The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

I would like to tell you she got out. The engine turned over instead. The Dodge pulled off the curb with one wheel scraping, and it went to the end of Main Street, and its brake lights stayed on a long moment at the stop sign.

Then it turned toward the highway and was gone.

Nobody on that street said a word. Marlow put his box of nails down on the step, very carefully, as if it might wake somebody.

“Tildy,” Booker said from the doorway.

“I know,” I said.

“You could still catch her. Orrin’s truck is right there.”

“I could,” I said. “And I would be making her come to me one more time, with two children in the back seat and a husband in a bed. I have made her do that for eight years.”

Orrin stood beside me with his cap pinned under one elbow. He looked like a man who had carried a piano up a stair and had it fall back on him.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Osterhout. I thought she’d get out.”

“You did right, Orrin. You told me the truth. That’s more than I did.”

What a shoe is for

I did not sleep that night. I sat at the kitchen table with Verl, who made me a cup of tea I did not drink, and I told him all of it.

He listened the way he does, with his hands flat on the oilcloth. When I finished, he was quiet a long time.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“I don’t know yet. Not call. I won’t ring that phone just to hear her not answer, and I won’t send a note she has to carry for the rest of her life. I have asked enough of her.”

“Then what?”

I looked at the dark window. I could see the lamp burning in the shop across the yard.

“I said those words in front of Booker, and Booker’s got a mouth like a vault,” I said. “But I said them so the whole county would know what a hard woman I was. Verl, I think I’ve got to take them back in front of the same ones.”

“The whole county.”

“As much of it as shows up.”

Verl got a pencil from the drawer, and he sat down again and drew on the back of the electric bill the outline of a child’s foot.

“Size one and a half,” he said. “You’ll want a last.”

At four the next morning I was in the shop, with the light over the shelf still on, cutting patterns from a hide of black calf I had been saving for something good.

That Saturday was Dunmore’s Harvest Days. It is the best day of my year. The whole county comes in for the parade and the chili supper, and the street fills with boots to be fixed before the first frost.

I do about nine hundred dollars on that one day. It pays the heat bill on the shop through January.

On Friday evening I put a sign in the window, in my own hand.