The Shoe List at Sunday Dinner

I opened my mouth to say she did not have to do that, that the check was more than enough. She looked at me over her glasses, and I closed it again.

Later, while the kids were fighting over who got to dry, I tried to give the check back to her. I tried to put it in her hand at the sink.

She folded my fingers back over it. “Keep it whole,” she said. “Put the shoe part on Kaitlyn’s softball fees and the electric. The shoes are mine. I want to see those feet measured with my own eyes.”

Duane walked me out to the van that evening. The kids were already buckled in, and the sun was going down orange behind Evelyn’s barn, and the frogs had started up in the ditch along the road.

“I didn’t know Ben’s size,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“I should have known that, Shawna. I should have known that before I knew what a used Honda goes for.”

I did not say anything. I did not need to. He was saying it all himself.

“I told myself it was for them,” he said. “I did. I sat in that man’s yard and I told myself, Ethan’s gonna love this, Ben’s gonna love this. I wasn’t lying to you. I was lying to me.”

“I know that too,” I said.

He nodded. He kicked at the gravel. Then he looked up at me, and for just a second he looked like the boy I married, before the bills and the layoffs and the two of us forgot how to talk.

“I’m gonna make it right,” he said.

“You don’t have to make it right with me,” I told him. “You have to make it right with them. And with her.”

He looked back at the house. Evelyn was standing in the kitchen window, drying a glass, watching us. She did not wave. She just watched.

“Yeah,” Duane said. “I know.”

That Saturday, I worked the drive-through at the branch until noon. I counted out a man’s paycheck and a woman’s social security and a little girl’s birthday money, and I thought about my children in Paducah the whole time.

I met them at the Shoe Carnival on Hinkleville Road at half past twelve.

I parked and sat for a minute, the way I seemed to be doing a lot that month, and then I went in.

The first thing I saw was Ben. He was walking up and down the aisle in brand-new sneakers, blue ones with a stripe, and he was stopping every few steps to press on the toe with his thumb, the way he had seen me do.

“Mama,” he said, when he saw me. “There’s room. Look. There’s room for my toes.”

Ethan had found the sneakers he wanted and was already arguing with the salesman about whether they came in a wider size.

Kaitlyn was on the bench by the window, lacing up a pair of black softball cleats and testing the spikes on the carpet.

“They fit, Mama,” she said when I sat down by her. “They actually fit.”

It was the first time in a long while I had heard her sound fifteen.

And then there was Rosie.

Rosie had found a pair of pink sneakers with white laces and little silver stars on the side, and she had been carrying them up and down the aisles for twenty minutes like they were made of glass.

She was nine years old and already worried about money. She had asked her grandmother three times, according to Kaitlyn, whether the pink ones cost too much, and whether the plain white ones would be better.