The return slip was folded in quarters and tucked under a roll of breath mints in the console of Dad’s Buick. I only found it because I needed a pen to write down the time of his next appointment.
I unfolded it in the parking lot of the foot doctor’s office on a cold, sunny Monday afternoon in November. The paper was pink, the carbon kind, and the handwriting was round and careful.
It said: men’s extra-depth oxford, black, size ten and a half wide. Returned, unworn. Store credit, $160.00. Then, on the line beneath it: applied to women’s boots, balance paid, $29.00.
I read it three times. Then I turned and looked through the windshield at my father, who was standing on the sidewalk with his cane, waiting for me to unlock the passenger door.
He was wearing his brown corduroy jacket, his good church slacks, and a pair of gray felt house slippers with the backs mashed flat. He had worn them to the doctor because they were all he had that didn’t hurt.
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My name is Philomena Garrity. I am 48 years old and I am the billing clerk for the rural water district in Washington County, Iowa. I know what a receipt says. I know what a balance means.
And I knew, sitting there with that pink slip in my hand, that my brother’s wife had taken my father’s shoes off his feet and turned them into a pair of boots for herself.
Ten days in slippers
Dad is 81. He ran the grain elevator at the co-op for thirty-one years, the last nineteen as foreman. He can still tell you the test weight of a load of corn by the way it pours.
He has had sugar diabetes since he was 66. For most of those years he managed it the way he managed everything, quietly, with a notebook and a pencil and a pill box with the days of the week on the lids.
But diabetes takes the feeling out of your feet before it takes anything else. Last spring he got a blister on his right heel from an old pair of work shoes, and he didn’t feel it until it had opened up.
By summer it was a sore the size of a dime. The doctor at the hospital sent him to the wound clinic, three mornings a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, for cleaning and dressings and a nurse who measured it with a paper ruler.
Dad gave up his driver’s license himself at 79, after his sugar dropped one afternoon and he found himself sitting at a green light on the square without knowing how long he’d been there. Nobody had to take his keys. He handed them to me.
So the question of that summer was who would drive him. I work seven thirty to four, five days a week, and I am the only billing clerk the water district has. When I’m gone, nobody posts payments and nobody answers the phone about a broken meter.
My brother, Thaddeus, works for a farmer east of town and runs grain trucks for him from late September until the last field is picked. In a wet fall like this one, that means sixteen hours a day, sometimes more, until the middle of November.
That left Kimber. Kimber is Thaddeus’s wife. She is 42, she does books part time for a plumbing outfit from her kitchen table, and her hours are her own. In April she said she could take Dad. I thanked her, and I meant it.
Since April she had driven him. Three mornings a week, in his own Buick, so she didn’t have to put miles on her car. Thaddeus put gas in it. I bought the oil changes and the new wiper blades. And Kimber sat in the clinic waiting room, three mornings a week, for an hour and a half each time.
I knew that was a lot to ask. I told her so more than once. I brought her a casserole now and then, and a gift card to the steakhouse out on the highway at her birthday. I thought we were square. I thought she’d say something if we weren’t.