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CHAPTER 1
Timmy O'Neil came to live with Mary and David Holmes on a cloudy day in the middle of September, two weeks after school started. He was a quiet little six-year-old boy with sorrowful eyes. Not very long afterward, they wondered about the box he carried with him all the time. It was an ordinary shoe box with a red lid and the words Running Shoes printed on one side.
Timmy carried it everywhere he went. When he put it down, it was always where he could see it.
"Should we ask him about it?" Mary said to her husband.
"No. He'll talk to us about it when he's ready," David said, but he was as curious as she was.
Even Mrs. Iverson, the social worker, was curious about the shoe box. She told Mary and David that Timmy had the box when the policeman brought him to the Youth Authority offices. Timmy's dad was put in prison. His mom had a job, but she didn't make enough to take proper care of Timmy. A lady in the apartment house where he lived found out he was by himself all day and reported it to the police.
"They brought him to me with one small suitcase of clothes and that shoe box," Mrs. Iverson said. "I asked him what was inside it, and he said, 'Things.' But what things he wouldn't tell me."
Even the children at Timmy's new school were curious about the box. He didn't put it in his cubbyhole like things the other children brought. He would put it on top of his desk while he did his work.
His first-grade teacher, Mrs. King, was curious, too. "What do you have there, Timmy?"
"My box," he said.
"What's in your box?"
"Things," he said and went on with his arithmetic.
Mrs. King didn't ask him about the box again. She liked Timmy, and she didn't want to pry. She told Mary and David that Timmy was a good student. He wasn't the brightest by far, but he always did his best work. Mrs. King admired that about Timmy. She wrote a note to him about it on one of his math papers. Other students will learn by your example, the note said, and she drew a big smiling face on his paper and gave him a pretty, sparkly star sticker.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Shoe Box"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Francine Rivers.
Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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