The Shoes Laced On at the Bench

Afterward

Dad wore the shoes an hour at a time that first week, the way he’d been told. Every night I came by after work, sat on the stool in his bathroom, and checked both feet with a flashlight for red spots. There weren’t any.

The second week, two hours. By Thanksgiving he was wearing them all day and walking to the mailbox at the end of the drive without his cane, just to show me he could.

The nurse at the wound clinic measured his heel every Tuesday with her paper ruler. In three weeks it was the size of a pea. By the week before Christmas she wrote closed on his chart and gave him a peppermint from the jar on her desk.

Thaddeus finished harvest the Saturday before Thanksgiving. After that he took the Friday mornings himself, and I worked it out with the water district to take a long lunch on Thursdays and drive Dad to the clinic on my own time.

Kimber still had Tuesdays. She asked for them. I said all right.

She brought Dad a pair of wool socks the week after the store, good thick ones, the kind for diabetic feet that don’t bind at the top. She left them on his kitchen counter with no note. He wore them every day.

I started giving her forty dollars a month for gas, without being asked, folded in a card. She took it. Neither of us has ever said anything about the boots since, and I don’t expect we will.

Sunday

The first Sunday in December, Dad walked up the aisle at church for communion without his cane. He went slow, in his black shoes, double-knotted, with his good suit on.

I watched him from the pew. The farm wife from the shoe store, across the aisle, watched him too. When he passed her she reached out and touched his sleeve, just for a second, and he nodded to her.

When he sat back down beside me, he leaned over and whispered.

“Your mother would have liked these shoes,” he said.

“She would.”

“She’d have said they cost too much.”

“She would have,” I said. “And then she’d have double-knotted them.”

He smiled and looked down at his feet, and patted the toe of each shoe with his hand, once, the way she did.

The last of it

I still have the pink slip. I don’t know why I kept it. It’s in the drawer of my desk at home, folded in quarters, under my checkbook, next to the white carbon ticket that says Bartholomew Garrity across the top.

I don’t take it out and look at it. I don’t need to. I just know it’s there, the way you know where the flashlight is when the power goes out.

Dad is still walking. He goes to the café on the square with the old elevator men on Thursday mornings, and he walks from the car to the door on his own. He tells everybody who will listen that Abram Feldkamp is the best shoe man in Iowa.

Kimber drives him on Tuesdays. She’s never been late once.

Kimber returned the boots that afternoon, and the credit went on Dad’s account for next year’s pair.