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By Marcy O'Brien

The first time we met, Pat gave me her shoes.

She was noticeable in the party crowd — tan, sleek, laughing. When introduced, I kiddingly said, “If your shoes turn up missing, check my house.” The aqua beads on her white sandals matched my outfit. We chuckled about our skinny size tens and were old friends by party’s end.

As I got into the car for home, her husband, John, came running up the driveway with a brown paper bag.

“She wants you to have these.”

“John, she can’t give me shoes right off her feet?!” But she did. I loved them and wore them. A lot.

Later that year, my 3-inch heels began arguing with my lower back. My elegance era at an end, I gave them all to Pat, ten years younger. We laughingly declared ourselves “Sole Sisters,” and I felt a little better.

That winter, she knitted me new potholders and a pair of cozy lounging socks. Every time I saw her, she greeted me, “my sole sister,” and our private joke continued. Eavesdroppers thought it was deep, spiritual. We giggled about that, too.

I began to find homemade gifts tucked inside the storm door. Strawberry jelly, signed, “Your sole sister.” And blueberry jam, “Solely for you.”

One spring morning, a jaunty little May basket of posies hung on the front doorknob. I grinned at the tag’s “O sole mio.”

I told her not to tell anyone she was wearing my shoes. But she delighted in thrusting a long leg forward, pointing her toes, and declaring, “Aren’t these GAW-JUS? They’re from my sole sister.” She’d just wink at me.

When I finally delivered my last and lowest heels, I told Pat, “The end of the heel train, kiddo. I’m flat out.” She hugged her sympathy.

Pat’s early cancer had been in remission for 20 years. Its sudden return hit everyone hard. The metastasis spread widely, rapidly, leaving us stunned by her bravado.

“I’m going to hang around until you publish your book,” declared my feistiest cheerleader. “I’m not going to miss my sole sister in print!”

I took her some muffins the last time I visited, a month before my book published. She was wearing a pair of my old sandals, and slowly lifted a leg to show me. She died four days later.

John came to my book signing two months after Pat passed. “I want two copies, one for me and one inscribed to Pat.” Mystified, I looked up, barely containing the waterworks. “It’s going beside her reading chair,” he explained. “She was always happy when she talked about your sole sister fun. I want to look across the den and see her soul smiling.”

—Marcy O’Brien

Marcy O’Brien, of Warren, Pennsylvania, is a 2024 winner of the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition in the global human interest category. Her essays won honorable mentions twice in the past in the biennial contest sponsored by the Washington-Centerville Public Library. Marcy, who began to write “as she entered her dotage,” has written a humor/human interest column for 20 years for the Warren Times Observer, the Jamestown Post Gazette and the Dunkirk (NY) Observer. She has written features for The Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine, Yankee Magazine and many more. A member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, she compiled a collection of her warm and funny columns last year into a debut book, Rounding Third (Shorehouse Books). One reader describes it as “a bedtime treat for drifting off each night with a smile.”