Forty Chairs Under the Cottonwood

People like to think a fellow in my place would feel he had won something. I did not feel that way.

I thought of her at that table with all those cousins and church ladies on the phone, explaining.

I thought about the shoebox. I felt sick about it, and I still do a little, when I let myself.

On Thursday night, Emily came out after her last shift before her days off.

She stood in my kitchen in a sweatshirt with her hair up, and she asked me if I still had Grandma Ann’s boots.

My mother, Ann Lindahl, wore the same pair of brown cowboy boots to every dance at the Legion hall for forty years.

She was a small woman with small feet, and she polished those boots every Saturday afternoon on newspaper spread across the porch.

When she died, I kept them in a box on the shelf in the back closet. I don’t know why.

Emily is the only woman in our family who wears a six and a half, and maybe I was saving them for her without knowing it.

I got the box down. She sat on the edge of my bed and pulled them on over her bare feet, and then she stood up and walked across the floor.

The heels made the same sound on the boards they used to make when my mother crossed the kitchen.

“These,” Emily said. “I want to walk to Josh in Grandma’s shoes.”

I had to go stand in the hall for a minute.

Saturday came in clear and cool, the way late September does out here when the beans are turning yellow and the corn is drying down.

The neighbor held off combining the field across the road so the dust would not blow over us.

The rental place was supposed to drop the chairs at nine that morning.

Their trailer had a flat outside Dell Rapids, and the chairs did not come up my lane until after one. By then I had already gotten dressed, which was my mistake.

Emily got ready at the house with Josh’s sister and two nurse friends from her floor. Her dress was plain white, bought off the rack in Sioux Falls, no train and no beads.

She wore her long, light brown hair down her back, the way she wore it as a girl.

At about three o’clock I was carrying chairs from the trailer two at a time, still in my light tan sport coat and white shirt.

I had not put on a tie. I never do. Emily came out the back door in her dress and my mother’s boots.

“Dad, you’re going to sweat through that coat,” she said.

“Then go back in the house and let me sweat,” I said.

She did not go back in. She took a chair out of my hand and walked it across the grass under the cottonwood and set it square in a row, and then she came back for another.

The afternoon sun came in low and gold through the leaves.

We set the rest together, her and me, in the grass I had mowed three times. Five rows of eight, with an aisle down the middle, straight as a planter row.

When we finished she stood back and counted them out loud, the way she used to count her fair ribbons.