Our problem has always been her love for other people’s possessions. But the day my grandmother stepped into Jimmy Ryczek’s restaurant and slid that crystal urn into her bag when she thought the waitstaff wasn’t looking, well, that was the day she handed Jimmy our lives on a brown fiberglass serving tray. Hers, mine, and that of her prize terrier, Bobo.

That’s not to say my grandmother didn’t do what she did by accident. I mean, it’s not as if the man had taken any care to notify his employees that it was the ashes of his dead grandfather inside the urn. From the day he hired me I just assumed it was cheap carnival sand art gone horribly wrong.

So as two of Jimmy’s mammoth, gun-toting shadows took out my gag and untied my hands I just had the burning desire to ask, who the hell stores the remains of their relatives in public places beside cheap plastic plants, commercial strength coffee makers and wicker baskets of clean flatware wrapped in burgundy cloth napkins? It just isn’t normal.

The reaction I got from the three-piece suits with muscles galore made me shrink back into my chair. They both glared at me and bore their teeth, not needing English lessons to recognize sarcasm.

Nevertheless, they stepped aside as ordered and let me leave with my limbs intact. The only reason they freed me was to straighten the mess my grandmother had made, with me praying her precious dog would be returned with its insides still inside.

The terrier was really the only bargaining chip they had. They couldn’t bring themselves to tie up and drag off an eighty-seven-year-old woman who can’t take three steps without a walker. I guess even mob bosses with a grudge have a sense of decency.

So there I stood on the corner of Washington Street and Genesee panting from my three-block sprint while I waited for a cab to pass. Jimmy’s last words rolled through me over and over until they stuck like a bad song. Back in two hours with the urn and the dog’s free to go. If the stopwatch on his wrist ticked off to two oh one, he’d be making a trip to the post office with the first of seven boxes, one each day until my grandmother had all the pieces of her dog back.

I looked down at my wrist realizing my own stopwatch was frozen at three minutes twenty seconds. I frantically pressed the buttons getting the countdown going again figuring it should read at least fifteen minutes. I replaced the skipping record of Jimmy’s words with my own: add twelve minutes, add twelve minutes.

Two empty cabs rolled toward me one behind the other. I waved and they both stopped. After leaping into the back seat of the one closest to me, the driver of the other rolled down his window and exchanged a few obscenities with my driver before speeding away.

“Today must be my lucky day,” I said looking down at my watch again and doing the necessary math.

The cabby just stared over his shoulder and twirled his hand around waiting for me to blurt out my destination as if it’s all he had time for. I gave him the address and he drove taking roads I didn’t even know existed. The man was a genius because he actually shaved three minutes off any route I’d ever taken.

When he stopped in front of my grandmother’s house I surveyed the surroundings keeping my head low. Along the way I hadn’t noticed any vehicles following us, but these people are professionals. If they didn’t want me to see them, I wouldn’t. Suddenly every car parked on the street was a tail. They’d watch me until I came out with the urn, they’d jump me, they’d take it back and keep the dog and sell it for all its worth. All in a day’s work.

Before I could open the door and step out onto the curb, I had to convince myself that Jimmy still thought the dog’s value to my grandmother was only sentimental. He had no idea it was a four-time best in show. He didn’t know how much he’d rake in by breeding a bitch like that. And better kept that way.

I paid the cabby enough to keep him there for at least ten minutes while I worked through my grandmother’s cryptic Polish and tried to figure out where she put the damn thing. I sprinted up the front stairs and dug the key from under the mat while I berated myself for running and hiding all those years my mother hounded me to learn my grandmother’s native tongue. I kept arguing, why the hell should I, everyone else I know talks English? When my mother took off for Arizona three months earlier, leaving me to take care of my grandmother, I realized I should’ve taken her advice.

I turned the key and pushed hard on the front door clearing the mess that was still piled up behind it. The kitchen hadn’t been touched since Jimmy’s men went through it that morning. I stepped over the tipped stack of Polish-language magazines she’d been collecting for the last fifty-some-odd years and piling in the corner by the fridge. Broken dishes and glass covered the floor all the way into the dining room. That’s where I found her sweeping up what was left of the china cabinet, a worn straw broom in one hand and her walker in the other.

I told her to put the broom down and leave it for me to clean up. She started with the foreign exclamations and incessant praying, easy enough to decipher from the relieved look on her face and tone in her voice. She hugged me and kissed my face. I sympathized with her worry and I really appreciated all that affection, but we needed to save it for later.

