“Is your daddy giving you a birthday party?” Lesslie asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t have birthday parties.”
Lesslie frowns, then sits down on my bed and picks up the unwrapped box lying on my pillow. “Is this your birthday present?” she asks.
I take the box out of her hands and set it back on my pillow. “No. My daddy buys me presents all the time.”
“Are you going to open it?” she asks.
I shake my head again. “No. I don’t want to.”
She folds her hands in her lap and sighs, then looks around the room. “You have a lot of toys. Why don’t we ever come here and play? We always go to my house and it’s boring there.”
I sit on the floor and grab my shoes to put them on. I don’t tell her I hate my room. I don’t tell her I hate my house. I don’t tell her we always go to her house because I feel safer over there. I take my shoelaces between my fingers and scoot closer to her on the bed. “Can you tie these?”
She grabs my foot and puts it on her knee. “Hope, you’re about to turn five. You need to learn how to tie your own shoes. Me and Holder knew how to tie our shoes when we were five.” She scoots down on the floor and sits in front of me. She says it like she’s so much older than me. She just turned six. She’s only one year older than me because I’m almost five.
“Watch me,” she says. “You see this string? Hold it out like this.” She puts the strings in my hands and shows me how to wrap it and pull it until it ties like it’s supposed to. When she helps me tie both of them two times, she unties them and tells me to do it again by myself. I try to remember how she showed me to tie them. She stands up and walks to my dresser while I do my very best to loop the shoestring.
“Was this your mom?” she says, holding up a picture. I look at the picture in her hands, then look down at my shoes again.
“Yeah.”
“Do you miss her?” she asks.
I nod and keep trying to tie my shoe and not think about how much I miss her. I miss her so much.
“Hope, you did it!” Lesslie squeals. She sits back down on the floor in front of me and hugs me. “You did it all by yourself. You know how to tie your shoes now.”
I look down at my shoes and smile.
