The skin on the back of my daughter’s heels was worn down to a raw, weeping pink, but she would not stop counting the crumpled ten-dollar bills. She laid them out in neat rows of three across the white oilcloth, smoothing each one with her thumb.
The green shoebox sat between us on the wooden table, its lid off, smelling of old cardboard and the faint lilac soap Norma used on her hands. I could smell the distinct scent of damp grass from the yard and the chemical tang of hairspray lingering in her thick brown curls from when she had tried a prom hairstyle at her friend’s house.
“That makes two hundred and eighty dollars,” Norma said, her voice rushing ahead of her breath.
She looked up at me with her father’s eager, wide eyes, her chest rising and falling quickly. She rubbed the back of her left heel against her right ankle, a quick, dry sound under the table that made my own feet ache in sympathy.
“The champagne dress is three hundred and fifty, Norma,” I said, adjusting the thin silver band on my left ring finger.
I sighed softly, looking at the small stack of bills. It was five o’clock, and the light coming through our small kitchen window was already turning a dull, flat gray, casting long shadows across the floor.
“I can do the Henderson yard tomorrow before school,” she said, her words tumbling over one another as she smoothed a particularly wrinkled ten-dollar bill. “And the library on Wednesday night. They need someone to dust the high shelves in the back.”
“Your feet are bleeding through your white socks, baby,” I said, reaching down to touch her ankle.
Norma pulled her foot back, rubbing her heels together again. “It is just skin, Mom. It grows back. Besides, Claire says everyone is going to be wearing long dresses, and nobody will even see my shoes.”
She reached into the shoebox and pulled out another crumpled bill, this one torn slightly at the corner and held together with a yellowed piece of tape.
“Who gave you this one?” I asked, pointing to the torn corner.
