The Girl With Mismatched Shoes
The first time Lucy showed up at my door, I almost sent her home. She was forty minutes late, her hair half-pulled into a lopsided bun that had given up somewhere between her apartment and mine, and she was wearing one white sneaker and one black flat. Not as a fashion statement.
She genuinely had not noticed. She stood in my doorway holding a backpack with a broken zipper, slightly out of breath from the stairs, and she said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Calder, the bus was — ” and then she looked down at her feet and went quiet for a moment before finishing, “I’ll be on time next time.”
I thought: this girl is going to burn my house down.
I hired her anyway, because I was desperate, and because my neighbor had vouched for her, and because something in the way she looked at my daughters in those first five minutes told me she was going to be kind to them. You can usually tell. Children know it first.
My youngest, Sophie, walked straight up to her and said, “Your shoes don’t match,” and Lucy said, “I know. I was running late and grabbed the wrong ones. Which do you like better?” and Sophie thought about it seriously and said, “The black one.” Lucy pulled off the white sneaker and handed it to Sophie.
“Hold onto that for me,” she said. “I’ll need it later.”
Sophie carried that shoe around for the rest of the afternoon like a treasure. That was five years ago.
Lucy was sixteen then, a junior at the high school three blocks away, already raising a toddler on her own with help from her mother and a schedule that would have collapsed most adults. She babysat for us three afternoons a week, then four, then five. She became part of the furniture of our lives, part of the rhythm, the person who knew where we kept the extra batteries and how Sophie liked her grilled cheese and which of my daughters needed to be held when they cried and which needed to be left alone.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
