"It's okay," I said.
"It's not okay," she said, which surprised me. "But it's what it is." Then she stood up and took her coat off and hung it on the hook by the door and started pulling things out of the fridge for dinner, which meant the conversation was over.
I stood there for a second longer. I remember thinking that the pale pink tissue paper alone was nicer than anything I owned. Then I went and set the table, three plates, three forks, and I didn't say anything else about it, because what she'd said made sense. Brent wasn't my father. Brent didn't owe me anything. If Brent had finally, for once in his life, sent money for Sadie, then Sadie should get to have it, and I should be glad for her. That was fair. That was even right.
It's funny how much you'll accept when it comes with a reason attached. I would have argued with "no." I didn't know how to argue with "it's not mine to spend."
That night, in our room, Sadie lined up all three pairs of shoes at the foot of the bunk bed like they were pets. She was on the bottom bunk. I was on top. She talked for a long time in the dark about how she was going to wear the white ones on Monday and whether Delaney would notice, and how the boots were so warm she could probably walk to the North Pole in them, and then she said, very quietly, almost to herself, "Daddy picked these out. Mom said he looked at the pictures and picked."
"That's nice," I said.
"He remembered my size," she said. "I didn't even tell him my size."
I lay there looking at the ceiling, which was close enough to touch, with a water stain in the shape of Idaho right above my face. I listened to her breathing get slower. Then I reached up and put my palm flat against Idaho, the way I did sometimes when I couldn't sleep, and I thought about my own father, who I barely remembered, and who had never in his life looked at a picture of a shoe and picked it out for me, because he had been dead since I was four.
My father's name was Eduardo Arriaga, and everybody called him Lalo. He was a roofer. He was twenty-nine years old when he fell off the back of a two-story house on the South Hill on a Saturday in October, a side job, cash, a reroof for a man my mother knew from the dental office. It had rained the night before. The shingles were wet on the north slope. He wasn't tied off, because it was a side job and he was in a hurry and he was twenty-nine and roofers almost never tie off, which is what everyone said at the funeral, over and over, as if it explained something.
I have about six memories of him, and I don't trust half of them. I remember being carried on his shoulders at Riverfront Park, near the big red wagon, and holding onto his ears. I remember he smelled like tar and oranges, which doesn't make sense, but that's what I remember. I remember him singing in Spanish in the kitchen, badly, very loud, and my mother laughing and telling him to stop. I'm pretty sure that one is real, because I remember my mother laughing, and I didn't hear her laugh like that again for a long time.
My mother was thirty-one when he died. She had a four-year-old and a job answering phones, and they had been saving for a down payment on a house, which is why he was on that roof on a Saturday. She told me that once, when I was eleven, late at night, after a glass of wine. She said, "I'm the one who told him to take that job." Then she looked at me like she had said something she couldn't take back, and she got up and went to bed, and we never talked about it again.