The Shoes She Served In

At 7:00 exactly a woman in a red fleece came up front, flipped on the lights, and turned the lock on the door.

Her name tag said Glenna. She looked about sixty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain.

We were through the door before she got back behind the counter.

She took one look at June in her jersey and her slip-ons and her red eyes, and she did not ask us how we were doing this morning.

“Volleyball?” she said.

“Size eight,” I said. “And knee pads. She has a match at eight-thirty and her gear got locked in a house.”

Glenna did not ask whose house. She just walked us straight to the back wall and pulled down three boxes in an eight and one in an eight and a half, in case.

June tried on the first pair standing up and said they pinched.

She tried on the second pair and walked to the end of the aisle and back, and bounced on her toes, and did a little side shuffle, and her face changed.

They were white, with a gum sole that squeaked on the store’s tile.

They were not the brand she had at home. They were better. I did not tell her that, but she knew.

“These,” she said.

The knee pads were on a rack by the register.

She picked the ones that looked most like her old ones, black, the regular kind, and Glenna rang them up without even taking the tags off, because we did not have time.

The shoes were a hundred nineteen ninety-nine. The knee pads were twenty-nine ninety-nine. With tax it came to a hundred and fifty-nine dollars and twenty-eight cents.

I do not have a hundred and fifty-nine dollars that is not spoken for. That was most of a week of tips.

That was the electric bill. I put it on my card and I did not think about it twice.

Glenna put the box in a bag and handed it to June instead of me, which I thought was a kind thing.

Then she said, “You go get ’em, sweetheart,” and June said thank you so quiet I almost did not hear it.

It was 7:11 when we pulled out. The high school was eight minutes away. I drove the speed limit, which was hard.

June opened the box in her lap and pulled the shoes out and tried to lace them, and that was when I saw her hands.

They were shaking so bad she could not get the lace through the second eyelet.

She tried three times. Then she put the shoe down in her lap and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, and I heard her say, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” very softly, to herself.

At the stop sign by the white church on the corner I reached over and took the shoe out of her lap.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Put your feet up on the dash. Your dad’s not here to yell about it.”