The Shoes in the Parking Lot
We stood in that lot together, two women who each thought we had nothing to give. Behind her Tyler was watching through the drive-through window with his headset in his hand, and a line of cars honking, and his face as red as his shirt.
That Christmas I had them to the house. Kathy had driven up, and she took one look at Tammy and Tyler on my porch with a plate of fudge and said, in the kitchen, “Mama, who are these people?” I said, “These are my friends.” She looked at the boy in the front room eating a sausage ball with such concentration, and I watched her put it together. She squeezed my hand under the table.
Tyler ate four plates. He asked, very formally, if he could see Clyde’s shop, and I took him out, and he stood in the doorway looking at the pegboard with every wrench outlined in black marker, so a man always knew what was missing. He did not touch a thing.
“He must’ve been neat,” Tyler said.
“He was particular.”
“My dad wasn’t around. I mean, he’s alive. He’s in Arkansas. I just never really,” and he lifted one shoulder, and let it drop. “I always kind of wanted a guy like this. Who outlined his wrenches.”
I had to look at the pegboard for a minute.
“He’d have liked you,” I said. “He’d have given you the first wrench you asked for. He’d have said, take good care of it.”
I told the boy my birthday by accident.
It was the first Friday in March, a gray wet morning, and the ditches ran. “I’m turning eighty a week from today,” I said, when he asked how I was, “so I may be out of sorts. I’ve decided to ignore it.”
“Eighty,” Tyler said. He wrote something on his hand with a pen. I thought nothing of it.
The cards were nearly gone. There had been twenty-four in the box on the night I started, and that morning I passed him the twenty-third. Maybe three dollars a week is not a thing you stop just because the paper does.
On my birthday itself I did not go to the window. It fell on a Friday, and Kathy called in the morning to sing to me over the telephone. I put on my good gray dress and sat at the kitchen table with a slice of Janelle Hutchins’s pound cake, and I thought, well, Elva, you are eighty, and you have buried a husband and a son and kept the house, and that is a thing.
At four o’clock, someone knocked.
When I opened the door, Tyler was standing on my porch in his good white shirt, too small for him through the shoulders, with his hair wet down flat. His mother stood behind him on the second step with a hand pressed against her mouth. And in his arms, held out like a plate of something hot, he had a shoebox.
“Happy birthday, Mrs. Prine,” he said.
I could not speak.
“Mom said I should’ve wrapped it. I was gonna. I ran out of paper.”
“Tyler.”
“Can I come in? I think you should sit down.”
I sat in the front room. He sat on the edge of Clyde’s chair, which he did not know was Clyde’s chair, and I did not tell him. Tyler put the shoebox on his knees and lifted the lid, and I saw his Adam’s apple go up and down.