The Shoes the Quiet Woman Paid For

“Well,” Alan Quast said. “I wondered if anyone would ever come.”

He did not make me explain. He turned and worked the dial of an old safe behind the counter, and when he straightened he held a flat box of dark blue velvet, worn through at one corner, and he set it on the glass between us.

“I was twenty,” he said. “Home from the junior college that summer, running the buffer and sweeping up for my dad. That Thursday morning she was standing on the sidewalk before he’d turned the sign. Gray sweater. Gray hair in a knot. Dad let her in and she stood at the counter very straight and unpinned that from a ribbon at her blouse and laid it on the glass. It was ticking.”

I did not say anything.

“Dad turned it over twice. He told her it was worth three times what she was asking. She said eighty-five dollars, in small bills, and would he please not mention it to anyone in Bellmont. She asked him to type up the slip plain, so she’d have it.” He turned the slip toward me with one finger. “Then she walked out and I watched her down the street. She didn’t look back at the window.”

“He kept it.”

“He put it in the safe the minute she left and wrote that on the carbon. Held. He said, ‘You don’t sell that, Alan. She’ll come back for it or she won’t, and either way it’s hers.'” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “She never did. I thought about driving over to Bellmont a few times. Dad said it was her business. Then he died in ‘ninety-four, and by then it had been too long, and I kept it the way you keep a thing you don’t know how to give back.”

I opened the box.

A gold pocket watch, old, worn at the edges of the case, with a hunter’s lid and two initials in curling script. L.T. There was a soft dent in the lid where a thumb had rested, over and over, for years.

It was not running.

“It hasn’t run since she handed it over,” Alan said. “I take it out when I do the safe inventory. I never wound it. Old movement like that, you wind it wrong and you’ve done something you can’t take back. I figured that was for someone who knew whose it was.”

“Somebody offered to buy it once, didn’t they?”

“Twice. Fellow from a collectors’ show in Kansas City, 2004. I said it wasn’t mine to sell.”

I asked what I owed him. He looked at the slip a while.

“Dad paid her eighty-five,” he said. “I’ll take eighty-five.”

“I would pay you more.”

“I know you would, Mrs. Calhoun. It says eighty-five.”

I wrote the check at his counter with a pen that kept skipping. He tore the carbon in half along the fold, gave me one side and kept the other, and I thought that was probably what his father would have done. When I got to the door he said, “Tell whoever’s got it to keep it somewhere dry,” and then, “She had a good hand, your Miss Pohlman. I never saw a more even line of type than the one she asked for.”