"Daddy?" Sadie said.
Everything on the other end of the line stopped. The wind, the clanking, all of it, like he'd put his hand over the phone. Then it came back, and his voice was different again, high and fake, the princess voice.
"Hey! Hey, princess! Hey, is that you? Hey—"
My mother moved. She moved faster than I had ever seen her move. She crossed the kitchen in two steps and snatched the phone off the table and fumbled with it, trying to find the button on a phone she didn't know, and I heard Brent say, tinny and far away, "Jo? Jo, what the hell is going on, why is—" and then she found it, or found something, and snapped the phone shut, and the kitchen was silent.
She stood there with Abuela's flip phone closed in her fist. Her face was white. Not pale. White, like paper.
Sadie stood in the middle of the kitchen in her tan boots, holding the card with THANK YOU DADDY on the front, each letter a different color. She wasn't crying. She was looking at our mother. She was looking at our mother the way you look at a word you thought you knew how to spell, after somebody tells you it's wrong.
"Mom," she said. "Who bought my shoes?"
My mother didn't answer right away. She looked down at the phone in her hand like she didn't know how it had gotten there, and she set it on the table, carefully, next to my shoe. Then she crouched down in front of Sadie, so they were eye to eye, the way she did when Sadie was small and had fallen off something.
"I did, baby," she said. "I bought them. Me."
"But you said Daddy."
"I know."