Child of My Heart Read Online Free Page B

could admire the hard pink shoes. I had tried to convince her not to wear them with socks, it was summer, after all, I said, but she had shyly insisted that the socks made the shoes more comfortable.
    There was an iridescence to them, I saw, in the sunshine of my bedroom, a bit of metallic blue beneath the pink, and when I pointed this out to her she said, delightedly, that she hadn’t noticed it before.
    “It probably wasn’t there before,” I told her. Softly, she asked me what I meant.
    “They’re changing,” I said bluntly.
    “They’re not the same shoes they were when you found them at Great Eastern. They’re not even the same shoes your mother put in the suitcase this morning.
    They’re becoming something else. I don’t know what yet. We’ll have to wait and see. Maybe by the time you go home, they’ll be all blue, or even silver. Maybe these,” I leaned over and tapped one of the turquoise gems glued to the cheap leather, “will have become real.”
    I sorted and stacked her outfits—four shorts sets, three tennis sets, a pedal-pusher set, underwear, pajamas—and then unwrapped them one by one, pulling out straight pins and pieces of odd-shaped cardboard. I had her try each one on and was dismayed to see that not only would each of them have to be ironed to get out the factory-sealed creases and wrinkles but that each was at least a size or two too big. Here was my Aunt Peg’s logic, here was evidence that her grudging sense of life’s unfairness had seeped into everything she did. She would not send her middle child out to the hoity-toity Hamptons for the summer with a suitcase full of Bernadette’s hand-me-downs.
    Oh no. (I could hear her say it to Uncle Jack, at their kitchen table, over his favorite dessert of canned fruit salad sprinkled with tiny marshmallows.) No, siree. Daisy would go with new clothes, still in their wrappers. But neither would she want me or my parents to forget that life was not easy for a transit cop with eight kids, not nearly as easy as it was for a working couple with only a daughter, and luxuries like one-season shorts sets bought from racks, not bins, were simply not in the cards for this hardworking family. The “poor Daisy” refrain had its benefits, no doubt—a few weeks in summer with one less mouth to feed, for instance, one less child to keep track of but even in her harried, downhill existence, Aunt Peg would want to mark her child with evidence of both her dignity and her practicality.
    Poor Daisy stood in my bedroom in her pink shoes and hooked two thumbs into the drooping armholes of her sleeveless tennis dress, like Mr. Green Jeans pulling at his suspenders.
    “It’s a little big,” she said, laughing at herself, at the way the pleated skirt nearly touched her knees. Beneath the white polyester cotton of the cheap dress, I could see her skinny chest with its shadowy hollows and pink nipples and nearly translucent glow. Even at eight, her skin gave off the peculiar, new-to-the-light aura of a newborn’s.
    “Let’s save it for Bernadette,” I said, and stood.
    “This way, Daisy Mae,” I said.
    Our house was so small that both bedrooms led directly into the living room, and the place where the living-room ceiling dropped down to accommodate the attic stairs delineated the extent of the dining room. A fisherman’s cottage to be sure, built in the late 1900s, we were told, with one stone fireplace and wide-plank floors and a walk-up attic that smelled of cedar and mothballs and dust, and, on sunny days such as this, the warmed breath of old wood. The stairs to it were steep and curved a little at top and bottom, and when I reached the top and leaned down to take Daisy’s hand, I could feel she was trembling.
    When she reached the last two stairs, she pulled her hand away and kind of scrambled on all fours onto the attic floor, getting, as she did, very little traction from the pink shoes. When she saw that the floor was safely beneath her, and the