The Shoes Laced On at the Bench

Kimber

It was eight minutes to ten. Kimber is always early. I’ll give her that, and I mean it.

She came in with the cold on her and stopped just inside the door, by the big front window, with the sun behind her. She had her purse on her shoulder and her car keys in her hand.

And she was wearing the boots. Tan suede, lace-up, with a cuff of cream-colored fleece at the top. Good boots. A hundred and eighty-nine dollars, according to the pink slip in my pocket.

She saw me first. Her face changed a little. She hadn’t expected me to still be there. I’d said in my text that he’d be there from nine to ten. I hadn’t said I would be.

Then she looked past me and saw Dad. He was standing in the middle of the floor, straight, in his corduroy jacket, with no cane in his hand.

And then she looked down at his feet.

I watched her see the shoes. I watched her know them. She’d carried that box back into this store eleven days before. She knew exactly what they were.

Nobody said anything. Mr. Feldkamp had gone back behind the counter, and he stood there with his hands flat on the glass, and he did not say a word. I didn’t say a word. The radio in the back was playing a hymn, an old one, low.

Kimber’s face went red from the collar up. She looked at me again, and then at the floor, and then at her own boots, the way you’d look at something on your shoe you’d stepped in.

She opened her mouth, and what came out first was her reason.

“Do you know how many hours I’ve sat in that waiting room?” she said. Her voice was tight and shaking. “Three days a week since April. An hour and a half every time. Plus the driving. Thad’s gone dark to dark. You’re at your desk. Nobody pays me a thing. Nobody even asks me.”

I didn’t answer her. Thaddeus had asked me not to, and he was right.

“I figured I’d earned something,” she said, smaller. “I figured it was like wages.”

What Dad said

It was Dad who answered her.

He didn’t raise his voice. My father has never raised his voice in his life that I know of, not at the elevator and not at home. He just stood there in his new shoes and looked at his son’s wife.

“Kimber,” he said, “you’ve been good to drive me. Every one of those mornings. I know what it costs a person.”

She looked up at him.

“If you’d told me you were short,” he said, “I’d have given you gas money. I’d have given you more than that. All you had to do was ask me.”

He paused. He looked down at her boots, and then at his own shoes, and then back at her face.

“You didn’t have to take it off my feet.”

I have thought about that sentence every day since. There was nothing cruel in it. There was nothing loud in it. It was just true, and he said it in the same voice he used to tell a farmer his corn was too wet to take.

Kimber’s eyes filled up. She opened her mouth again, but nothing came out.

Behind me I heard the bell. A woman from Dad’s church came in, a farm wife who has known our family forty years, holding a pair of her husband’s shoes that needed new heels. She stopped. She looked at Kimber’s boots, and at Dad’s shoes, and at Mr. Feldkamp’s face behind the counter.

She didn’t say anything either. She just quietly set her husband’s shoes on the end of the counter and waited, the way people in a small town wait when they’ve walked in on something that isn’t theirs.