The Shoes

It’s not quite every day that young women jump over my back fence. No, in fact, I don’t think such a thing has ever happened before. So, needless to say, I was very surprised when she did -- when the girl jumped over my fence, I mean, and landed on the grass, swishing and thudding a little and grunting when her feet hit the ground. They were bare feet.

I live alone you see, all by myself in a little house on Willow Street. It’s not the best area of town, but it used to be a very nice neighborhood when my husband and I moved in. That was somewhere around thirty years ago. I hardly keep track anymore. All I pay attention to now is my grandson’s birthday and the potluck dinners at church. He’s going to be thirteen this year. It doesn’t sound very old, compared to my sixty-five years, but I suppose he thinks he’s old; no doubt he’ll start defying his parents and being rebellious pretty soon. I pray for that boy. It’s hard to be young in this world.

There is a very narrow alleyway behind that fence. It runs along the back of some structure that seems to be storage space, but without anything stored in it. It wouldn’t do any good to store anything there anyway because the building is falling apart. The roof is ready to cave in, not unlike a few patches of my own porch roof. I’m too afraid to fix it because the roof is a bit too far above my head for me to reach and I haven‘t had the courage to get up on a ladder recently.
I grow flowers along the fence, but since it’s winter, most of them have died out. Only the shrubs at either end remain productive. They are quite wild and I had cut them in the morning before I moved on to dig a few trenches for my flowers. Tuesdays are my gardening days. That was when she landed on the lawn. I turned around and looked (my hearing is not too bad as yet), the shovel still in my hand.

“Well, hello,” I said.

She looked at me through disheveled hair, dyed blonde, but dark brown at the roots. There were stripes of a darker color in it. Her eyes looked up at me from where she crouched on the ground, one hand resting on her naked foot. Her hands were dirty. So was her white shirt, tight against her young breasts. I think she must have been in her twenties.

After a moment we both heard yelling and we turned our heads in the direction she had come from. It was a man, screaming a name. And coming closer to us even as he spoke.

“My boyfriend,” she gasped. There was banging from down the street, past the storage structure and the neighbor’s house. The girl stood up quickly and started walking across my yard. She was headed for the other side of the house, I could see. She limped a little and she didn’t bother to say anything else to me. There was another fence on that side of the house, even higher than the back one.

“Wait a minute,” I called to her. She turned around and watched me as I dropped to the ground (much too slowly for my liking) and laid the shovel in the grass. As quickly as my old knobby fingers could I untied my shoes. They were tied rather too well, I fear. I regretted every extra moment that my fingers took to work at the double knots. But finally they were untied. I sat back and took them off my feet and held them out to her.

For a moment, I wondered if they were even the right size to fit her. But she snatched them from my hands and quickly slipped them on her own feet.

“Thank you,” she said. “I have to go.”

She did not tie them and as she nimbly climbed the fence, as only the young can do, the laces dangled down, knocking against the green wire. I heard her thud to the ground on the other side and pick herself up again, running across my neighbor’s back yard.

And then there was a man scuffling about on the other side of the back fence. I stood up slowly and my back ached a little for my having plopped too quickly to the ground. Usually, I don’t approve of cursing in any situation, but I couldn’t help smiling when I heard him swearing because the alley was too narrow for him to maneuver through. She would get away.