Taking her by the shoulders, I made a gesture that she needed to stop her chattering. I pointed to my eyes and made her listen, thinking I was about to break our thirty-year language barrier with a few seconds of intense concentration. Once I had her attention, I repeated over and over again, where is the urn, Babciu, where is the urn? I made an hourglass gesture with my hands.

She shooed my hands away and ranted on about Bobo, motioning to the spots on the floor where the dog would sleep and occasionally take a dump. For a split second, like countless split seconds before, I considered taking the thing partly to protect my only inheritance and partly to let it go to the bathroom in the back yard like every other normal dog. But she never let the damn thing out of her sight. Right after she retired Bobo, my uncle even tried to swipe it, but he didn’t make it to the driveway before she threatened to drop him from her will. An effective convincer since the house was worth more than the dog, not to mention he loathed pets to begin with.

I repeated the same question three times until she started on with a word that I actually recognized. Closet. Jimmy’s bulky boys had torn the place apart before they made off with Bobo, but there was one place they’d obviously missed.

I raced over the mess in the living room to the back bedroom which had been returned to a pristine condition. Stopping in front of the bed, I tried to imagine how she’d righted the thing. Her closet door was locked. I fished for the key in the ceramic replica of Bobo on the dresser, the same place she got it from when one of the thugs demanded the door be opened. Once I got the lock undone, I flung the door open remembering the cabby at the curb. My watch said fifty-seven minutes. I guessed I still had four of my ten minutes left, positive that at ten oh one he’d throw it into D and take off.

I reached though the rows of hanging clothes and worked my way to the back wall of the closet feeling for the hidden panel. With my face buried in a house coat that reeked of old age and Clorox I found the seam in the wall and pushed. The magnetic latch gave and the door popped ajar. I shoved the clothes to one side as far as they’d go and swung the panel as far as it’d go.

My great-grandfather had finished the room behind the closet, barely big enough inside to stand up or lie down. He used to hide fugitives and marked men during the logging strikes. That was a time when showing your face would’ve got you killed, all in the name of making a living for the family. But times changed, the trees thinned and the loggers moved on. The room, empty for decades, eventually became my secret playland until I discovered girls and recreational drugs.

When I got the door open, the first time in years, I saw my grandmother had made it her own, a treasure chamber of sorts. A final resting place for all the things, other people’s things she couldn’t live without.

The little room still had no light inside. There was just enough from the bedroom to give shadows to all the stuff she’d been taking since before I was born. She’d amassed herself quite a collection. Dolls, books, jewelry, purses, tea cups, pens, stuffed animals, clothes, eyeglasses, silverware. Her own private rummage sale. Much of it with tags still attached, having come right off the store shelves.

I was tempted to browse, take it all in, items and designs and labels I’d never seen before, but my curiosity waned when I saw her collection of wrist watches. I looked at my own and calculated how little time I had left on both meters, the cab’s and Jimmy’s. I kept my eyes alert for that particular hourglass shape. When the urn wasn’t obvious in the dimly-lighted areas I started feeling around in the dark spots, careful not to knock anything over.

Down in the corner I felt something hard, glass. It was tall, with a cover. I reached with my other hand and lifted it into the light. It was unusually heavy and remembered Jimmy going on about genuine blah blah crystal. As I white-knuckled it and worked my way out of the closet, all I could wonder is how my grandmother got this dead weight into her bag so carefully, so furtively, without dropping and smashing it into a million pieces right in front of a busy lunch crowd.

I carried it like a time bomb through the living room and into the kitchen. With my elbow I cleared a space on the counter and put it down. She was right on my heels still going on and on about Bobo and pointing to the urn accusingly, as if she felt ripped off by the exchange, dog for urn.

I rode to the peak of anger and blame as she talked. Then with a raised hand, I hushed her and barked one of the ten Polish words I could half pronounce, quiet. I’d had enough. What’d been part of my grandmother’s quirky personality got me dragged out of work and gagged with a gun in my face just an hour before. I no longer wanted this responsibility of watching out for her. Her rightful place was under my mother’s roof, in Arizona, regardless of how fed up my mother had become with her need to steal something every time she leaves the house.

