Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page A

orchestrated their return. He was your usual jittery Irish setter, but mostly pretty well mannered, so I wasn’t prepared for the way he rushed for Daisy as soon as I opened the gate, devouring her English muffin in an instant and then nearly knocking her over with his wiggling and wagging. She was startled, but not frightened, and although she backed away, she was closer to laughter than to tears. I grabbed him by the collar and snapped on his leash, while he took a minute to lick the jelly from his chops. And then he turned his head toward me and seemed to say, “Oh, it’s you!” and, nearly beside himself with joy, began to lick my face and my chin, his paws on my chest. I had to push him off me, and push him out the kennel door, Daisy all the while hanging on the fence and now laughing breathlessly.
    We continued on, down toward the Coast Guard beach, where I was able to unleash him and let him run. Daisy was still a little overwhelmed, and I told her to sit on a stone and take off her shoes and socks before she walked in the sand.
    “Maybe tomorrow you’ll want to wear your sneakers,” I said.
    She sat down as I’d told her, but she made no move to take off the pink shoes. I had one eye on Red, who kept turning back and going forward, more or less waiting for us, but running off a little farther each time. I knew he was too much of a coward to run very far, but I didn’t want to be stuck walking to Ama Gansett to retrieve him—I had to be at Flora’s by nine.
    I turned back to Daisy, but she had still made no move to take off the shoes.
    “The sand will ruin those, Daisy Mae,” I said, and I bent down to pull them off myself. Abruptly she scooted her feet away from me, and when I looked up at her, somewhat startled, she had her nose in the air, one of those bratty, overacted poses I had seen plenty of other kids strike, but never her.
    “What’s the matter?” I said, and to complete the picture she folded her arms across her chest, across the bodice of the sweet-collared dress, and said, stubbornly, “I don’t want to take them off.” The sun on her wiry, uncombed hair brought out the reds and the golds and the possibility that she did indeed, as her mother and Bernadette had assured me, have a redhead’s temper.
    I stood up straight and shrugged.
    “Suit yourself,” I said and, without another word or look, kicked off my own battered Keds and ran down toward Red Rover, who saw this as his signal to take off full tilt ahead of me. I ran after him for a while, the leash in my hand, and then slowed down to a walk as he began to nose and sniff at whatever he could find along the shoreline, playing his own game of keeping me near without seeming to. When I finally turned to look back, Daisy was running toward me down the beach. It took a few minutes for me to see that she had her pink shoes in her hands and her white socks still on her feet, and that she was crying. I held my arms out to her as she grew nearer, and when she reached me, I lifted her and spun her around. When I put her down again, she sobbed into my hip.
    “Were you afraid someone was going to steal them?” I asked, and she waited a moment before she nodded.
    “Do you want to take off your socks, too?” I said, and she whispered, “No.” Red came bounding toward us, and I picked up a piece of driftwood and tossed it to make him head back toward the road.
    “All right,” I said.
    Sitting on the same stone, Daisy brushed the sand off the thin socks and slipped them back into her shoes.
    “You still don’t want to take those off?” I asked, and she shook her head.
    “You don’t have sand between your toes?” Smiling, she shook her head again. I shrugged. With kids, you never knew. It could have been a broken toenail. It could have been that her brothers, or Bernadette, had told her she had stinky feet. It could have been that she did indeed fear that her magic slippers would be stolen. It could have been a whim.
    I got the leash