The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

The shelf

My husband Verl is a quiet man, and he built the shelf the weekend after.

On Sunday afternoon he went out to the shed and came back with a plank of white oak he had been saving. By supper there was a shelf bolted to the wall behind the register, four feet off the floor.

Verl was never a man for speeches. But he understood that I could not keep a thing out of sight, and that I had to put it where I would pass it forty times a day.

Over the next two weeks, I set Renae’s shoes on that shelf.

I am a cobbler’s wife and a cobbler, and I have never thrown away a pair of shoes that still had a sole on it. There were her first walking shoes, white leather high-tops that Verl had resoled twice because she dragged her toes.

There were saddle oxfords from first grade, the brown and white gone soft. Pink ballet slippers gone gray at the toes. Her county fair show boots, size four.

There were the prom heels, dyed blue, still marked where she stood in the grass at the football field.

And there were the red Easter Mary Janes with the little brass buckles, which Verl made her the year she was seven out of a scrap of calfskin.

Seven pairs in all. I added the last one later, without admitting to myself why: the black non-slip shoes from the summer she scooped ice cream at the Dairy Dip.

I polished them every Sunday night.

For eight years I told people it was housekeeping. I said good leather cracks if you don’t feed it, which is true.

I used neatsfoot oil on the boots and paste wax on the Mary Janes, and I buffed those little buckles until they glowed under the shop lights. I knew the creases of every pair.

I knew the way her left foot rolled in, because every left sole she ever wore wore down on the inside edge.

Here is what I told myself it meant. That I had not given up on my daughter, only on her choice.

That the day she came to her senses and walked through the door, I would have the little red pair ready, and she would understand her mother had stood in the same place the whole time, waiting.

I never once asked what that looked like from the other direction. A mother who waits in one place is a mother who has not moved.

I thought I was the lighthouse. It never crossed my mind that to my daughter I might look like the rock.