At the supermarket, I found it. The Princess Aurora doll my seven-year-old daughter Emma had been dreaming of for half a year. Not just any Princess Aurora doll—the special collector’s edition with the light-up crown and the dress that changed colors in sunlight. She’d circled it in every toy catalog that came in the mail, had shown me pictures on her tablet, had whispered about it in her prayers at bedtime.
I had saved for six months, putting away twenty dollars here, thirty dollars there, from my paycheck as a medical transcriptionist. It was hard—rent was always due, utilities never stopped, groceries were expensive—but Emma deserved this. After everything she’d been through, everything we’d been through, my daughter deserved one perfect birthday present.
And there it was, marked down from eighty-nine dollars to forty-five. A small miracle on a Tuesday afternoon.
Emma held my hand as we stood in the toy aisle, her eyes sparkling as she looked at the box through the clear plastic display. She was wearing her favorite purple dress, the one with butterflies on the hem that was getting too small but she refused to let me donate. Her dark curls were pulled back in the ponytail I’d wrestled them into that morning.
“Mommy, is that really her?” Emma whispered, as if speaking too loudly might make the doll disappear.
“That’s really her, baby.” I reached for the box, feeling the weight of it, the reality of being able to give my daughter this one thing she wanted more than anything.
“Can we really get her?” Emma’s voice was small, uncertain. She’d learned not to ask for things, learned that disappointment hurt less when you didn’t hope too much.
“We really can.” I smiled at her, and her whole face lit up like sunrise breaking through clouds.
That’s when I heard my mother’s voice—a sound that could curdle milk, sharp and cutting even across the crowded store.
“Julia? Julia Morrison, is that you?”