He tried to pull his foot away, but I gently held his ankle still. Under the dirty gauze was a deep cut running across the side of his foot, swollen and angry red around the edges. It looked days old. I asked Sandra why he hadn’t been taken to a doctor, and before she could answer, Eli whispered, “Mom said we couldn’t because they’d ask questions.” The room went completely silent.
I wrapped his foot in a clean towel, carried him to my truck, and drove straight to the emergency room. The doctor took one look at the wound and said it was badly infected and could have become dangerous if we’d waited much longer. While a nurse cleaned the cut, she quietly asked Eli how it happened. He hesitated, then admitted he’d stepped on broken glass almost a week earlier while taking out the trash barefoot because his only pair of shoes had fallen apart. Sandra had patched it up herself and told him not to tell anyone because she couldn’t afford the hospital bill.
Before we left, a hospital social worker sat down with me and asked if Eli had a safe place to stay while his foot healed. I answered before Sandra could say a word. Two months later, Eli was living with me under a temporary guardianship order while Sandra worked through court-ordered parenting classes and treatment for alcohol abuse. The first thing he did after moving in was line up his two new pairs of sneakers by the front door. One black, one blue. When I asked why he’d finally chosen black after begging me not to, he smiled for the first time in weeks and said, “Because now I know nobody’s going to make me wear shoes that hurt just because they’re all we have.”
