The Dance Boots Read Free Page A

pink-flowered paper plate of peanut butter cookies that my mother had baked that morning and covered with pink Saran Wrap, and she placed it in the center of the dining room table, next to a box of chocolate doughnuts. She offered us tea. She asked how everybody was doing, my mother and brothers and sisters, my husband and children. My dad told her how good her house looked and what a nice place it was. He asked how old was the waterproofing stain on the front steps and said that it looked like new. “Boy, this is a really nice place,” he said again.
    I offered the plate of cookies to my dad because I knew that Shirley wouldn’t take one until he did. “Patsy made these, hey,” he said. “You should try one. Boy, they’re good.”
    â€œMy mom said they’re supposed to be good for you,” I told Shirley. Could she possibly have any appetite, I wondered. Could the cookies help anything as serious as lung cancer? My mother’s peanut butter cookies could be magical, healing. They were not too big, not too small, tender in the middle, crisp around the edges, nearly as light as air. On the tongue, they dissolved into grains floating in a sweet and salty cream. She made them often and kept them in a commercial-sized pickle jar on the kitchen table. She packed them in plastic bags that she had my dad drop by relatives’ houses when they were sick. They were light on the stomach, she said, and helped keep your strength up. She advised saying a rosary, too.
    Shirley picked out the smallest cookie with her fragile hand,which was nearly fleshless, just thin and wrinkled skin over bone, and bit a neat scallop from the edge, chewing daintily with her front teeth. I said a Hail Mary silently. “My, these are delicious,” she said, and took another bite.
    We brought her a manila envelope filled with photocopies of old pictures. She spread them out on the coffee table, one by one, naming all of the people, until the surface was covered. There was Shirley, a little girl posed with her brothers and sisters in front an elm tree, just half a block from where their aunt, my grandma Maggie, who died before I was born, lived. Shirley’s mother, our great-aunt Lisette, and Grandma Maggie posed in a studio portrait with great-aunt Helen and their mothers, sometime in the 1920s. A dozen children, cousins, grouped together next to a picnic table. A hundred boys and girls in uniforms lined up in rows on the steps of the Harrod Indian School, Lisette with the big girls, Louis with the boys, Maggie between the girls’ matron and the cook. Shirley in skinny pedal pushers and harlequin glasses holding a little boy in shorts and engineer boots up to face the camera, her ponytail blowing almost straight up in the wind. An old woman in an ankle-length cotton print housedress, Aunt Lisette shaking her finger at the person behind the camera, tucking escaped wisps of hair back into her chignon with her other hand. Shirley in a lawn chair at Aunt Babe’s last August, legs crossed, one sandal balanced off her toes, fingers trailing over grass and dangling a cigarette, straw hat casting patterns of sunlight across her laughing face. Her mouth was open; her gold tooth glistened wetly in the light of that late summer day. On the ground next to her was a paper plate of untouched picnic food.
    â€œIt’s me! Look, it’s me!” She held up the copy of a small snapshot of a little girl on a snow-covered porch, smiling into the camera, wearing a knit hood and mittens. “I don’t remember this picture! Where did you find all these?”
    She was so much thinner than last summer. Her brown hands were twigs, dry and chapped against the freshness of her nail polish as they moved stiffly among the stack of photographs.
    â€œAnd look at this one; it’s Maggie and Dolly. Oh, we used to love to go visit there, when they lived in that apartment in the west end. That Dolly, she was so nice,