Digging through the wicker basket on the window sill, one of the few things in the entire house not tipped over and emptied, I pulled out two rubber bands and secured the cover to the urn by wrapping the bands over it and twisting them around the handles. I stared through the glass at the dark remains of Jimmy’s grandfather feeling relieved that I’d found him. The man was now safe in my care.

Without another word to my grandmother I stepped out onto the front stoop with the urn coddled in my arms like a newborn. What I didn’t find waiting for me at the curb made my stomach go sour. By my watch I should’ve still had a minute and a half on the cab meter, and now less than an hour on Jimmy’s. Add twelve minutes, I remembered. Dammit. I was down to as little as forty before Bobo got divided into sevens.

Just inside the porch door was the old dry sink. I opened the top drawer and fished for the keys to the Buick hoping my uncle left them behind before he went away. If not, they were doing five to seven for burglary along with him, sealed up inside some padded envelope marked personal possessions. I began to chastise my grandmother’s modus operandi, wishing she’d hoard what mattered. Like keys to her own damn car.

But there they were, way in the back. And behind the house was the car half-covered by a tattered blue vinyl tarp, the 1978 Buick trashcan. The wet weather had refinished it a rust color. The holes in the body looked like bed sores. At this point though I didn’t care if it had bullseyes painted all over it, so long as the engine would turn over.

I opened the passenger door and threw the junk from the seat into the back which was already chock full of old Playboys, spare car parts and fast food wrappers. With the urn snug against the damp fabric of the passenger seat I wrapped the seatbelt around it and buckled it in. I climbed in the other side, closed my eyes and turned the key. The engine gave a few slow grunts then turned, and me so grateful that three months without my uncle hadn’t completely killed it. I threw it into gear and tore up the lawn until I hit dry pavement. I waved to my grandmother who was standing on the threshold of the door yelling in Polish as if reminding me not to forget to buy eggs.

I wasn’t even going to try to backtrack the cabby’s route, sure that I’d get lost. I still had time, so I took the M-13 the whole way right into downtown. At the first light, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the sign for Washington and Genesee. Bobo was three blocks away. I pressed down on the brake, eyes fixed on the yellow light as it changed to red. My foot went down, and down, right to the floor. The car kept going and the rear of the Mercedes stopped at the light got closer and closer.

I turned the wheel to the right just missing the rear corner of the Mercedes. A quick, proud smile overtook me just before I went up over the curb and slammed into the metal light pole. I felt my left thumb jamb into the dashboard and bend back to my wrist. My teeth cut the inside of my cheek as my face caught the steering wheel. Smoke began to cloud my view of the light pole which was now part of the hood. The pole broke and fell on top of the car sending the long green Genesee St. sign right through the roof over the back seat.

I swallowed a mouthful of blood and winced as I tried to move my thumb. Broken, but otherwise I was in one piece. With my good hand I reached down and pressed the seatbelt button realizing only then that I’d never put it on.

I turned to the passenger seat—empty. The seatbelt was still attached, but the urn was now on the floor, lid hanging off by one busted rubber band. The knocking that started on my window didn’t break my stare. I was focused on the fine gray powder that used to be Jimmy’s grandfather now in a fairly neat pile on the mud-caked floor mat.

The knocker outside my car window was now jiggling the handle trying to get in, but at some point I had locked the door. All I could do was raise up my broken hand and give him a wave. He must have noticed my twisted thumb because I heard him say he’d call the paramedics.

I finally caught my breath, stolen less by my collision with the steering wheel than seeing the spilled urn. I dove into the passenger seat, grabbed the urn with my good hand and started scooping up Jimmy’s grandfather with the bad one.

But there was something in it. The ash wasn’t just ash. It wasn’t mud or dirt or rocks. This was something different, something round. I lifted the pile with both hands and let the ashes sift through my fingers until all that remained was a small black cylinder. Rolling back onto the seat, I held it up. A plastic 35mm film canister. I popped the cover off and dumped the contents. A key, one of those with a round orange head made to open a locker. I turned it around and inspected it. The only markings on it was the number 40 and below that an impression of a greyhound in full stride. The bus station.

At first I shook my head at the added absurdity of hiding a key inside the ashes of a relative stored on a restaurant shelf, but I had to stop and consider the necessity. No one in their right mind would disturb a container of ashes. So if Jimmy was hiding a key in there, it had to be for something important, something he didn’t want anyone to find. Absolutely never find. So what do mobsters hide? My first guess: dead bodies. No, not in a bus station locker. But my second, yes, that was it. Money. And lots of it.

