Clare looked over from the passenger seat.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re weird.”
“I know.”
Lily babbled from the back seat.
Clare reached behind her and touched Lily’s shoe.
A tiny pink sneaker.
I looked at it.
Then at Clare.
“You know,” I said, “shoes caused us a lot of trouble.”
Clare smiled.
“Shoes didn’t.”
“No?”
“No.”
She looked out the window as the old house disappeared behind us.
“People did.”
She was right.
Objects are rarely the problem.
Not chairs.
Not shoes.
Not houses.
Not money.
The problem is what people believe they are entitled to do with them.
Tessa believed a chair mattered more than another person’s dignity.
My parents believed peace mattered more than fairness.
I believed providing for people meant I could avoid confronting them.
We were all wrong in different ways.
The house sale didn’t fix my family.
It did something more important.
