"You said he looked at the pictures. You said he picked."
"I know I did."
"Why?"
My mother opened her mouth and nothing came out of it. I watched her try. I watched her look for a reason the way you look for your keys in a bag, digging, and come up empty, and dig again. Finally she just said, "Because I wanted you to have something from him," and her voice cracked down the middle like a plate.
Sadie looked down at the card in her hands. THANK YOU DADDY. She looked at it for a long time. Then she said, in a small, practical voice, the voice of a kid putting something together, "What about the bike?"
My mother closed her eyes.
"The bike at Christmas," Sadie said. "And the headphones on my birthday. The purple ones. You said those were from Daddy too."
My mother didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
Sadie stood there for another second. Then she sat down on the kitchen floor, right where she was, and she unzipped the left boot, the tan one with the cream fleece cuff, and pulled it off, and unzipped the right one and pulled it off, and she pushed them both across the linoleum toward me, with her sock feet, hard, so they skidded and tipped over against the leg of my chair.
"They're Noemi's then," she said.
"Sade," I said. "They don't fit me."