The Sneakers That Brought Him Home

The Piggy Bank

To understand what happened in that principal’s office, you have to go back about two weeks, to an ordinary Tuesday when I walked into my daughter’s room to put away laundry and noticed that the ceramic pig she had kept on her dresser since she was seven years old was gone.

Rhonda is twelve now, and she has always been the kind of child who notices things other kids her age walk right past. When she was six, she gave her mittens to a boy at the bus stop who did not have any, and came home with red, bare hands and a look on her face like she had done something perfectly ordinary. When her father passed, four years back now, in an accident at the equipment yard where he worked that I still cannot make myself describe in detail even now, Rhonda was eight years old, and I watched a piece of her childhood get taken from her overnight in a way no parent ever wants to watch happen to their child.

What did not get taken, though, and what I have thanked God for more times than I can count, was that soft, watching part of her. The part that clocks who is left out at recess, who does not have a coat when it turns cold in October, who is quietly going without something the rest of us take for granted.

“Where’s your pig, baby,” I asked her that Tuesday, standing in her doorway with a stack of folded shirts.

She did not look up from her homework right away. “I moved my money somewhere safer,” she said.

I should have pressed her on it. I think about that a lot now, how easily I let it go, how a working single mother learns to pick her battles and this one did not look, on its face, like a battle worth having. I had rent due and a truck that needed a new alternator and a daughter who had never once given me a reason to distrust her. So I said okay, and I went back to folding towels, and I had no idea that my daughter had been quietly saving every dollar that came her way for nearly five months.

Birthday money from her grandmother. The two dollars I would slip her for helping carry groceries in from the truck. Money she earned raking leaves for our elderly neighbor down the road, a woman everyone in town just calls Mrs. Garner, who Rhonda has helped every fall since she was old enough to hold a rake steady. Loose change that most kids would have spent on candy at the Marathon station the same day they got it.

Ninety four dollars, all told, sitting in a shoebox under her bed instead of in the pig on her dresser, because as she told me later, she was afraid I would ask her what it was for before she was ready to tell me.