The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

“I asked her once, why don’t you just go see her, it’s seventy miles. And she said…”

He stopped. He looked down at the scanner in his hand.

“She said, Orrin, if I walk in and she says it to me again, I won’t have anything left to carry him with.”

“Carry who?” I said. And I knew as I said it.

“Her husband. Teague. He went off a pole, ma’am. Four years ago last March, thirty-eight feet, a bad weld on a cross arm. The settlement from the co-op didn’t cover half of it.”

“He broke his back in two places, and it took his legs, and after that his kidneys. He’s been in a bed in the front room since.”

“She quit the school the summer the baby was born, because she couldn’t pay for help. She turns him every two hours at night. She runs his dialysis in the kitchen on a folding table.”

“This summer the doctors said it was down to months, and she has hospice now. A girl comes Thursdays from nine to noon so she can sleep. In four months she hasn’t once used it to sleep.”

“The baby,” I said. My voice sounded like it came from the far end of a barn.

“There’s two. A girl and a boy. Seven and four. Good kids. The girl’s smart as a whip. Calla Verl and Wren Verl. Teague said that way there’d be a Verl in the house.”

I had known there were children. A cousin had told me once, and I had said “I don’t want to hear it” before she finished.

For eight years I had stood in my own shop with two grandchildren somewhere in the world and had not asked for their names.

The man I had refused to look at, the one I charged double for a pair of boots, had named his son after my husband.

“The girl’s got a pair of school shoes split at the toe,” Orrin said. “Black electrical tape, wrapped around and around. I saw it in August. Size one and a half, I’d guess. Her mother can’t spare the money.”

I looked down at my hands, which have made a thousand pairs of shoes and had not made one for my own blood.

“I never knew,” I said.

“No, ma’am. That’s the part she told me to tell you, if I ever told you anything. She said, tell her I’m not hiding. I’m just out of everything.”

He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

“She had a bag packed all that first winter,” Orrin said. “But when it came to the minute, she told me, she had nothing in her to hear that sentence one more time. She’d been twenty-nine, and her mother said it in front of Booker, and she’s been walking around with it ever since like a stone in a shoe.”

“Her words, ma’am. Not mine.”

“Why are you telling me now?” It came out hard. My knees had started to go, and a hard voice is a kind of crutch.

“Because Teague told her to. Monday. He said he wasn’t going to go with her mother’s door shut against her. He said if she wouldn’t go in, he would.”

“She called me Tuesday night, which she’s never done, I never had her number. She said, Orrin, is the light still on? I said yes. She said, can you meet me at the Casey’s.”

He put his cap back on, then took it off again.

“She’s on Main Street, ma’am. Down by the barber’s. She’s been in a gray Dodge since a quarter to ten, and she cannot get out of the car. And you ought to know, because I would want to, the children are in the back seat.”