I got down off the counter. I sat in the chair across from her, the one with the wobbly leg. Abuela pushed her own chair back, with a scrape, and then she did something I'd never seen her do in my life. She got down on the floor. On her knees, on our kitchen linoleum, in her husband's jacket. It took her a while. I heard both her knees pop, one and then the other, like knuckles. She put one hand on the table edge to lower herself, and then she was kneeling in front of me with her face at the level of my lap, and she took my left foot in both hands and set it on her thigh, the way a shoe store man used to do when I was little, back when we went to shoe stores.
"Abuela," I said. "You don't have to."
"Shh."
She untied the lace. She took her time. She pulled the shoe off my foot, and she held it up in front of her face and looked at the tape the way she'd look at a cracked part, turning it. Then she found the end of the tape with her thumbnail, which was short and square and permanently dark at the edges from forty years of engine grease, and she started to peel it off.
It made a long, sticky ripping sound. Nobody said anything. My mother was standing very still by the counter. The tape came off in one long, curling, silver strip, and Abuela didn't throw it away, she laid it on the kitchen table, flat, sticky side down, like evidence. Then she held up the shoe and opened the hole with two fingers. The smile in the toe opened up like a mouth. She pushed her finger through it, all the way, so her fingertip came out the front of the shoe and wiggled.
"Hm," she said.
She put the shoe on the table, right in the middle, next to the strip of tape.
Then she took my sock off. I didn't want her to. My foot was fine that morning, I hadn't been outside yet, but it was still my foot, long and pale, and there was a red line across the top of the toes where the too-small right shoe had been rubbing, and on the left foot a red line too, and the beginning of a blister on the back of the heel where the tape had rubbed when it peeled. She looked at the blister. She pressed her thumb gently along the top of my foot, feeling for where my toes were, the way you'd feel a melon.
Then she reached over for the cardboard. She unfolded it on the floor beside her. It was the side of a box, a big plain brown one, and on it in black marker in her square capital letters, someone had already written CONNIE—BRAKE PADS—HOLD. She flipped it over to the clean side. She took a fat black marker out of the inside pocket of her jacket, uncapped it with her teeth, and said, "Stand up. Put your foot here. Weight on it."
I stood up on one leg. I put my bare foot on the cardboard. She traced around it, slowly, pressing the marker close against my skin so it tickled, around the heel, up the long outside, around each toe. When she was done, she did the other foot. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at the two outlines on the cardboard, side by side.
"Eight and a half," she said. "Going on nine. Your father was a ten and a half by the time he was fifteen. You're going to have his feet, mija, God help you. You know what size that shoe is?"