What I told myself
Dunmore is a town of eleven hundred people if you count the dogs and the cemetery. It has a Casey’s on the highway, a feed store with a grain elevator behind it, a Methodist church and a Baptist church that agree on very little.
Main Street is two blocks long and has my shop on it, between the hardware store and the barber. The sign over my door says Osterhout Shoe and Boot Repair. Verl’s father hung it in 1961.
For the first year people asked after Renae, because people here are kind in a way that has teeth in it. By the second year they had stopped.
Booker sat on that stool every morning from eight to noon. He said something only once, in the third winter.
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“You’ll want to call that girl.”
“I’ll want to do nothing of the kind.”
“Tildy.”
“Booker, you have a cup of coffee and a stool. I am grateful for both. Please do not make me pick.”
He drank his coffee. He is eighty-one now, a retired railroad section hand with hands the size of skillets, and the most patient man I know. He did not bring it up again.
Let me put one thing against myself, because it is the ugliest part.
In forty years at that bench I have mended the shoes of men who left their wives, a man who drank away a farm, and a woman caught stealing from the church flower fund. I never once asked a person where their road was going before I put a heel on it.
A shoe is a promise to keep going, and I had never refused one.
I refused my own daughter’s. And the reason, if I am honest, is that she was the only person who ever walked into that shop whose road I could not stand to see go somewhere without me.
That is not a standard. That is a hurt, dressed up as one.
Verl could see it. He said so that first night in our kitchen, drying his hands on the dish towel.
“You’ll want to take that back, Tildy. Before it sets.”
“She knows where I am,” I said. “She knows where the door is.”
He looked at me a long time, a thin man in a cap he wore indoors, the way he measures a foot for a last.
“That’s the trouble,” he said. “She does.”
I am sixty-seven years old now. I had a husband who told me the truth in my own kitchen, a friend on a stool, and eight years of Sundays to listen. I used none of it.
I took my daughter’s silence for contempt. I could think of only one explanation. She had turned hard, and the longer she stayed away, the more it proved my sentence right.
That is how a hurt feeds itself. I had no other explanation, and I did not go looking for one.