Memory Reconstruction

“Remember when we found money in your mom's closet.” Azeezah says while laughing.

“OMG! Yes and then it magically disappeared the next day.” My stomach hurt just from thinking about it.

“I swear your mom probably thinks we thought it was fake.”

“She’ll never find out that we knew it was real. We were good children because I wanted to stash it.” I said while picking up a box and running to hide it as if it too had money in it. Azeezah just laughs at me.

“Yeah right.” Azeezah rolls her eyes, but not in disbelief.

My cousin and I used to play dress up in our mom's closet all the time. We would open all the shoe boxes and walk around almost breaking our ankles.

“Oh, I wonder what that is.” Azeezah pointed at the big purple box.

“I don’t know, but let's open it” I went towards the box in an attempt to open it.

“Wait, Kemba, I think we should….” Azeezah trailed off.

“You think we should what..?” I looked up at my cousin.

“I want to open the box.” Azeezah folded her hands over the big overcoat.

“Yea..No, but we can do it together.”

“Fine.”

“One… Two… Three” Azeezah and I both counted together and when we opened the box we found what we liked to call cash. I’d never held money in my hand. I was too young to even have money. The money wasn’t crisp, but it wasn’t old either. The money smelled clean which made no sense at the time. We didn’t know what to do, but we both knew this was our secret.  We laugh about it to this day. We were children then six and seven years old, acting like we were nine and ten. It still amazes me how finding my moms money makes us laugh. I mean it is funny, but it shouldn’t be a secret. We keep it that way because anytime we dressed up we would secretly go looking for money or anything of value not knowing that the clothes we put on were worth so much more than we thought.