The Shoes the Quiet Woman Paid For
“Mama,” Tracy said, “was there ever any egg money?”
“There were four hens, Teresa, and they were for eating.” She almost smiled. “I told your father I’d found it, and then I told all of you the same, because I wanted it to be one clean thing and nothing to carry. If it was a stranger, he’d have taken it back. If it was the church, he’d have sat in that pew every Sunday feeling like a debtor. So I found it. In the mailbox. That much was never a lie.”
Mitch laughed. “You told the truth this whole time.”
“I just didn’t tell all of it.”
“The walk,” Larry said. “Daddy shoveled her walk for thirty years.”
“He never knew,” my mother said. “I’d have heard it from him. But I never asked him why he turned the truck toward Sutton Street every snow, and he never said.” She was looking at Daddy’s picture. “She stood in the line at his funeral and told me he was the best thing in that church. I thought she was being kind. I think she was telling me what she’d been keeping.”
I took the velvet box out of my purse and put it in her hands. She opened it. She looked at the little gold case with the dent worn in its lid, and she put her thumb in the dent. It fit.
“Oh, honey,” she said, not to any of us. “You did this for us.”
After a while she said, “Take it to Dot Rinke before you do one other thing. It was never Verna’s to keep, and it isn’t ours.”
Mitch drove, with Mama in the front seat holding the velvet box in her lap and me in back. Dot Rinke lives in a white frame house on Elm Street with a porch swing and a ramp somebody had built to the side door out of treated lumber. Her granddaughter let us in and went to put the kettle on without being asked, and we sat at the kitchen table, which had a plastic cloth printed with lemons.
Dot is ninety-two, small and bright-eyed, with white hair in a net. She had not been told why we were coming.
I did not make a speech. I set the velvet box on the lemons in front of her and said, “Mrs. Rinke, I believe this belonged to your brother.”
She did not lift the lid right away. Her hand moved over the velvet, back and forth, the way you smooth a sheet. Then she opened it.
“Lamar’s grandfather bought that watch in Kansas City in 1903,” she said. “At a jeweler’s on Grand Avenue. He told it every Thanksgiving.” She turned the case over with a thumbnail, and read the initials with her finger. “Lamar gave it to Verna in my mother’s front hall, the night before he left. I was seventeen. I watched from the stairs. He told her to keep it wound and she said she would, and that was the whole conversation.”
“She kept it wound,” I said.
“I asked her once if she still had it. Years after. She said, ‘Every day. It’s running.'” Dot looked up. “She didn’t say any more than that. I didn’t ask.”