I’ve wanted hot pink running sneakers for a while now, so I asked my parents to buy me a pair for Christmas. They asked which ones, so I chose the cheapest pair I could find on the Internet, and sent them a link.
A few days later, I received a phone call from my father. “That link you sent me was spam mail!” he screamed.
“How can a link be spam mail?” I asked, trying to sound reasonable.
But he had already hung up the phone.
Later in the day he informed me that I probably wouldn’t be receiving my sneakers at all, if ever, because they were coming from a company in China who was trying to steal his credit card information.
“I tried to cancel the order,” he said. “But they wrote back an email, ‘This very good company, please don’t do.’”
The sneakers hadn’t arrived by Christmas morning, but I received a box of Russell Stover chocolates, so I hardly noticed.
On Boxing Day, however, they miraculously appeared on my parent’s doorstep.
This morning, the family drove down to Brooklyn, primarily to visit the cat Butters, with whom my sisters are obsessed. But they also brought the sneakers.
“These are pretty fucking cool,” I said when I took them out of the box. But I didn’t use the word “fucking,” because the last time one of us cursed around my father—it was my sister Blara—he chased her around the house for 20 minutes.
“I’m not sure they’re real,” my father said.
“They’re fine,” I said. “They’re probably straight from the factory.”
But the seed of doubt had crept into my heart, planted and nourished by my omnipotent father. I held the sneakers up close to my face. I poked at the bubbles in the air pockets in the soles. The bubbles felt weak. “Maybe they are fake,” I conceded.
I wore the sneakers on my run later in the morning. In them, I tread hesitantly.