PART 1
Alejandro loved his guitar more than anything.
Once, we bought him an expensive guitar for his birthday, and he spent hours playing it every day.
Recently, I walked into his room to collect some dirty laundry and noticed that only the guitar stand was there.
The guitar itself was gone.
I searched the entire house but couldn’t find it anywhere.
So I waited until Alejandro came home from school and asked him:
“Sweetheart, where’s your guitar?”
He lowered his eyes and said:
“I sold it, Mom.”
I was ready to get angry.
But before I could say anything, Alejandro explained that there was a girl in his class named Elena.
He told me that her old wheelchair was practically falling apart.
She could barely move the wheels well enough to get from one classroom to another.
The seams were coming apart, and the metal was covered in rust.
Then he added:
“The other kids laughed about it, but I couldn’t just ignore it. I knew her parents couldn’t afford a new wheelchair.”
I knew Elena, but I had no idea her family was going through such a hard time.
I was proud of my son.
The next morning, a loud knock echoed through the house.
When I opened the door, TWO POLICE OFFICERS were standing there.
One of them greeted me, looked me in the eye, and asked:
“Are you Alejandro‘s mother?”
At that moment, Alejandro stepped out of his room and froze when he saw the police.
Then the officer continued:
“Ma’am, we need you and your son to come outside.”
My stomach dropped.
I grabbed Alejandro‘s hand and asked:
“What happened? What did my son do?”
The officer cleared his throat and replied:
“Ma’am, don’t you know what your son has done? YOU NEED TO HEAR THE TRUTH.”
The officer kept talking, and I felt the air leave my lungs…
PART 2: The Sacrifice
The morning the police came to my door, I thought my son had done something terrible. That was my first mistake. My second was assuming I’d known the full story a few nights before, when I walked into Alejandro‘s room with a laundry basket on my hip and noticed the empty space by his desk.
His guitar was gone.
“Alejandro?” I called.
“Yeah, Mom?” he yelled from the kitchen.
“Where’s your guitar, son?”
“Mom,” he said, appearing in the doorway to his room. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you…”
“Alejandro, what’s going on?”
He lowered his eyes. “I sold my guitar, Mom.”
“You did what?!” I set the basket down on the floor because my hands had gone weak. “Why would you do that? That guitar meant everything to you.”
He swallowed hard. “It did. But Elena needed a new wheelchair.”
I just stared at him, completely stunned.
“Her old chair was barely working,” he said quickly, the words rushing out of him. “The wheels kept sticking, and she kept pretending she was fine, but she wasn’t. She missed lunch twice last week because it took too long for her to get across the building.”
“Alejandro…”
But I couldn’t get a word in. Once he’d started speaking, there was no stopping him.
“Her family doesn’t have money for a new one right now,” his voice got smaller, filled with a heavy empathy. “So I sold the guitar.”
I sat down on the edge of his bed without meaning to. Elena was his classmate. She was a sweet girl with sharp eyes and a lovely smile, and she always had a book on her lap when I picked Alejandro up from school events. She had been paralyzed after an accident when she was little; I knew that much. But I didn’t know her chair had gotten that bad.
“How did you even do this?” I asked.
He shifted nervously in the doorway. “I posted the guitar online. Mr. Keller from church bought it.”
