The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

Eight stitches to the inch. Every one pulled. The street watched me do it.

People who had not spoken to me in years stood at the bench and told me about their own daughters, their own brothers. I heard about a son in Tulsa and a sister in Arkansas and a hurt that had gone three decades without a phone call.

A man I had known all my life asked me whether I thought it was too late for his.

I said, “It is not too late while the light is on.”

I do not know where I got that.

At six, when the street cleared, there was three hundred and ten dollars in the jar. I had given away nine hundred in work, and nobody would ever give it back, and I found I did not mind.

Verl counted the coins and did not say a word. Then he put his hand on the back of my neck, as he has since I was nineteen.

The shoe was finished by closing. I put it in a box with a pair of wool socks and a yellow ribbon, because she was a seven-year-old girl.

There was no note in the box. I had thought about it for two days. A note is a thing a person has to answer.

The brown truck

Orrin carried the box out to Lick Branch Road on Monday. He would not take a nickel for the gas.

“I’ll leave it on the ramp,” he said. “I won’t knock. I’ll say it’s from the shop and nothing else, and I’ll leave.”

“That’s all.”

“Mrs. Osterhout, she may not open it.”

“Then she may not,” I said. “It’s hers to open or not.”

I will tell you what the next three days were like. I went to the shop at seven every morning and polished the shelf. I did it because the shoes needed it, and for no other reason, and I told myself that.

Every time the bell rang I did not look up. I looked at the shoe in my hand. Booker watched me not look up and said nothing, and I was grateful.

The brown truck came the next Thursday at ten past ten, as always. Orrin rolled in the hand truck and set a box on the counter, small and square, wrapped in a grocery bag.

His face was careful.

“It was on my seat when I came out of the Casey’s in Salem,” he said. “I’ve got no idea how it got there. No, that’s a lie. I know exactly how it got there.”

“Orrin.”

“It’s not from the leather house,” he said. “Open it, Mrs. Osterhout.”

I opened it.

Inside lay a pair of cream-colored leather pumps with a low heel. They were worn gray along the sides. They had been kept somewhere dry for eight and a half years.