My mother turned and looked at me then, really looked, straight at my face, at his eyebrows and his chin and his hair that won't hold a braid. She held it for a long time. I could see what it cost her. I could see her doing it anyway.
"No," she said. "I loved her easier. That's different. I'm going to try to learn how to do the hard one."
She didn't hug me. I think she wanted to. I think she was afraid I'd pull away, and I think she was right to be afraid, because I might have. She just reached over and put her hand on the toe of my new boot, the left one, and left it there, the way Abuela had left her hand over the price sticker.
Then she went inside.
I don't know how to end this, because it didn't end. That's the honest answer. On Monday morning Abuela and my mother drove downtown together in Gordo with my old shoes on the dashboard, and I went to school, and I don't know everything that happened in that office, because neither of them would tell me all of it. I know my mother came home with a stack of forms and a gray face. I know there are letters now, with the eagle on them, that come addressed to Consuelo Arriaga, and that Abuela visits every other weekend again, like when I was little. I know that on the first of every month my mother gets a check in the mail from Moses Lake, made out in square capital letters, and that she writes a receipt on a pink pad from the dollar store and sends it back, and that the first time she did it she sat at the kitchen table staring at the pad for twenty minutes before she could write her name.
I know Abuela asked me, in December, if I wanted to come live with her in Moses Lake. She said there was a room. She said the school there was fine. She said I could think about it as long as I wanted and that nobody would be mad either way. I haven't answered her yet. Some days I want to go so badly I can feel it in my feet. Some days I come home and Sadie's at the kitchen table asking me how to spell something, and my mother is at the stove, and she looks up when I come in, and she doesn't look away, not right away, not anymore, and I think maybe I'll stay and see.
I know Sadie wore the black ankle boots for her solo. I made her. She didn't want to. I told her the shoes didn't do anything wrong. She sang "In the Bleak Midwinter" in the elementary school gym in front of two hundred people on folding chairs, and her voice shook on the first line and then didn't, and our mother cried in the second row, and Abuela, beside her, chewing cinnamon gum, said "That's my girl" loud enough that the people in front of us turned around. Brent didn't come. He called the next day. Sadie talked to him for four minutes. She didn't mention shoes.
And I know that on the Monday after Abuela came, I walked to school in my new boots, nine-tenths of a mile, through the slush on Wellesley and the gray ice at the curb cuts. At the corner of Alberta there was a puddle the size of a bathtub, the kind I'd spent all fall stepping around on the sides of my feet like a ballerina. I stood at the edge of it for a second. Then I walked straight through the middle, slowly, the cold brown water coming halfway up the boots, and out the other side.
My feet were dry. Both of them. I stood on the far curb and wiggled my toes inside the boots, and they were warm and dry and there was room in front of them to grow, and I thought about my father, who had paid into something a little bit at a time out of every check, on every roof, without knowing it would ever matter, and who had been taking care of me every third Wednesday for nine years while I walked around with tape on my shoe.
I didn't know what was going to happen to my mother. I didn't know whether I'd be in Spokane or Moses Lake next fall, or whether there'd be anything left in that account by the time I was eighteen, or whether Sadie would ever write another card to anyone. I still don't know most of that.
But I stood on that curb with my feet dry, and the school bell starting to ring up the hill, and I let myself be late, just once, just for a minute, standing there.