Quickly, I pull out the orange vinyl bag from the back. As I’m taking the manila folder, my hand brushes against what feel like lumps of candy in a zippered compartment. Inside I find a velvet string bag. When I spill the contents onto the floor, there it is: a gold and pearl and ruby-studded choker. Earrings. Bangles. I had forgotten what Ammi told me: Find the jewelry. Sell it for a good price.

Since when did my mother have such expensive things?

I twist from the floor, all of me electric, fearful.

“What’s up?” Carlos stands in the hall, holding Kamal’s duffel bag.

I stuff the choker back into its bag and shove it, along with the bangles, into a zippered compartment in my backpack.

“We have another stop.”

Mr. Mehta’s eyes glint with pleasure as he strokes the choker draped in his palm. “Very nice!” He wedges in his eyepiece to examine all the pieces, fingering every filigreed bit. “Your mother must have had a very big wedding.”

“Not really. My parents were like—” I want to say: Activists. Students. Progressive. He’s busy weighing the jewelry, punching at his calculator, then he swivels it around to show the number: fifteen hundred dollars. “Cash,” he adds.

The floor seems to float under my feet, imagining all that money. Tucked in my bag are the bangles, just in case.

I agree, folding the bills into my wallet, then I watch him lift the jewelry, press a buzzer, and disappear into a back room. I feel a swipe of loss, for something I didn’t even know was mine.

Part 3: Connecticut

Chapter Ten

Okay, so this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Me, my little brother, and this guy Carlos on the road in search of some phantom uncle who will sign the form tucked in my backpack and save the day. Save us? What does that even mean? All I know is I can’t go back to the shelter. I steer our car out of its parking spot, up Coney Island Avenue, toward the Brooklyn Queens Expressway ramp. Kamal’s in the back, happily eating greasy pakoras he and Carlos bought while I went to the jewelers.

“We could pick up a few fares,” Carlos jokes, pointing to my mom’s decal.

“Yeah, right.”

“You know, I got a license too,” he says.

“How’d you get that?”

He smiles. “In Connecticut, where we lived before, it’s not so hard to get one. Comes in handy, right?”

“Right,” I say with a laugh. This Carlos guy thinks of everything.