”
Quiroz didn’t look up. He turned to the petition’s second page, then the third, and stopped there and read it with his lips pressed together. Then he held it out to me.
“Have you seen this part?”
I hadn’t seen any of it.
The first two pages were what Jazmin had copied into the notebook, dressed up in court words. Respondent is frequently absent from the home overnight. Two nights in January had become frequently. Respondent has used the minor’s benefits for her own household expenses.
Page three was a different kind of list. It was what Arlene wanted.
Temporary guardianship of the minor through the end of the school year.
And under that, in its own paragraph, that she be appointed representative payee for the minor’s Social Security survivor benefits, effective immediately, and that all funds currently held on the minor’s behalf be accounted for and transferred to the guardian.
All funds currently held. The credit union account.
Thirty-six deposits, the third of every month, since her dad died.
Night four, 1:30
Back in the room, Jazmin had her forehead on the steel table.
“Can I have it?” she said to Quiroz. “For one second. I’ll give it right back.”
He thought about it. Then he took the notebook out of the bag and set it in front of her, and kept his hand on the desk next to it.
She didn’t open it to the folded page. She went to the last page with writing on it, turned the notebook around and pushed it across to me, and looked at the wall.
Night 4, Tuesday, 1:30 am. Woke up for water. Grandma is on the kitchen phone with Uncle Donnell. She said, “I don’t want the girl, Donnell. I can’t do a teenager at my age. I want the payee letter. The judge signs Friday, the bank gets the back payments by the fifteenth, and she goes home to her mother Saturday and nobody’s the wiser.” Then she said, “Kristen’s sitting on forty thousand dollars of my son’s money.”
I’m writing this in the bathroom with the fan on.
And under that, the last line, the letters bigger than the rest:
2:05 am. I’m going.
I read it twice. The second time I could hear Arlene’s voice saying it, because I’d heard her say nobody’s the wiser over cards a hundred times.
The red stamp on the envelope. The roof Donnell paid for. August 9, the very first call, and the very first question had been how much.
Give me Jazmin and I’ll hand you back a real granddaughter.
She’d meant to hand her back on Saturday either way.
“She doesn’t want me, Mom,” Jazmin said to the wall. “She wants the letter.”
I reached across and put my hand on top of hers, and she let me leave it there.
“I wrote down the time,” she said. “Dad said they hate the time.”
Quiroz had read it over my shoulder. He bent down so he was level with her.
“You heard her say Saturday? You’re sure?”
“Saturday. And nobody’s the wiser. She says that one a lot.”
He wrote it down. Then he straightened up and looked at me.
“My report goes to the court by noon, and this goes with it,” he said. “What I can’t show a judge is what you did or didn’t do with that money.”
I already had my phone out.
“Then bring her in here,” I said.
6:10 in the morning
He brought her in. Arlene took the chair across from us and set her purse on the steel table, and she started talking before she was all the way down.
“I don’t know what she’s told you. She’s fifteen, Deputy, she writes stories in that thing. She writes stories about everybody. Half the girls at church have a notebook like that and none of it’s true.”
I opened the credit union app and put my phone on the table and turned it so it faced him.
Thirty-six deposits. Eleven hundred and eighty, eleven hundred and eighty, eleven hundred and eighty, all the way down the screen. Not one withdrawal. A balance of forty-three thousand and change, in her name.
Then I opened my own checking and scrolled to the orthodontist. Forty-two dollars, forty-two dollars, forty-two dollars.
Quiroz scrolled with one finger. He took his time.
“That’s a screen,” Arlene said. “Anybody can make a screen say anything.”
“I can have the credit union print it when they open at nine,” I said.
“You can have them print whatever you want.” She turned to Quiroz. “Do you know what I got when my son died? A folded flag and a mortgage. She got his house and his checks and a new furnace, and I’m supposed to clap? I raised that boy by myself. I worked the lunch line at the elementary twenty-two years so he could have braces. Nobody sent ME eleven hundred dollars a month.”
“Mrs. Munro,” Quiroz said, “your granddaughter wrote down a phone call.”
“She was asleep.”
“She wrote the time on it. One-thirty.”
“Then she was eavesdropping in my house at one-thirty in the morning and that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.” Her voice went high and then came back down. “Do you know what the bank sends me? Do you know what it’s like at seventy to open the mailbox and see FINAL in red ink? Forty-one years in that house. Forty-one years.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’d have sent her back,” Arlene said. She said it to me, like it should count for something. “Saturday. I’d have sent her back to you fed, with a decent haircut, and nobody would have lost one thing. Not one thing. You’d have got your girl and I’d have kept my house.”
Jazmin was looking at her now.
“You were going to make me sign it in front of the clerk,” she said. “Thursday. That’s today.”
Arlene opened her mouth and closed it.
Quiroz stood up. He told her the notebook and the typed statement were going to the court with his report, and that a statement an adult wrote out for a minor to sign was something the county attorney would probably want to see. He said it the same flat way he’d said that’s the rule to me.
“You’d do this to his mother,” Arlene said to me.
“Give her the phone back,” I said.
She dug it out of her purse and set it on the table. Then her hand went back into the purse, and it came out with a twenty-dollar bill, folded small, the way she’d folded it for fifteen years.
She held it out across the table to Jazmin.
Jazmin kept both hands in her lap.
Arlene put it down next to the phone and picked up her purse and went out, and the floor squeaked all the way down the hallway.
The twenty stayed on the steel table. Nobody picked it up.
Sunday, my kitchen
On Friday we were at the Fairbury courthouse at 8:30 with everything printed. At 8:50 a clerk came out into the hallway and told us the petition had been withdrawn. Donnell never came.
A woman from the county came to the house the next Tuesday. She was nice about it. She opened my pantry and my refrigerator, wrote some things down and asked Jazmin a few questions with me in the other room. They closed it two weeks later. January twelfth is still in a county file with my name on it.
The green notebook is still in Fairbury too. Quiroz said they’d send it back when the county attorney was done with it.
Jazmin bought a new one. Same Dollar General, same green, a dollar twenty-nine.
That Sunday the phone rang while I was doing the dishes and it was Arlene.
“Let me come by after church,” she said. “I’ll bring a ham. We’ll sit down in your kitchen and talk like a family.”
“No,” I said.
“She needs her grandmother, Kristen.”
“No, Arlene.”
I hung up and dried my hands. Jazmin was at the table with the new notebook open to the first page and a pen in her hand.
“What time is it, Mom?”
“Six-fifteen.”
She wrote it down.
If there’s a kid in your life who writes everything down, buy them the next notebook when this one fills up.
For more family drama and hard-won reckonings, read the groom who barred his grandmother from the door, the stepsister who tore up a job offer, and the father whose toast left one child out.
