The Shoe List at Sunday Dinner

“Tell me about the four-wheeler, son,” she said.

Duane put the fork down. He wiped his hands on his napkin, slowly, one finger at a time. Then he finally looked at his mother.

“It’s for the boys, Mama,” he said. “It’s for my weekends. I don’t have a yard at my place. I don’t have anything for them to do. I wanted to give them something to do with me.”

“With their shoe money.”

“With my refund,” he said. “It was my refund. She signed the paper.”

“With their refund,” Evelyn said. “That money came to you because of those four children, Duane. Not because of anything you did. Because of them.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again. I looked at my plate. I did not want to watch him get caught. I had loved him once, and some part of me always will.

“I never had one thing growing up,” he said, after a while. His voice had gone quiet.

“Not a bike. Not a go-cart. Nothing. Every other boy on our road had something. I just wanted my boys to have something.”

“I know you didn’t,” Evelyn said. “I was there, son. I was the one who couldn’t buy it for you.”

That stopped him. It stopped me too. I had never heard her say it out loud.

“But you had shoes that fit,” she said. “Every September, you had shoes that fit. I made sure. Do you remember what I gave up for that?”

Duane did not answer. He looked at the table.

“I’ll tell you,” Evelyn said. “I gave up the beauty shop. Every year of your life. I cut my own hair over the kitchen sink so you could go to school with your toes in the right place.”

Nobody said anything for a long minute. Out the window I could hear Ben squealing about the kittens, and Kaitlyn telling him to be gentle.

Evelyn reached over and pulled her checkbook out from beside her plate. She opened it flat on the table and clicked her pen.

Duane started up out of his chair. “Mama, you don’t have to do that. I’ll get it. I’ll get it to her by next weekend.”

“Sit down, son.”

He sat. I do not think I had ever seen him sit that fast for anybody.

She wrote the check slow, the way she does everything, in that school cook’s handwriting that every child in Graves County over the age of forty would recognize from the lunch menu.

Pay to the order of Shawna Fiedler. Four hundred sixty-four and no cents. In the memo line, she said the words out loud as she wrote them: “Spring shoes.”

She tore it out along the perforation and laid it by my plate. I started to say thank you, and she held up one finger, and I stopped.

Then she took my list and turned it over to the blank side, and she slid it down the table to Duane, and she set her pen on top of it.

“Before anybody in this house gets a bite of pie,” she said, “you are going to write down every one of your children’s shoe sizes. From memory. Without asking her.”

Duane looked at the paper like it might bite him.

“Mama, that’s…”

“Every one,” she said. “Kaitlyn first. She’s your oldest.”

He picked up the pen. He wrote Kaitlyn’s name, and then he wrote an 8. He knew that one.

He had bought her cleats for her first rec league season, back when we were still married.