The Yellow Shoes

Chapter 1: Adoption day

The shoes waited on the kitchen table for three days.

They were small enough to fit in one of Daniel’s hands, pale yellow with narrow straps and silver buckles that caught the morning light. Nora had placed them beside the fruit bowl on Sunday evening, after checking the size twice and making Lily walk from the refrigerator to the back door and back again.

“Do they pinch?” she had asked.

Lily shook her head, though she always shook her head when she thought something had cost too much.

Now it was Wednesday, adoption day, and the shoes still looked too clean for anyone in their house. Everything else carried some mark of living: the table had a white ring from a hot saucepan, the fruit bowl had a hairline crack, and one kitchen chair bore a stripe of blue paint from the summer they moved in. Even the walls had fingerprints at Lily’s height.

Nora stood at the counter spreading peanut butter on toast. Outside, rain tapped against the window above the sink. The August sky was the color of dishwater, and the maple tree in the yard kept shaking its wet leaves as if trying to wake itself.

“Mom,” Lily called from upstairs, “does this count as a court dress?”

“If it covers your bottom and doesn’t have a dinosaur on it, probably.”

“It has one tiny dinosaur.”

Daniel looked up from the coffee maker. “Judges love dinosaurs.”