My daughter wore my wedding shoes to her first job interview

Dear Delyara, My daughter called from downstairs this morning asking whether she could borrow “the black shoes in the box.” I came down and found her wearing the heels I wore at my wedding twenty-three years ago. I had kept them even after the divorce. She knows that. She is twenty-one and was ten when her father and I separated. She asked if wearing them would be weird. I told her they were only shoes. That was a lie. I watched her walk around the kitchen practicing in them, and for a moment I could see myself at twenty-six, standing in front of a mirror believing marriage was the beginning of the rest of my life. The shoes are scuffed now. One heel was repaired after I danced too much at the reception. My daughter wore them to an interview for her first proper job and texted me afterward: “I think your lucky shoes worked.” I nearly replied that they had not been particularly lucky for me. I stopped. My marriage ended. My daughter did not. Perhaps objects do not have to remain loyal to the story in which we first used them. Tonight, the shoes are back in the box, carrying one wedding and one young woman walking into a future neither of her parents could predict.