Shoe

                                                                                                                                   Image uploaded by Pinterest user Cindi Bruni

I see a shoe down there. In the dry leaves by the back door, a black party shoe with a bow. I know it is mine, but I can’t reach, not even with a stick. It’s wedged between some windows. Maybe with a bigger stick; but it is too heavy. There is a mouse trap too, and some pieces of cloth which make me think of my doll Ginger, but it is not Ginger, because Ginger is in the car.

“Dad,” I call, “I want my shoe!” And when he doesn’t hear me, again, “Dad!!” The cows are still here, right by the house, and the cow’s skull is on the post where it always was, showing the black holes of its eyes, and the apple trees are still here too-- but not apples yet, only teeny green ones. I look back at my shoe, then down at my feet. My shoes are bigger than that party one; I can see that. Bigger, but I bet it will still go on. My fingers remember the leather strap, and the poky metal buckle which I can’t do yet, and the little holes in a row, and which to choose?

“Dad! Daddy, I need you!” And then my dad is there--my dad comes--and puts his big, warm hand on my hair. I can hear him breathing.

“My shoe’s down there.”

“What?” My dad is looking at my feet like he doesn’t understand.

“My party one. Look!” and I point to where it is.

My dad bends down by the broken storm windows and the foundation stones of our white house—our used to be house; we don’t live here now--and he says, “Oh,” and we can both see it, a shiny wedge of black patent leather.

“I want it,” I say.

“It won’t fit, Punkin. It’s an old one.”

“Please, I want it.”

My dad uses his hands and his shoulders to hold the windows apart, leaning them, one by one against himself until he can reach in sideways and tweeze the shoe up with his fingers. It feels like I can’t wait, watching him. But I have to wait, so I do a little bounce on my toes and remember a piece of black velvet ribbon that I used to have and can’t find, and I think how my shoe is like a treasure I forgot or a secret I remember.

When my dad gets the shoe out, he pushes the windows back against the house with his stomach. Then he bends over holding the heel of the shoe, and he knocks the spiders out. Then he hands it to me.

I grab his baggy pants leg for balance and pull my foot out of my red puddle boots. I put my toes in the opening and I push. Only my toes go in. I think of Cinderella and her step sisters. I tug up my sock and try again.

“It won’t go,” says Dad, “You’ve grown.”

But I want it to. I remember how these shoes felt on my feet, flat and thin on the bottom, and the clicky sound they made on the floor, and the swirly dress I got them to go with—it has a bow in the back and yellow polka-dots on it and blue flowers.

But now the shoe won’t fit. How could I have ever fit in there? I was a littler me and now I am a bigger me. I see my dad’s shoes, so big. He was a baby that grew, and now he is huge man; he is a daddy, but he used to be a boy. And I don’t like to think of that at all. He has to be HIM: Daddy. Always just the same. I want the smell of him like this, and his red hooded sweatshirt with a long pocket for my hands to meet each other in, and his bristly face, and his daddy nose poking out, and his high shoulders to ride on and his hair on my face when I lean to see him, and his ears to hold onto up there.

I hug his legs very tight, one sock foot on his shoe.

“Come up,” he says, “Punkin.’” And he swings me to his shoulders--the “uppest place”-- for a ride, bending over for my boot, holding my legs, while I, for the littlest bit of time, swing out sideways, tipping into space. Then we are off into the milkweed with the sun on our heads and the clouds wheeling over us.

Dad
Robert C. Cares
11/19/1930--9/19/2015