The Shoes in the Parking Lot
“I do have to. Where will you be?”
“I’m on the crew at the Whistle Stop, the burger place right there. I work the drive-through window Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays. Closing shift on Fridays, mostly. Helps my mom out.” He said that last part to the road. “She does doubles at the nursing home laundry in Marshall. The rent’s six-forty. The Whistle Stop pays the electric and some of the groceries, so.”
So. That is how the young say a thing that is heavier than they want you to know.
“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked.
“Tammy. Tammy Dunn. I’m Tyler.”
“I know. It says so on your shirt.” And he laughed, a short surprised laugh, and that was the first time I saw his whole face open up. He had a chipped front tooth. “I’m Elva Prine,” I said. “I’ll see you Friday.”
He stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants and the soles of his socks, and he walked back across that lot with his hat in his hand. He did not look back. I sat on the curb a while longer, in a boy’s shoes, with the wrapper in my fist.
I drove home in those sneakers with paper towels stuffed into the toes.
My house sits at the end of a gravel road three miles outside of Alder Creek, a white two-story with green shutters. We farmed ground out there for forty years, mostly beans and corn, and when his knees quit Clyde took the job at the co-op elevator and I kept books for the feed store. We raised two children in that house, Kathy, who is in Wichita now, and a boy we lost in 1989, and I will not tell that part today because it is not this story. We were married fifty-one years. In fifty-one years I had never once bought my own shoes.
Every September, the week after the county fair, Clyde would come in from the shop, wipe his hands on a rag, and say, “Well, Elva, I reckon it’s time.” We would drive into Marshall to Brown’s Shoe Shop, where the floor creaked and the whole place smelled like leather and polish, and he would sit in the little chair by the mirror, the one for waiting husbands, and I would try on shoes.
He did not know a thing about shoes. He only knew me. “She’s got a wide foot,” he’d tell the clerk. “And a stubborn heel. Don’t let her talk you into something pretty that pinches.” Then he would watch me walk the length of the store and back, frowning, with his chin on his fist, as serious as if he were buying a tractor. He would not leave until I had done a second lap.
When he died in January, it was fast. It was a Tuesday, and he had eaten a good breakfast, and he sat down in his chair to take his boots off and did not finish. The funeral was at Alder Creek Methodist, and the church ladies fed three hundred people in the basement. Kathy stayed ten days. Then she had to get back to her job, and I told her I’d be fine, and I believed it.
It was not the grief that surprised me. What surprised me was what happened to every purchase, once he was gone.