The Shoes in the Parking Lot

It was the biggest deal I’d had in eight months. I want to say that plainly, because I have thought about it many times since. A boy took off his shoes for me, and I stood there with my hands halfway up in front of me like a woman being handed a baby, and I did not know where to put them.

I stepped into the sneakers. They were a size ten. I take a seven, wide. My feet slid around in them like two canoes in a creek. Tyler saw it, and he did not laugh, and he did not say a thing. He knelt back down and pulled the laces tight and tied them in a double knot, the way you’d tie shoes on a child on the first day of school, and when he was finished he patted the top of my left foot twice with his flat hand and stood up.

“There,” he said. “That’ll get you to the car.”

Then he went into the Kwik Stop in his socks.

I watched him through the glass. He crossed the lot in his socks like it was a church carpet, and he walked down the candy aisle and picked something up. I remember that he counted out the money onto the counter, and that it took him a while, and that the girl at the register waited without hurrying.

When he came back out, he held a Butterfinger out to me.

“You look like you haven’t eaten,” he said.

I hadn’t, not since Thursday. Food had stopped having any taste after the funeral, and I had gotten into the habit of forgetting it until my hands started shaking, which mine had started to do that very minute, right there in the sun in front of him.

“I can’t take that either.”

“It’s a candy bar. It’s, like, a dollar twenty-nine.”

I took it. I couldn’t unwrap it. My fingers wouldn’t do the small work. He took it back from me without a word, tore the wrapper down one side, and gave it back, and then he did the thing I have not stopped thinking about: he sat down on the curb by the ice machine, in his socks, in a red work shirt and a paper hat, with his elbows on his knees, and he waited.

He did not ask what was wrong. He did not say a word about my husband, though the whole town knew. He just sat there. I took small bites of that candy bar standing up, and then my knees told me to sit, and I lowered myself onto the curb beside a seventeen-year-old boy, and the two of us watched a grain truck go by on Highway 54.

It must have been ten minutes. Not once did he check his watch, though I know now that his break was fifteen.

“Why are you doing this?” I finally asked.

He shrugged. He picked at a loose thread on his sock.

“I just felt like I was supposed to,” he said.

He said it the way you’d say it looked like rain. No sermon in it, no pride. Like it was a small fact about the afternoon, something the day had handed him, and he had simply taken it.

I told him I would bring the shoes back.

“You don’t have to.”