The Purple Rain Boot

The boot was stuffed. Something was jammed down into the toe, so tight the rubber bulged at the front where Poppy's little foot should go.

I didn't touch it at first. I stood inside my door and looked at it sitting on my chair in the stripes of light, and I thought about bombs, which is a crazy thing for a grandmother to think about a child's rain boot, and I knew it was crazy, and I thought it anyway. That's what six months does to you.

Then I stepped out into the hall and caught Tamika by the sleeve.

"Who put that boot in my room?"

"Oh." She looked relieved, as though she'd been waiting for me to ask. "Your daughter-in-law. She came to the front desk about three-fifteen. Didn't want to come back, said she wasn't on the list." Tamika lowered her voice. "She said Poppy left it in the car and she'd want her grandma to have it. I didn't think it'd hurt."

"Did she say anything else?"

Tamika thought. "She said to make sure it went on your chair. Not the bed. The chair." She shrugged. "I figured she knew you'd sit there."

I shut my door. I sat down on the end of the bed with the boot in my lap, and I worked my fingers down inside the shaft, and I pulled out a wad of paper folded over and over on itself into a hard little square.

Manila. The heavy, cheap kind they give out at every day camp and every Sunday school in America. I unfolded it on my knee one crease at a time, and the whole time my fingers were shaking so badly I tore one corner.

It was a crayon drawing.

A kitchen. I knew it was a kitchen because there was my table with the checked cloth, drawn in red squares, and there was my window with a yellow sun in it. On the right side of the paper there was a big white box with its door hanging open and blue scribbles coming out of it, the way a six-year-old draws cold.

And standing at the white box was a man.

He was drawn big, bigger than the refrigerator, a brown stick body and a round pink face with a brown beard scribbled all over the bottom half of it. On top of his head, pressed so hard into the paper that the crayon had flaked, was a hat. Bright orange. The only orange on the whole page.

In his hand was a circle with little jagged teeth hanging off it, and a red dot dangling from the bottom.

Keys. My keys, with the red plastic Lakeside Market rewards tag I've carried on that ring for nine years. She'd even drawn the tag.

Down on the shelf of the white box sat a brown square, and next to it, in careful block letters that went downhill, a word. ICE CREM.

In the doorway on the left side of the page, very small, peeking around the frame, was a girl with yellow pigtails and purple feet.

Across the top, in green crayon, in letters of every size:

DADDYS TRIK ON GRAMMY. SHHH.

The afternoon went on without me. The stripes moved off the chair and onto the wall.

I thought about Easter. My son standing in the rain, pressing the button on my spare key, telling me in his nurse voice that I'd given it to him. Then the butter pecan. A photograph taken before seven on a Wednesday morning, when he'd sworn to me he was three hours away in Springfield. Six minutes on Route 5. Rhonda Fitch's cheerful voice. Contingent on the guardianship order, the way we discussed.

I'd been hanging every piece of it on Brynn, because Brynn was the one I could stand to lose.

There wasn't any Brynn in this picture. There was a big man in an orange cap at my freezer, holding my keys, and a little girl in the doorway watching him do it.

I turned the paper over.

On the back, in a grown-up's ballpoint, in the bubbly round hand of a teenage camp counselor, it said: Poppy H. 6/10. Kitchen Helpers!

June tenth. The same morning. The same date printed in little gray numbers along the bottom of Exhibit C.

Wednesdays that summer, Brynn opened the dental office at seven, and Wade dropped Poppy at day camp on his way to the shop. He'd have had her in the truck at six forty-five. He'd have stopped at Grandma's first. And he'd have told her, laughing, that it was a game. A trick on Grammy. Don't tell. Shhh.

And she didn't tell. That's what broke me, finally, sitting on that flowered quilt. For four months that baby kept her promise to her daddy. She never said it out loud. Not in June, when I was crying in my kitchen. Not on moving day, when I begged her through the glass. Grandma didn't do it, I saw, and then she looked at her mother and closed her mouth, because that was as far as a promise let her go.

She didn't say it. She drew it. She's six. That's what six-year-olds do with the things too big for their mouths.

I pressed the paper against my chest and I cried the way I hadn't let myself cry since the funeral, with my mouth open and no sound coming out, rocking on the end of that bed. Not for the house. For him. For my boy in his orange cap, holding my keys over his daughter's head so she could see the trick.

When I could hold the phone steady, I called Gil.

He listened to the whole thing without interrupting. When I got to the back of the paper, the counselor's date, he said a word I'd never heard him say in eleven years of being neighbors.

"Where is it now?"

"On my lap."

"Put it somewhere nobody would look. Not your suitcase. Wade's guardian, he can go through your things." He was quiet a second. "Lottie. How did it get to you?"

"Brynn left it at the desk."

Silence.

"Brynn," Gil said.

"In the boot. She told the girl to put it on my chair." I looked at the chair. "Gil, what does that mean?"

"I don't know." His voice was careful again. "It might mean she's scared and wants out. It might mean she's cutting him loose to save herself. People do that, when a thing's about to go bad. They make sure they're standing on the right side of the courtroom when it does."

"She signed the affidavit."

"She did. And there's something else." Paper rustled. "Lyle filed his witness list Friday afternoon. Three names for the petitioner. Wade Haskett. Denise Holloway."

He stopped.

"And Brynn," I said.

"Brynn Marie Haskett. Petitioner's witness. She's testifying for Wade on Thursday, Lottie. Under oath. About you."

I looked down at the drawing. At the little girl in the doorway with purple feet.

"If I give the judge this," I said slowly, "they'll want to know where it came from. They'll ask Poppy."

"They might."

"They'll put a six-year-old on a stand and make her tell a room full of strangers that her daddy's a liar. Or they'll say I coached her. Or they'll say Brynn cooked it up, and Brynn will get up there under oath and say whatever Wade tells her to say, and it'll be my granddaughter's word against both her parents." I heard my voice start to crack and I let it. "And if I don't give it to the judge, I lose the house and I die in this room."

Gil didn't answer. There wasn't an answer.

I sat in the green chair after we hung up, with the drawing folded back into its hard little square and tucked inside the pillowcase under my head. Four more days until the hearing. Four days to decide whether to save myself with the one thing in the world that would make my granddaughter choose between her father and me, while her mother sat on the other side of the courtroom, waiting to swear against me.