The one thing he held onto was the sneakers.
He wore them every day. Rain, mud, cold, it did not matter. Those shoes went on his feet every morning with the same deliberateness that I imagine a person puts on something they have decided is necessary for survival. He never asked to wear them anywhere specific or made a ceremony of them. They were simply what his feet wore now, and they wore them as though the shoes were continuous with his skin, as though removing them might remove something else along with them.
I understood it. I had a sweater of Jacob’s that I slept with in the bed. Understanding it did not make me any more certain what to do when, nine months after the fire, the soles finally gave out.
Not gradually, the way shoes usually wear. All at once, the way things in our life had been going, the right sole peeling away cleanly from the upper and then the left one following within a day, both soles hanging open like mouths. I told Andrew I would get him new shoes. I did not tell him that my waitressing job had ended the previous week, my manager having delivered the termination with the apologetic explanation that I had been seeming too sad around the customers. I did not argue with him. He was not entirely wrong about the sad, and the argument would have cost energy I did not have.
Andrew looked at the ruined shoes and then at me, and then he went and got a roll of duct tape from the kitchen drawer. He held it out like a solution.
“We can fix them,” he said.
I wrapped the soles as carefully as I could, pulling the tape tight and overlapping the edges the way Jacob had always overlapped tape when he was sealing something he wanted to hold. I used a marker to draw little patterns on the tape so it would look less like a repair and more like a design choice, though I was aware even as I was doing it that children would not be fooled by this, that children were among the least foolable audiences available for anything.
I watched him walk out the door the next morning and told myself the things you tell yourself when you are doing the best you can with what you have. That it would be fine. That kids would barely notice. That what mattered was what the shoes meant to him, not what they looked like to anyone else.
I was wrong.
He came home that afternoon so quiet that the quiet had its own weight, a different quality from his usual composed silence. He walked straight past me to his room without speaking. I gave him a minute and then another minute and I was about to knock when I heard it, that specific cry that parents know from the first time they hear it and never forget, the cry that comes from somewhere deep and involuntary, the cry that has nothing left to manage itself with. I went in and sat beside him on the bed and waited. He was clutching the shoes against his chest.
It came out in pieces, the way things do when a person has been holding them in long enough that the holding itself has become exhausting. The other kids had pointed. They had laughed. They had said the shoes were trash and that we belonged in a dumpster, and some of them had said it in the particular offhand way that makes casual cruelty worse than deliberate cruelty, as if they were simply reporting a fact about the natural order of things. Andrew had sat through it and not said anything and had come home and made it to his room before it was too much.
