Part 8

PART 6: The Other Shoe My father drove to Cotter Springs. After a tornado, volunteers do something most people never see on the news. They go through the wreckage and pick up every small, ordinary thing they can find. Backpacks. Lunch boxes. Library books. Coats. Then they lay it all out on long folding tables, so families can come and claim what's theirs. In Cotter Springs, the tables were set up under a big white tent in the parking lot of the First Methodist Church. Forty tables. Hundreds and hundreds of children's things, still wet, still covered in pink insulation and mud. A church lady named Mrs. Abbott told me about it later. "He showed up at seven in the morning," she said. "In a blazer and good shoes. He asked if there were any children's sneakers, and I said, honey, there are about four hundred. He said that was fine. He had all day." He walked those tables for six hours in the rain. Mrs. Abbott said he never once complained. When other families came looking for their own children's things, he helped them too. He found a little boy's dinosaur lunch box and carried it all the way across the tent to the boy's mother. He picked up every pink shoe he found. He checked the size. He checked the inside. He set each one down again exactly where it had been, so he wouldn't mess up somebody else's search. At a quarter past one, on the thirty-second table, under a soggy green raincoat, he found it. A small pink sneaker. Left foot. And inside, written on the tongue in purple marker in Jess's handwriting, two letters. L.L. Mrs. Abbott said he sat down right there on a folding chair in the parking lot and held it against his chest for a long time. She brought him a cup of coffee. He thanked her. She said his hands were shaking too hard to drink it. He walked into Lily's hospital room at four o'clock that afternoon, still wet, with mud on his good shoes. He didn't say a word. He just held it up. Lily screamed so loud that two nurses came running. Then she laughed. Then she cried. Then she laughed again. She made him put it on her good foot, even though it was the wrong foot, and she laughed at how silly it looked. Then she made him take it off again and put it in her lap, next to the other one, so she could look at them both together. Matt told me later she slept with them on her pillow for a week. That evening, my father found me in the hallway by the vending machines, buying a cup of terrible coffee. "Erin," he said. "Dad." He looked at the floor for a while. Then he looked at me. "I called you an embarrassment," he said. "In front of thirty people. You walked in wearing your brother's blood, after you carried my granddaughter out of a collapsed building, and I said that looking at you embarrassed me." "Yes," I said. "You did." "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know how to fix that one." I thought about my mother's letter. About fifteen years in a car outside a funeral home. About how long it takes to undo something like that. "You don't fix it, Dad," I said. "You just start showing up. And you keep showing up. And one day you look back and it's fixed." He nodded slowly, like a soldier taking an order. That was six months ago. Every Monday since, my father has driven two and a half hours north to Cotter Springs. He eats lunch at the counter of the diner where Jess works. She pours his coffee. He leaves a tip that's much too big, and she lets him. Then he picks Lily up from school, and they go get ice cream, and he drives the two and a half hours home again. He hasn't missed one Monday. Not one. Last month, I walked into his house for Sunday dinner and stopped in the front hall. On the wall, across from the door, where everyone sees it the minute they walk in, my father had hung a framed picture. That newspaper photograph. Me in the mud and the floodlights, carrying a little girl in one pink shoe. Under it, there's a small brass plate. He had it engraved. "My daughter."