The Shoes in the Parking Lot

I’d go to buy a package of dish towels, and I’d stand there in the aisle with my hand on it, and it would feel like stealing from him. I bought food, because a body has to eat, and I paid the light bill and the property tax and the church pledge. But anything extra, anything I’d have bought for myself in a good week, I could not do. I wore the same three dresses. I used the chipped coffee cup with the sunflowers until the handle came off in March, and I glued it and kept using it. I didn’t mean it as a punishment. It was only that every time I reached for a thing, I heard him in the chair, saying, Don’t let her talk you into something pretty.

And my shoes wore out. They were the pair he bought me last September, the last he would ever buy, a brown leather loafer with a low heel, and I walked in them every day since, to church, to the cemetery, out to the mailbox and back. I wore through the heel in July and the sole in September. I could have driven to Marshall any day and bought a new pair for sixty dollars. But to walk into Brown’s alone, and look over at the empty little chair by the mirror, with the clerk waiting politely for me to say my size. I tried it twice. Both times I sat in the car in the lot with my hands on the wheel, and both times I drove home.

Kathy called every Sunday afternoon from Wichita, and I never told her about the shoes. She would have driven four hours that same night and bought me six pairs, and wept in the store, and I would have wept with her, and then she would have started in about my moving closer to town. I could not stand that. I wanted somebody to just hand me a thing without it turning into a conversation about how I was holding up.

I realized that was what the boy had done. He had handed me a thing and sat with me, and not once asked me how I was holding up.

That night I prayed for the first time in eight months. I had gone to church every Sunday and sung every hymn, but I had not prayed in my own words since the afternoon I sat in the hallway of the hospital and told God exactly what I thought of Him. I sat at the kitchen table in my nightgown and said, out loud, to a kitchen with nobody in it: “I don’t know what that was. But thank You.”

It was not much of a prayer. It was the first honest one I’d had in a while.

On Sunday I wore the sneakers to church. I had nothing else, you understand. I sat in the third pew from the front in a gray dress and a boy’s canvas sneakers. Pastor Settle shook my hand at the door and glanced down, and glanced up, and did not say one word about the shoes. Neither did Janelle Hutchins, who has not kept her mouth shut since 1971.