She came in backwards, pushing the door with her hip. She had three big paper bags with twisted paper handles, the kind you get from the nicer stores at NorthTown Mall, not the plastic ones from the discount places. She set them on the kitchen table, which was also our dining table and our homework table and the place where the mail piled up, and she said, "Sadie-girl, come here a second," in a voice I hadn't heard her use in a while. It was a happy voice. It was almost a singing voice.
Sadie came. I came too. I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room with my left foot still pink from the bathtub, in two pairs of socks.
There were three shoe boxes. The first one was white with a red swoosh and inside it, in a nest of tissue paper, were white leather sneakers with a pale pink lining, the exact ones half the girls in Sadie's class had been wearing since September. Sadie made a sound I can only describe as a squeak. The second box was taller, and in it were winter boots, tan suede with a cream-colored fleece cuff and a thick rubber sole with deep treads, the kind that are warm to a hundred below. The third box was flat and black, and in it were shiny black ankle boots with a little block heel and a zipper up the side, for the winter choir concert, my mother said, because Sadie was singing a solo verse in "In the Bleak Midwinter" and you couldn't sing a solo in sneakers.
Sadie put on all of them. One pair at a time, one after the other, walking up and down the kitchen in each pair, the white sneakers squeaking on the linoleum, the boots thudding, the little black heels clicking. My mother sat in her chair with her coat still on and watched her with her chin on her hand, smiling, and for a minute she looked younger than I had seen her look in a year.
I want to say I was happy for Sadie. Some part of me was. Most of me was standing in the doorway in two pairs of socks doing math.
I knew roughly what shoes cost. I had stood in front of the wall at the sporting goods store with my birthday money and looked at those same white sneakers and looked at the price and put them back. A hundred and ten dollars. The boots were more than that. The black ankle boots were less, maybe sixty, maybe seventy. I added it up in my head and got a number close to three hundred dollars, and I thought about the fact that two weeks earlier, when I had held up my left shoe in this same kitchen and shown my mother the smile in the toe, she had looked at it and sighed and said, "Noemi, I can't right now. There's no money. Tape it."
So I taped it.
When Sadie went into the bathroom to look at the black boots in the full-length mirror on the back of the door, I said, "Mom."
She knew what I was going to say. I saw her know it. Her smile went somewhere behind her face, and her shoulders came up a little inside her coat.
"Those are from Brent," she said, before I could ask. "He sent money for Sadie's shoes. It's his money, for his kid. I can't spend it on you, honey, it's not mine to spend."
I said, "Oh."
"I know," she said. "I know your shoe. I've seen your shoe. Just wear them another month, okay? After the first, things'll loosen up. One more month."