"Oh." A pause. "When are you getting new ones?"
"Next month."
"Is your dad going to send money?"
It was the kind of thing she said sometimes, because she was eight and because she didn't really understand, deep down, that my father wasn't somewhere else the way her father was somewhere else. To her, dads were people who lived in other towns and called on your birthday. She knew mine was dead. She'd been told. She'd seen the picture on our mother's dresser, the one of him in his Carhartt hat squinting into the sun. But she'd never had a dad who was all the way gone. She didn't know there was a difference between a dad who wouldn't call and a dad who couldn't.
"No," I said. "He can't."
"Oh. Right. Sorry."
"It's okay."
"You can have the boots when my feet grow," she said. "Wait. No. Your feet are bigger. That doesn't work."
"It's okay, Sade. Go to sleep."
She was quiet for a while. Then, just as I thought she was out, she said, very softly, "I'm glad Daddy remembered my size," and then she was asleep, the way little kids fall asleep, all at once, like a light going off.
I lay in the dark with my palm on Idaho for a long time, listening to my mother's bathroom fan through the wall. I thought about my grandmother's voice on the phone, the mechanical silence, the way she'd asked what day it was. Wednesday. Thursday the nineteenth. I didn't know why the date mattered. I knew it mattered to her, which meant it mattered.