The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

The street

I never took off my apron. I wore it down the street with a streak of black dye across the front, and Marlow Pruitt came out of the hardware store and stood on his step with a box of nails in his hand.

Later he told the whole town I looked shot out of a cannon.

The Dodge sat half on the curb in front of the barber’s, a gray minivan fifteen years old at least, with a crack across the windshield that someone had taped. I could see a woman in the driver’s seat with her hands on the wheel at ten and two.

I could see two small shapes in the back.

My daughter did not look the way I had kept her. In my mind, for eight years, she had been twenty-nine, in a cream dress, holding shoes.

The woman behind the glass was thirty-seven and looked fifty. Her hair was cut short and ragged at the neck, the way you cut it when there is no one to take you to a salon. She wore a gray cardigan, buttoned wrong.

Dub Kessler, the barber, had stopped with the clippers in his hand and a half-shaved neck in the chair behind him. Booker had followed me to the door of the shop and stood there, holding on to the frame.

I was thirty feet away when she saw me.

I watched my daughter’s face go through three things in about one second. First, that she knew me. Then that I was coming. And then I watched the fear take her, plain as weather.

Not anger. Not coldness. My daughter, who had stood in front of a roomful of seven-year-olds without a tremor and had turned a man who could not walk for four years, was afraid of her mother.

I could have walked the rest of the way and made her roll down the window.

I stopped.

I stood still on the sidewalk in front of the barber pole, with my hands at my sides and a black stripe on my apron, and I let her look at me.