The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

The Thursday

The brown truck pulled up at ten past ten on the second Thursday in October.

Orrin Fessler has driven the Ozark Parcel route through Dunmore for eleven years. He is a big, soft-spoken man with a gray mustache who brings my sole stock and heel blocks from the leather house in Springfield every other week.

He takes his coffee black and argues Cardinals with Booker.

That Thursday he rolled the box in on his hand truck and set it on the counter, and he did not say a word about baseball.

“Morning, Orrin,” Booker said from the stool. “You’re quiet.”

“I am,” Orrin said. He took off his cap. I had never seen him take it off indoors.

He tucked it under his arm. He looked at the shelf behind me, and then at me.

“Mrs. Osterhout, I need to tell you something. Booker can hear it. I’ve been carrying it three years, and I’m not good at carrying.”

I put down the rag. I had been polishing the red Easter shoes, and I still had one of them in my left hand.

“Orrin,” I said, “if you’ve come to tell me about my daughter, I’ll thank you to say it fast.”

“Yes, ma’am, I have. Your girl is not mad at you. Not the way you think. And I’d ask you to sit down before I say the rest.”

I did not sit. I have never in my life been told to sit down and done it.

But I set the shoe on the counter. Booker got up off his stool, which at eighty-one is a process, and stood close beside me.

What Orrin said

“Three years ago they merged our routes,” Orrin said. “They gave me the stretch out past Salem, the gravel roads. Lick Branch Road is on it. The last house at the end, green metal roof, plywood ramp.”

“First delivery I made out there was a replacement hospital bed. The old one had given out. Then oxygen filters, bed pads, supplements.”

“The woman who signs for it has a hand that shakes so bad I hold the scanner for her. Thin as a rail.”

I felt Booker’s arm come up against my back. I don’t know if he meant to hold me up or keep me from turning around.

“First day, she asked where I was out of,” Orrin said. “I told her Dunmore. She went white, ma’am. And then she asked me, very quiet, if the light was still on over the shelf in Osterhout’s window.”

I looked at the lamp, a little brass gooseneck clamped to the plank. It had stayed on all night for eight years. I called it a safeguard against burglars.

“She’s asked me every single delivery. Is the light still on. And I’ve said yes, because it has been. Three years of yes, and watching her face.”