The Shoes Laced On at the Bench

The bench

The inside of Feldkamp’s smells like leather and floor wax and cedar. The walls are wooden shelves floor to ceiling, stacked with shoe boxes, every box with a size written on the end in grease pencil.

In the middle of the floor is the fitting bench. It’s a long wooden bench with a padded seat, worn pale in two places where people sit most. In front of it is a low sloped stool with a footrest, where Mr. Feldkamp sits to fit you.

He was waiting for us. He’s 72 now. He’s been bald since I was in high school, and he wears a gray cardigan and a tie to work every day of his life, even in July.

“Bart,” he said, and shook my father’s hand with both of his.

“Abram.”

“Sit down. Let’s look at those feet.”

Dad lowered himself onto the bench the way he sits down in his pew on Sunday, one hand on the arm, slow and careful, like the bench deserves some respect. I stood beside him at his shoulder.

Mr. Feldkamp knelt in front of him and took off one slipper, then the other. He didn’t make a face at the slippers. He just set them neatly side by side under the bench.

Dad’s feet are thin and pale, with blue veins and toenails gone thick and yellow. The right heel had a fresh white dressing taped over it from the foot doctor the day before. Mr. Feldkamp didn’t touch the dressing. He moved his hands around it the way you’d move around a sleeping dog.

He brought out the old steel foot measure, the one with the sliding bar, and had Dad stand on it holding the bench rail. He measured the left. He measured the right. He measured the width twice.

“Swollen up a half size since I saw you,” he said. “That happens. The slippers let the foot spread. We’ll go to the wider pair.”

He stood, slowly, with a hand on his knee, and went into the back.

Paying again

While he was gone I went to the counter. The register at Feldkamp’s is an old brass one, but there’s a card machine next to it now, which Mr. Feldkamp says his granddaughter made him get.

When he came back with the box under his arm, I had my debit card out.

He looked at the card and shook his head. “Put that away, Philomena.”

“No, sir.”

“I’m not charging you for a pair of shoes I already sold once.”

“You refunded them once,” I said. “In credit. Somebody spent it. That’s not on you. You’re a business, and these are Dad’s shoes, and I’m buying them.”

He looked at me over the top of the box. I think he was deciding whether to argue with a Garrity, and I think he remembered how that usually went with my mother.

“A hundred and sixty,” he said finally, quietly. “You’ll have the receipt in his name.”

I paid. He wrote the ticket by hand, the way he always has, with the carbon underneath. He wrote Bartholomew Garrity across the top in his square printing and tore off my copy and handed it to me. I folded it once and put it in my coat pocket, next to the pink one.