Life moved, as it does.
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I also helped pay off the last of my mother’s debt.
And when my grandmother got sick, I paid for her to move into a nursing home where she could get the care she needed.
Every Thursday, I visited her after work.
One day, I was halfway down the hallway when I spotted an elderly woman mopping the floor.
She paused as I approached and pressed one hand against her lower back.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said when she spotted me. She dragged the bucket aside. “I didn’t mean to block your way.”
When I saw her face, recognition hit me like a truck.
I spotted an elderly woman mopping the floor.
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Same gentle brown eyes, same hairstyle.
It was Mrs. Price! The teacher who changed my life.
I stood there even after she moved off, staring at her, and all I could think was, That is not where life was supposed to leave her.
***
That night, I barely slept.
Every time I shut my eyes, I saw her hand on her back, and the way she’d looked right through me, because why would she remember one scared little girl from almost four decades ago?
But I remembered her.
God, I remembered everything.
It was Mrs. Price!
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At around one in the morning, I got out of bed and went to my closet.
On the top shelf was an old shoebox I hadn’t opened in years.
Maybe decades.
My hands hovered over it before I finally lifted the top.
Inside, wrapped in tissue that had gone yellow at the edges, was the pair of sneakers Mrs. Price gave me. I’d kept them all these years as a reminder of how one small act of kindness could change a life.
But the shoes weren’t the only thing in there.
I shut the box again. “It’s time I gave this to you.”
