uh, what are you looking for exactly…uh?”
“Louise,” she snapped, offended because she thought he’d forgotten her name. She picked up a pair of canvas Keds and told him her size.
In the back, he found the size and style she’d asked for, but in the wrong color. He paused and picked up his pen, pondering the message. Then he wrote: How did I get here? and, Have you seen my lost youth?
Louise sniffed as she sat on the bench, simultaneously thumping her handbag to the ground and kicking off her loafers. She held her hand out for the shoe, slid it onto her left foot, and looked down. He watched her register that the canvas was stained, perhaps from water damage, and the cardboard box was a bit misshapen. She did not notice his message, tiny print running in the grooves of both soles.
Her feet smelled—rank from the build-up of sweat inside her cheap leather shoes—Scottie backed toward the window, wondering if he still had a can of air freshener under the register. People like Louise were always pointing out other people’s smells, completely oblivious to their own. She didn’t even bother to tie the laces, just sat with her feet stretched out on the footstool and her eyes on the window. Rose and Ward came out of Mondragon’s. Scottie and Louise dropped the pretense and gawked. Rose’s shock of white hair made her almost unrecognizable, and Ward’s big shoulders hunched as he leaned into her truck window—he looked as if he were pleading. Scottie touched his pants pocket nervously. Ward reached a bag through the truck’s passenger window, and Rose’s black dog pushed his nose into Ward’s hand.
Scottie cleared his throat. “What do you think, Louise?”
“Hmmm,” she glanced down. “I just don’t know.”
“Would you like to try on the other one?” He held out the shoe, looking somewhere to the left of her eyebrows.
“No. It fits, it’s…” She peered at the scene on the street. “It’s not quite right.” Though their sons had been close, Scottie knew, Louise and Rose were not friends. Never had been.
He took the shoe she shelled from her foot, returning the pair sole to sole into the box, folding the tissue paper carefully over the canvas. Outside, Rose’s truck engine ground and sputtered away. “Anything else?”
She said No and left without ceremony. He watched her cross the street to Mondragon’s, probably to pump Ward for information. Louise had shrunk since she’d last come in, and not from weight loss. Ward too, for that matter. And Rose, from the glimpse he’d had—she was practically shriveled.
Scottie had never been in a war. No, no, no indeed. He’d have gotten out any way he could, if he hadn’t been too young for Vietnam. A generation had forgotten what it was like—a generation spoon-fed glory tales of World War II, treated like children by politicians and pundits and the breakers of the news. And now they’d lost a child, Rose’s child. It was stupid that the boy had gone there, to war, and stupid now to see people bemoaning it, acting dodgy, stopping by only to peep out his store windows, flabbergasted at its proximity. It wasn’t a pretend war, though listening to some you might think it. How could this happen? It can’t be. It’s so unfair. It makes no sense. People were perpetually determined in their oblivion.
Soon Louise made her way down the street toward the bank, a small paper bag from Mondragon’s in hand. Scottie knocked his knuckles against the shoebox under his arm. Even though Louise hadn’t bought the shoes they belonged to her now, in a way that pleased him. His reconfigured bones were art, and the shoe repair was business. The sole messages he counted in another category entirely.
They were his tiny, secret protests, sent out into the world on the feet of his few customers, unknown to everyone except Scottie himself. When the idea first came to him, he’d clutched his pocketknife to calm himself. Since, he’d waited for an irate phone call, or a sullen demand for money back. But no one had ever brought back a shoe, and so he’d grown bolder, writing on the soles not only of the few shoes he sold, but also on his display items, and even along the dark stitching of the shoes he was asked to repair.
His long-term project was to write a message on each shoe in the store. He felt light at heart—light all over—as he made his tiny messages. Even if the shoes never sold and wound up in a landfill or on the feet of some charity case in Somalia or Bangladesh, his messages would remain.
A few years ago, in miniscule black print under the Dunleavy’s Fine Shoes (&Shoe Repair) lettering on the front window, he’d etched, You don’t see what’s right in front of you. The world makes fools of us all. This proclamation was the only thing that kept him flipping the sign to Open some days.
The sky, he noticed now, was thickening. His stomach rumbled, so he went to the back and ate a can of creamed corn and cherry pie filling from a jar. He turned on the radio for company. “Be alert, folks,” Ted Waite the weatherman said. Don’t take chances. That means you, too, Scottie. The ants that nested in his walls’ insulation trailed up the rim of the cherry jar, drawn from their storm shelter, made reckless by the sticky drippings.
They decided to board the shoestore window first. Ward’s shirtsleeves were rolled up his big forearms and his breath whistled a bit. He’d always been husky, but now he was downright fat. He took up too much room in Scottie’s small space, standing by the window with a display brogue in his hand.
Scottie retrieved the plywood from the storeroom and lugged the boards to the front. “I’m working on resoling your shoes, Ward?” he offered, his inflection rising nervously.
“Great.” Ward took some planks off Scottie’s stack as they angled out the front door. He didn’t ask when his shoes would be ready.
“I think they’ll look good as new.” Scottie set the wood under the window.
“I bet,” Ward said. “Do you have an extra hammer?” He was thinking about the visit from Rose, Scottie knew, and by extension, about Stella.
Scottie went to the back for his toolbox, wishing he had finished the re-soling project so he’d have something definitive to hand Ward. Instead, he gave him his smaller hammer and a few nails.
“Thanks.” Ward lifted a board and set it across the window frame. “How long has it been since we’ve had an alert over this many counties?”
Scottie placed a nail. “Eight years.” The effort of talking and pounding was too much. His hammer glanced off his thumb and he yelped.
“You okay?” Ward asked. Scottie didn’t answer, just sucked on his finger for a moment and returned to the task at hand. Ward didn’t really care how much time had elapsed since the last big storm warning, he was just trying to calm Scottie down. That was the problem with Ward, the closest thing he had to a friend—with one soothing word, he could remind Scottie all over again of his place in the world. The air that had felt heavy and close suddenly seemed thin, and the sky had a sickly tinge.
They finished and went to Ward’s store. Scottie wandered in the aisles while Ward went to the back for the boards and tools. Pausing in an aisle far from the stockroom door, Scottie pulled out his pocketknife and made a tiny nick in a five-pound bag of sugar. His heartbeat slowed. The radio blared the angry voice of an a.m. talk show host, and Ward dropped something heavy in the back. Scottie ambled down the aisle, picked up a small, unlabeled jar, jam of some sort, and then noticed there was a note tucked under it. A message scrawled on a piece of brown paper, signed by Rose. He tucked the paper into his pocket. His hands were moving, but his mind was on the overwhelming details of the store: the too-loud radio, the tired-looking merchandise on the shelves, the photos of Ward’s parents and grandparents on the wall near the stockroom door.
He touched a bag of rice, wondering what to do about the note, which wasn’t his. But now it was in his pocket. He would take it out and hand it to Ward, who obviously hadn’t seen Rose set it down while she was in the store. Relieved at this decision, he made one more cut, the bottom corner of a bag of cornmeal, and was setting it back into place when Ward asked him what he was doing. Just relieving a bit of pressure. Can’t you feel it? Scottie’s head felt large and square, too big for his body. He was