It's a few months after I've graduated college, and I'm home in Connecticut with my dad. We're at
the mall, and he's trailing me through the
makeup counters at Macy's like a ghost. I dragged
him along for some inexplicable reason — he's
never been a shopper.
I pass by a rack of shoes, looking for something
comfortable for a stint1
abroad. I gravitate toward
Sperrys, the boat shoes, which are somehow
trendy again. There are hot-pink Sperrys,
nautical2
Sperrys, gold blingy Sperrys. Wow, my
dad says. He tugs on a price tag. Ninety-five
dollars? I got your mom a pair of these once.
By once, he must mean decades ago. My mom died from cancer in 2004, two weeks after her
diagnosis.
We return home empty-handed. I fiddle around on my laptop. Meanwhile, my dad rummages through
the shoe closet and emerges with a pair of light-brown shoes. Sperrys. My mom's.
You can have these, he says, unceremoniously.
They're soft, beige, stretched leather, the soles beginning to split, all the grip gone.
It's easy to remember her wearing these shoes — and not for yachting. They were as much a part of
her look as her wry3
grin and the way she'd try to wink but instead only be able to blink both eyes. They
were on her feet at the barn when she would take me to ride. She would spend her nights leaning on
the arena railing, eyes watching over me. She wore these shoes on that trip to Vancouver, when her
stomach and bowel gave way while we explored a garden in Chinatown, before we knew that the
weakness ebbing at her was cancer. It wasn't irritable bowel syndrome, like our family doctor thought,
and it could not be cured, as we discovered, with Chinese soups and medicines.

Which of the following identifies the main idea of the text?
A. Chow will always hold onto some of the grief over her mother's death.

B. Cultural differences cause Chow and her father to grieve in different ways.

C. Chow found that anger was the easiest way to express her grief.

D. Chow has found that with time, she has been able to move on from her grief.