The list fell out of my grandmother's cookbook in the spring of 2019, twenty-six years after somebody wrote it. Half a sheet of paper, faded to grey, in pencil, in her handwriting.
It said: two loaves of bread. A kilo of rice. Half a kilo of sugar. Three bottles of oil. A packet of tea. A bar of soap. A bunch of carrots if they are cheap.
Then, at the bottom, on its own line, in smaller letters: a pair of shoes for Sherbek — if there is money left.
My father is Sherbek. He was nine years old in 1993.
I took the paper to him in his shop that evening and put it on the counter, and he read it twice without saying anything, which is not like him at all.
Then he told me the whole winter in about four minutes. Prices were changing between the morning and the afternoon that year. My grandmother worked at a school and was paid late, and by January the family was buying food in small amounts — a slice of cheese at a time, one piece of meat for a pot of soup that had to last three days.
There was no money left. He knew there would not be, he said, before she even went out of the door.
He wore his older sister's winter boots to school for the whole of that year. They were two sizes too big, they were reddish brown, and the boys in his class had a name for them, which he told me and I am not going to write down.
My father has sold shoes in that shop since 2006. He is not a sentimental man and he does not tell this story to customers.
But the list is on the wall behind the counter now, in a black frame, and there is one rule in that shop that he has never explained to anybody who works there. If a child comes in with no money and shoes that do not fit, that child goes out with a pair of shoes.
He gave me one piece of advice about the whole thing, and only one. Keep the list, he said. Not because it was hard. Because somebody counted, and we ate.