The Sneakers That Brought Him Home

The Hallway

The principal met me at the door of the main office rather than letting the secretary send me straight back, which I understood later was its own small kindness, giving me a moment to brace myself instead of being ambushed cold.

“She’s fine,” he said again, reading the look on my face correctly. “Rhonda is fine, I promise you that. But there’s someone here who came asking for her by name, and he’s waiting in my office right now, and I think you should hear a little more before you go in there.”

“Who is asking for my daughter,” I said, and I could hear my own voice climbing.

“He wouldn’t give his name to the front desk,” the principal said. “He said, and I’m quoting him, that her mother would know him the second she saw his face.”

I felt the floor of that hallway tilt under me in a way that had nothing to do with anything physical.

There is only one kind of man who says a sentence like that in a town where everybody already knows everybody’s face. The kind of man you have either buried, in your heart if not in the ground, or the kind you have simply stopped waiting on so many years back that you finally convinced yourself you were done waiting.

I ran through names in the three seconds it took to reach that door. I ran through every name it could not possibly be, and one name, at the very bottom of that list, that some small unkillable part of me had never fully stopped hoping it might be, even though I would have told you, if you had asked me that morning over coffee, that I had made my peace with never seeing that man again as long as I lived.

The Man In The Office

I pushed the door open already forming a question, and the question died in my throat.

He was standing by the window with his ball cap turning over and over in both hands, the way a man holds a hat when he does not know what else to do with them, and for one full second neither of us said a single word, because six years is a long time to prepare for a moment and no amount of preparing gets you ready for it actually arriving.

“What are you doing here,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to, more question than accusation, though God knows I had earned the right to plenty of accusation.

Bruce did not answer right away. He looked at me the way a man looks at a house he used to live in and never expected to be standing in front of again, taking in every change the years had made and every part that had somehow stayed exactly the same.

Bruce had been my husband’s best friend since the two of them were nine years old, running wild through the same hollow behind Mrs. Garner’s property, and later he had stood up beside my husband at our wedding in that same little white church I could not bring myself to look at on my drive into town that morning. He had been the closest thing to family we had outside of blood. He had held my husband’s casket on one shoulder four years ago, and then, three weeks after the funeral, he had disappeared from our lives entirely, with no call, no letter, no word to anyone in town about where he had gone or why.

I had grieved my husband and lost my husband’s best friend in the same season, and for a long time I could not decide which loss made me angrier.

“I heard about the shoes,” Bruce finally said. “I heard what your girl did for my boy.”