He fixed shoes two doors down

People think a dry cleaner washes clothes. He doesn't. There's a machine with a drum in it that looks like a washing machine, and what's inside isn't water, it's a solvent, perc, and the solvent costs money, so it runs back out through a still and you use it again. What settles in the bottom of that still is a muck. You pay a man to come with a barrel and take the muck away.

I had the store on Lawrence near Spaulding from 1977. I was nineteen when I took it over from Mr. Pak, who taught me the presses and then went out to California to be near his son. Next to me was a currency exchange. After that a place that sold birds, and when the birds went out a video store came in.

My wife did the counter and the books. I never touched the books, not once in forty years. She had a green ledger and then in 1997 a computer, and the ledger was better. She died in 2019, in March.

Sunday we were in the second row. Ninety people in that church, about that. I did the pastor's robes and I did the whole choir at Christmas, forty pieces, no charge, and that was my offering.

The shoe repair was two doors down from me. The sign on it said JOE'S SHOE HOSPITAL and his name was Kostas. The Joe was from before him. He never changed it because a sign was two hundred dollars and the people who knew him weren't reading the sign anyway.

He came in Thursdays with five shirts and he'd stay about forty minutes. Thursday was the day my wife walked the deposit up to the bank on Kedzie and then sat with her sister on Sawyer, and that came to about forty minutes.

He talked about leather. He'd pick up a shoe somebody had left on my counter and turn it over and tell me it was glued instead of stitched. He could do a heel in four minutes. I know that because I timed him once through the window.

A shirt unit is a body form and two presses, one for the collar and cuff and one for the sleeve, and a puff iron for the shoulder if the shoulder needs it. The head of a press comes down at about three hundred degrees. In 1979 I scorched the lapel of a wedding suit that had come over from Seoul with the man's father. Akkawo. My hands are how they are from thirty years of that same head coming down, and one afternoon in maybe 1982 Kostas took one of them and turned it over and looked at the knuckles a while, and then he put it back on the counter and said nothing about it.

He resoled my daughter's school shoes twice and wouldn't take money either time. She's forty-four now. She's out in Naperville and she calls me Sundays around four.

In 1985 I signed for the building. Eight hundred and ninety dollars a month to the bank on the fifth, and ninety people in that church who all brought their clothes to me.

The first week of October in 1986 it rained for days and I had water standing by the boiler. I was down there with a shop vac I'd borrowed off the currency exchange. That room in any weather is the worst room in the building, and in August it goes over a hundred with the boiler lit.

He came in on a Thursday that month with nothing in his hands. I said something about the shirts and he said he'd bring them next week. Then he went back out, and I heard his door pull, and then the bolt. Then he came back through my door.

We went in the back where the boiler is and I put the bar across.

Afterward he washed his hands in the utility sink and dried them on the rag I keep for the spotting board, which is not a clean rag, and I didn't say anything about that either. Then he put four dollars on my counter for shirts he hadn't brought. I rang it as a coat, because a coat was four dollars and my wife read the tape at the end of every day.

Then it was eight more years of Thursdays. Five shirts, no starch in the collar and light everywhere else, which I'd stopped writing on his ticket sometime in the early eighties because I knew it. He was number 6 in my book, because he was the sixth account I had when I took over from Mr. Pak and I never renumbered anybody. We talked about the street work on Lawrence and about his brother in Astoria. In 1991 my wife said he should eat more.

There was a stretch in the spring of 1994 when he didn't open for eleven days. When he opened again he was thinner and he'd cut his hair short, and the shirts started coming in loose at the collar, so I took two of them in without telling him and charged him the regular price. He noticed. He never said so.

He died in November. A woman came in for her husband's pants and told me at the counter while she was counting out her money. On the block people said he'd been sick.

The funeral was at a Greek church on the north side that I'd driven past maybe a thousand times and never been inside. My wife came with me and wore the good coat. Coming home she reached over at the light on Kedzie and put her hand on my arm above the wrist, and then the light changed and she took it back to work the heater, because the heater in that car only ran if you held the knob.

His nephew came from Astoria and cleared the shop out over a weekend. There was a dumpster at the curb Saturday morning and by Sunday it had the finishing machine in it and all the wooden lasts, maybe four hundred of them, some with names on them in pencil. The sign stayed up over the nail place that came after him until 2003 or so. Nobody in there ever got around to it.

I sold the store in 2011. My hip went the year after and I've had the cane since.

There were three shirts in poly at the far end of the conveyor that had been hanging there since the fall of 1994.