The Shoes in the Parking Lot

“I never spent your money,” he said. “Not one dollar. Mom said I could use it for the phone bill one time, and I said no. It’s sixty-nine dollars. Twenty-three weeks, three dollars each. I knew I wanted to get you something with it, but I didn’t know what. And then I kept seeing you limp.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the box. “I’m not trying to say anything about your husband. I’m only saying, I think he’d want you to have a good pair of shoes.”

And he lifted from the tissue paper a pair of walking shoes.

They were gray leather, with a soft rubber sole and a wide toe box and a strap across the instep, the kind of shoe a woman who has stood on concrete for fifty years would pick for herself. They were not pretty. They were so exactly right that I could not see them for the water in my eyes.

“They’re from Brown’s,” Tyler said. “In Marshall. Mom drove me down after her shift on Wednesday. I didn’t know what size. So I told the man what I was doing, and I said she has a wide foot. And he looked at me for a long time, and then he went in the back.”

“Lyle,” I whispered. “Old Mr. Brown’s son.”

“He came out with a card.” Tyler swallowed. “A little index card, like in a file. It had your name on it. It said Prine, Elva, seven wide. And under that it said, in pencil, in a different handwriting. Likes arch support. Don’t let her talk you into something pretty.”

I put both hands over my face.

I don’t know how long I sat that way. Clyde had gone to that shop every September for fifty-one years, and for fifty-one years that family had kept it on a card in a drawer. And a seventeen-year-old boy in a too-small shirt had walked in with sixty-nine dollars he had never spent and asked for the right shoes without knowing it was the right question.

“They were eighty-nine dollars,” Tyler said, rushing now. “But Lyle took ten off because I told him it was your birthday, and I put in ten of mine, from the, from my tips. So it’s fine. You don’t have to worry, it’s all fine.”

“Come here,” I said.

He came and knelt down in front of my chair, right there on Clyde’s rug, the same way he had knelt in the lot on that Saturday in September. I was wearing the resoled loafers. Tyler eased the left one off my heel and set it on the rug. Then the right. I had on a pair of Clyde’s wool socks with the toes darned.

He slid the new shoe onto my foot.

It went on like it had been waiting. The heel held. The toe had room. The sole had a spring in it, a step that gave back what it took. He knotted the strap. He took my other foot and did the same, patting the top of it twice with his flat hand, exactly as he had done on the day we met.

“There,” he said, and his voice cracked clear down the middle. “That’ll get you where you’re going.”