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.
