I did not hear anything. I went down to the shop on Tuesday and did my repairs. I did a latigo and two cinches and a pair of boots, and my hands were so sore I wept over the boots and was glad no one was there.
I did not expect an answer. I want that understood. I was not doing it for an answer. A thing you do to be paid back is a trade, and I had made one bad trade in that shop already.
On Wednesday afternoon, Dewitt came in at two, which is not his day. He had snow on his boots and had forgotten to wipe them. His good eye was red at the rim.
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“She called,” he said.
I put the awl down.
“Not the fourteenth of June. Just now, in the middle of a Wednesday.” He stood with the snow melting off his hat. “I told her you did it on the sidewalk, with half the town watching. She didn’t say a word for a good long while.”
“Dewitt.”
“Then she said the box had sat on her porch since Tuesday and she had not opened it until this morning.” He looked at me. “She said to tell you two things. She said the seat was tight.”
I could not speak.
“And she said, don’t turn it off.”
He put his hat on and went back across the street to his kitchen, where he can see the window.
That is all of it. She did not say she would come. She did not say she forgave me, and I do not think she should have.
She has a little girl who has never been inside this shop, and a husband I have never met, and a life that went on very well without me for five and a half years. I know that now. I am not owed a place in it.
I sat for a while at the bench by the window, where I could see the long room and the four stands down the east wall.
The third stand is bare. It will not be oiled on the first Sunday of December, because there is nothing on it to oil.
I took her apron down from the nail by the door that evening, the one with her name burned in the wood. I shook the dust out of it, folded it, and hung it back where it belongs.
Then I went to the back and lit the lamp over the third stand. I did not light it for oiling. I lit it so a man at a kitchen window across the street would see it come on.
It is on right now. I have decided to leave it burning.