Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [15]
But when he entered, jingling the cowbell above the door, he found no one there—just the counter with its clutter of awls and pencils and receipt forms, the pigeonholes behind it crammed with shoes, and a cup of coffee cooling beside the skeletal black sewing machine. “Fresco?” he called.
“Yo,” Fresco said from the rear.
Morgan laid his package down and went behind the counter. He pulled out a copper-toed work boot. Where would one buy such things? They really would be useful, he felt; really very practical. The cowbell jingled again. A fat woman in a fur cape came in, no doubt from one of those new apartment buildings. All down the edge of her cape, small animals’ heads hung, gnashing their teeth on their own spindly tails. She set a spike-heeled evening sandal firmly on the counter. “I’d like to know what you’re going to do about this,” she said.
“Do?” said Morgan.
“You can see the heel has broken again. It broke right off while I was walking into the club, and you were the people who’d repaired it. I looked like an utter fool, a clod.”
“Well, what can I say?” Morgan asked her. “This shoe is Italian.”
“So?”
“It has hollow heels.”
“It does?”
They both looked at the heel. It wasn’t hollow at all.
“Oh, we see a lot of this,” Morgan told her. He stamped out his cigarette and picked up the sandal. “These shoes from Italy, they come with hollow heels so drugs can be smuggled in. So naturally they’re weakened. The smugglers pry the heels off, take no care whatsoever; they don’t have the slightest feeling for their work. They slam the heels back any old how, sell the shoes to some unsuspecting shop … but of course they’ll never be the same. Oh, the stories I could tell you!”
He shook his head. She looked at him narrowly; faint, scratchy lines deepened around her eyes.
“Ah, well,” he said, sighing. “Friday morning, then. Name?”
“Well … Peterson,” she said.
He scrawled it on the back of a receipt, and set it with the sandal in a cubbyhole.
After she was gone, he wrote out instructions for his moccasins: GOWER. FIX! Can’t live without them. He put the moccasins next to the sandal, with the instructions rolled inside. Then he trotted on out of the shop, busily lighting another cigarette beneath the shelter of his hat.
On the sidewalk his mother’s dog was waiting for him. She had a cocked, hopeful face and two perked ears like tepees. Morgan stopped dead. “Go home,” he told her. She wagged her tail. “Go home. What do you want of me? What have I done?”
Morgan set off toward the bus stop. The dog followed, whining, but Morgan pretended not to hear. He speeded up. The whining continued. He wheeled around and stamped one foot. A man in an overcoat halted and then circled Morgan at a distance. The dog, however, merely cowered, panting and looking expectant. “Why must you drag after me like this?” Morgan asked. He made a rush at her, but she stood her ground. Of course he should lead her home himself, but he couldn’t face it. He couldn’t backtrack all that way, having started out so speedy and chipper. Instead he turned and took off at a run, holding on to his hat, pounding down the sidewalk with the dog not far behind. The dog began to lose heart. Morgan felt her lose it, though he didn’t dare turn to look. He felt her falter and then stop, gazing after him and spasmodically wagging her tail. Morgan clutched his aching chest and stumbled up onto a bus. Puffing and sweating, he rummaged through his pockets for change. The other passengers darted sidelong glances and then looked away again.
They passed more stores and office buildings. They whizzed through a corner of Morgan’s old neighborhood, with most of the windows boarded up and trees growing out of caved-in roofs. (It had not done well without him.) Here were the Arbeiter Mattress Factory and Madam Sheba, All Questions Answered and Love Problems Cheerfully Solved. Rowhouses slid by, each more decayed than the one before. Morgan hunkered in his seat, clutching the metal bar in front of him, gazing at the Ace of Spades Sandwich