The Shoes in the Parking Lot
“Then I will,” I said. “And I’ll think of you every time I kneel in the tomato bed. But this is for you.”
I held out the card. I saw him take in the envelope and the thickness, and I saw the exact moment he understood there was a little money in it, and I saw him begin to shake his head.
“Mrs. Prine, I can’t.”
“It’s a thank-you card,” I said. “You do not send back a thank-you card. Anybody raised right knows that.”
He held very still, with a pickup idling in line at my back. And then, slowly, he took it. He turned it over. He put it in the pocket of his red shirt and patted the pocket.
“Thank you,” he said, very quietly.
“That’s what the card says.”
He handed me my coffee. It was hot and weak and tasted like the best coffee I’d had since January.
So the next Friday I came again. A small coffee, one nineteen, and a cardinal card with three dollars inside and a few words, because I had decided the cards would last as long as the box did.
Dear Tyler, I saw a robin on the fence this morning. Elva Prine.
Dear Tyler, I hope the algebra test went well. Elva Prine.
Dear Tyler, It is supposed to storm. Drive careful if you borrow your mother’s car. Elva Prine.
He took every one. He never said a word about the money, and I never said a word about it either. It was the only arrangement I have ever known where a giver and a taker could meet at a window every week and agree not to look at what passed between them.
But he started writing back.
He couldn’t write back at the window, with cars in line. But the second Friday, when I pulled out of the drive-through, there was a Whistle Stop napkin folded under the lid of my coffee, and written on it in blue pen, in a boy’s cramped hand: Passed the algebra test. B minus. Tyler.
I laughed out loud in the car, and then I was crying, in the lot behind the Whistle Stop with a napkin pressed to my face, and it wasn’t the bad kind. It was the kind you do when a window has been shut in a house a long time and somebody finally opens it.
The napkins came every week after that. We have a game Friday. We’re gonna lose. Mom made meatloaf and it was actually good. Is it too cold for you to drive out? You can skip if it’s icy. I’ll still be here.
And I started to buy things.
I did not mean to. It was only that something loosened in me when I read a napkin from a boy who worried about my driving. I stopped at the Dollar General one Thursday for stamps and came out with dish towels, blue ones with little white stars. I stood in the aisle with my hand on them and felt Clyde in the chair by the mirror, and I thought: he would say, buy the towels, Elva. He would say, they’re a dollar fifty, for heaven’s sake.