The Shoes the Quiet Woman Paid For
The first was a yellow carbon copy of a sales slip, held together with a rusty paper clip. The top line was printed, Quast’s Jewelers, Main Street, Ainsley, Missouri. Under it, typed, a date. September 2, 1976.
It was not a sale. It was a purchase. The store had bought something from a customer. Received of V. Pohlman: one gold Elgin pocket watch, hunting case, engraved L.T., in running order. Paid $85.00. And beneath it, in a heavier hand, in fountain pen: Held for owner. Not for resale. H.Q.
I knew what the eighty-five dollars was. I had watched my father count it onto the oilcloth.
The second thing was a ribbon. A strip of gray grosgrain about eight inches long, soft as flannel, folded in half, with a brass safety pin still through one end. I held it up by the pin and it hung straight down with nothing on the end of it.
I sat on that stripped bed and thought of a gray woman crouching in a school hall with a clipboard against her chest, and I thought: she sold her watch to put shoes on us. The ribbon had hung loose. I had seen it. I had not known what I was looking at.
When Judith came to find me, tape in her hand, I did not say anything. I handed her the slip. She read it twice and then she sat down on the other side of the bed.
“Lamar Tessmer,” she said. “His name was Lamar. He gave her that watch the night before he shipped out. His grandfather’s. He told her to keep it wound until he came home and could wind it himself.”
“How do you know?”
“His sister told me. Dot Rinke. She’s ninety-two now and still keeps house on Elm Street with a granddaughter who stays over.” She laid the slip on the ticking, very gently. “He did not come home. Verna wound that watch every night for twenty-five years. I asked her once, young and stupid, why she wore a man’s watch on a ribbon like a necklace. She said, ‘Somebody has to keep it going.’ I thought she meant it as a kind of joke.”
The other women had come to the bedroom door by then, one at a time, holding rolls of newspaper. Nobody asked what it was. Phyllis went and turned the coffee off, and then I heard her start taping the lid on the last box of dishes, very quietly, as if the sound of tape might wake something.
I took the shoe home that night in my purse. I did not sleep much.
I drove to Ainsley on Monday morning. I woke at four and by seven I was on Highway 36 with the cigar box on the seat beside me, and I was parked across from Quast’s Jewelers a quarter hour before the sign in the window turned over.
It was still on Main Street, same gold lettering on the glass, a bell on the door. The man behind the counter was seventy or so, thin and a little stooped, with a loupe pushed up into gray hair. I laid the yellow slip on the glass.
“Mr. Quast? I think your father wrote this.”
He put on his glasses. He read it, and he went still the way a man does when a thing he stopped expecting walks in.