10. Ten minutes before ten, the funeral home invoices an estimate like a weather report: grief showers; today's chance of mourning, 100%. I open my grandmother's purse. The zipper is a mouth that tamed secrets. Inside the faux leather: menthol lozenges, starlight mints, a folded Lotto ticket, safety pins, and tucked in the coin pocket, a plastic card she never swiped. "Sense and cents are the same word if you cook them long enough," she'd say, stirring noodle soup like arithmetic. As a girl, her family crossed an ocean to outrun pogroms that burned the zippers off parkas. Philadelphia became home; she lived over her father's shoe parlor, which laced into a corner grocery. She learned that leather scraps gave way to oranges, onions, and herring in barrels. "Pickles may be sour, but hard work churns dollars." "If you arrive with holes," she said, "you learn to thread new patterns."

 

9. Nine lilies layer a vase, white as receipts. On hold, I listen as the El train grinds over Market like an adding machine. My grandmother refused interest as strongly as she resisted instant coffee. "The only one charging for my time is me," she'd explain. In 1939, Social Security added wives and widows as dependents. "Dependent tastes like appendage," she'd say. Linens for cash. She was on no ledgers, said her retirement would be stories and a pantry that respected gravity.

 

8. Eight cousins text from three time zones: love you, what do you need, emojis blink like slot machines. "Trust but never too much," she'd caution. My grandmother never used credit, though she carried layaway stubs (mostly Woolworths; sometimes Gimbel's) like mezuzot for luck. In the 1950s, local department stores offered a charge plate with her husband's name stamped on it; she kept one under the tablecloths. "If I can't sign my own life," she said, "I won't sign his." She measured flour with a coffee cup and paid cash for every ounce of sugar. On Fridays, she stuffed celery with schmear, lit candles in jelly jars, and called the flame "the only interest worthy of respect."

 

7. Seven bills in the mailbox, one soft from rain. I remember her table lessons: break bread with the rough side down; don't let a man convince you a price is a favor. The Equal Pay Act arrived in 1963; she wrote the year on an index card and pinned it above the stove between recipes for stuffed cabbage and desire. "Laws are promises with teeth," she'd say, "you still have to chew." At her Formica counter, she taught me to cut coupons and to say no without blinking, even to sales of Revlon cosmetics.

 

6. Six times, the funeral director says, "We can set up a payment plan." His tie looks expensive in a low-interest way. My grandmother once received a Diners Club card from an aunt who worked coat check and swore by cashmere, but she returned it with a note: I prefer home. In 1974, when banks could demand a husband's signature for a woman's credit, my grandmother hissed about it over onions, slicing fast. When the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, she rode the bus to a bank with a red logo and asked for a card with her name only. "The clerk looked at me like I'd asked for the moon as a garnish," she told me. "They said yes. I said thank you. Then I put the card in my pocket and paid cash for everything just to be petty." Not all years were pretty. Told her youngest son suffered a heart attack while sailing, she knew truths turn like dimes on concrete. 

 

5. Five photos stall time by the window (the sun and her youngest son still missing): my grandmother in a kerchief, stern; a borrowed wedding hat, almost smiling; finally laughing at a grandchild waving a wooden spoon. She married a sailor who never learned to swim, a superstitious man who survived the Atlantic. After the war, he opened a fish store that also sold vegetables: carp, fresh dill, tomatoes stacked like stanzas. They'd play cards in the backroom, where the floor held the scent of brine forever. When casinos opened in Atlantic City, they took the bus with rolls of quarters; she preferred the nickel slots for their manners. "In wartime," she said, palming a 1943 steel cent she called her emergency moon, "money changes what it's made of. People, too."

 

4. Four voicemails from a mother who hadn't spoken to her own in as many years, each a different storm system. "Do the right thing." "Listen." "She wouldn't want a fuss." "She wanted a fuss." I'm hungry for more of her. Her last recipe card has grease-ghost corners and block letters: Funeral, pay with plastic in my pocket. The woman who swore off interest wants the funeral charged. On the card's backside, her name is embossed like a quiet victory. Was it not that she despised credit, but that she denied all pressures to conform?

 

3. Three tries at sleep; three times the past keeps the light on. My grandmother loved facts salted correctly. "Coinage changed in 1965, silver replaced by a mediocre sandwich." She collected pre-'65 quarters in a tin we weren't allowed to shake. When I brought home my first paycheck, she had me hold the paper to my nose. "Smell that? Trees. You can't spend a forest badly and expect forgiveness." She taped the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act date to the fridge with masking tape and said, "No man gets to decide if a baby is debt." On Yom Kippur, she calculated apologies like interest and paid them in words.

 

2. Two women in our family signed mortgages before thirty. Two others hid cash in books because their mattresses bled disharmony. My grandmother taught me the ECOA meant the bank had to look at her numbers, not her measurements and that the Women's Business Ownership Act made loan officers stop asking to speak to a man. She never opened a restaurant; her business was a kitchen, and the recipe for all dressings a secret, but she lifted the newspaper high the day that law passed and said, "We baked cakes without ovens; imagine us with keys."

 

1. One decision left. The key to the final leg of her journey. The funeral home takes checks, cash, or card. I take the plastic from my grandmother's purse and think of all the signatures she wasn't allowed to give. She taught me to cut pie according to hunger; to never confuse thrift with lack; to tithe sometimes in secret; and to exercise every right to vote. "Sometimes," she admitted, "I said no to things just to make sure I could." Was this card her dare? Her last joke? Or a way to turn a lifetime of cash into a lingering laugh. 

 

0. Zero interest for thirty days, the receipt promises like a lullaby. But zero is also a circle, which is a kind of crown, also the shape of a mouth saying Amen. I press the card to the counter and say her name; the young man behind the register does not look up. The machine chews and nods. Approved. The paper curls warm as a cookie from my grandmother's oven.  I sign, not as a dependent or appendage, not as someone asking a husband's ghost, but as the granddaughter of a woman who carried plastic like a protest she alone could perform. When the lilies droop, I'll compost them. When the bill arrives, I'll pay it. When I get home, I'll tuck the card back in her coin pocket with a steel cent, a pre-'65 quarter, a subway token, and a Lotto ticket that never found redemption. Sense and cents are the same word if you cook them long enough; tonight, I feed the math. Tomorrow, I count what remains: her stories, our receipts, the fish-store ledger still faint with salt, and a name embossed on a line that was waiting all along.

 

Credit, with no expiration date.