I sat up and looked out the window for the first time at the man still working at the handle. He motioned to the lock and I reached over with my good hand and pulled it up. The door swung wide and he began grilling me about my welfare and saying the police and ambulance were on the way. In the distance I could hear the approaching sirens.

At most, I had thirty seconds to decide. I glanced back at the urn still lying on its side on the passenger floor then looked down at the key. The closer the sirens got, the less Bobo was worth to me. I’d never been sold on inheriting the dog anyway, regardless of its value. Jimmy, he could keep it. With what had to be stuffed inside the bus station locker, I’d buy my grandmother ten prize dogs, after I got her down to Arizona.

I slid out of the car and walked toward the rear of the Mercedes, the same one I’d nearly hit, now parked and running just ten feet away. Its driver was still asking me mundane questions of name, date, year of birth, anything to reveal the level of damage, or lack thereof, to my brain. I circled around his car and hopped inside. Confusion kept him from making any attempt to stop me as I threw it into gear and tore through a red light back to the M-13.

There were at least fifteen people in line for tickets. I looked down at my watch, added twelve, and figured I was nearly sixteen minutes overdue. A quick survey of the otherwise empty bus station did little to ease my edgy nerves. But I told myself we were safe for now. We had to be. At this point, Jimmy’s men wouldn’t be watching me, they’d be charging me, dragging me off, shooting me in the knees. Whatever it took to get that key back.

My grandmother was still going on in a kind of Polish I’d never heard before. She was most likely contesting the way I’d hurried her out of the house and stuck her into a car I’d never be able to afford in three lifetimes. She also was surely trying to get the full story out of me about her dog and my mother. The only explaining I had patience for was I needed to get her down to Arizona and that her dog was fine, although it did little good between my meager Polish vocabulary and her inability to shut up and listen to anything I was attempting to say.

I helped her to the chairs near the coffee station, poured her a cup of decaf with my one good hand. My damaged hand had stiffened into a claw by now. She kept pointing at that too while she asked her questions. I just motioned for her to stay put. I’d given up using words, so I followed up by pointing to the row of lockers on the far wall where I had to get the money to pay for the tickets. She swore at me—that much I was sure of—as I took off across the station lobby.

I looked at my watch again, now out of nervous habit. Late is late, I kept saying, and all I could focus on was getting us on the bus before the bullets started flying. But as I got closer to the row of lockers, the anticipation started to go to work on me, shortening my breaths and quickening my steps until I broke into an uncomfortable and obvious trot across the tile floor.

The loud clap clap clap of my shoes in the otherwise quiet station made me realize that smart men don’t make scenes in public. The least obvious way for Jimmy to take me out would be with a high-powered rifle and scope, from a distance where the shooter would never be found.

I had the key out of my pocket now and raised it up, my hand shaking. The numbers attached to the top row of lockers went by twos. As I passed twenty eight I started counting out loud in Polish. Funny how stress can compel the brain to remember things you thought you never learned. I got to forty and braced myself for the crack of glass and immense pressure on the back of my head from a bullet. Any second now.

I gathered my scrambled thoughts, but not before experiencing a two-second loss of bladder control. I put the key in and turned. The tumblers fell into place and the door unlocked. I took as deep a breath as I could and pulled on the handle. An infantile whine escaped my throat as I anticipated the splatter of blood painting the beige wall of lockers. It was coming at any moment. I took a quick glance over my shoulder at my grandmother, some wordless final farewell, but my promise of bullets turned up empty.

The locker—that turned out to be full, but not with a bag of money. I started rummaging through the jewelry, stacks of credit cards, tarnished silver trinkets, picture frames, all part of an assortment of things my uncle had been stealing. He was keeping a smaller version of my grandmother’s treasure chamber while he waited for the house and the room behind the closet to become his own. And he hid the key in the last place he thought anyone would look—inside a film case on the floor of his trash-filled car.

I fished through the locker noticing some of what he’d taken even belonged to my grandmother, including a framed photograph of them with my mother when she about my age. One happy family all leaning on the hood of a brand new Buick. My mother was the only one not smiling.

I found a blue checkbook near the back, the leather one I’d given my grandmother for her birthday with her initials inscribed on it. I hurried back, helped her to her feet and tried to explain without much luck that we needed to get in line.