He was on my route for nine years

Jayla's got her phone standing up against the sugar bowl with a little red dot going on it and she wants to know about the seventies. Not all of it. She wants 1974 to 1979 because that's the piece her teacher gave her, and she's been at me about it three Sundays running.

I told her I don't remember the seventies. I remember Monday.

What I can give her is the route. I cased out of the station on Glendale and I walked the stretch off Grand River, both sides, from Prest down past Steel and back around. Thirty-one years in and twenty-two of them on that same walk. I could still tell you which porches had a bad second step. There was a lady on Ilene who set a glass of ice water out on her rail every day in August and I never one time saw her do it.

There was a supervisor at Glendale a while, big fellow, had a thing about how you folded the flats. He went over to Livernois and I don't know what became of him.

She wanted to know about disco and I told her I'm not doing that one. Put down something else.

The Chinese place at Grand River and Greenfield was Wing Hong. There was a Cunningham's. Past that was the drugstore everybody still called the Rexall after it quit being one, and it quit being one in seventy-three. Seventy-four. There was a payphone bolted to the brick outside it.

Sutton Shoe Rebuilding was three doors up from that payphone. Raymond Sutton. He opened in there in seventy-eight. He'd been over on Fenkell before that and the building got sold out from under him. There was a barbershop on the other side of him and the fellow that ran it was Carl. Curtis. I can see him standing out front with his arms folded and I can't get his name.

Sutton was Korea. Twenty years up on me, so he was already an old man to me and I was thirty-some. He'd start in on how cold it got over there and then he wouldn't finish it, and I never pushed him.

He had a back room with two chairs and a hot plate. There was a pot on it that had been sitting since the morning and he'd pour it anyway. In the winter I'd set the satchel on the floor and sit maybe six minutes and then get back out on the street. That's what it was for about a year. A place to sit down.

He charged me six dollars for a half sole and I know for a fact he was getting nine off other people. I put the other three on the counter one time and he let it sit there and I picked it back up on my way out.

Then it got to be I'd run the loop so his block came around one o'clock instead of eleven.

And then there was a day in the back room when it went to something else, and after that it was something else maybe twice a month for a long stretch of years. That's all that was.

I'd call him from that payphone on my lunch. He'd pick up and say the whole name of the shop like he was reading it off the glass. I never said one thing on that phone a person could have done anything with. If Delores had the car on a Saturday I'd say the car's gone, and he knew what that meant, and that was the conversation.

I married Delores in 1972 at Greater Mount Moriah on Schaefer.

There was a man at the station, Ferrell, got put out in seventy-seven over something they found out about him. He had eleven years in. Whatever he had coming he didn't get it.

We went to a place on Twelfth twice. They put Rosa Parks up on the street signs in seventy-six but nobody I knew called it that for years after. It had a door onto the alley and that's why he liked it. I parked over on Pingree and walked up, and both times I was home before six. Twice.

There was a magazine I bought downtown on a Saturday I told her I was going for a filter for the mower. I kept it in the trunk of the Delta 88 under the spare. It stayed under there six years. I had a flat on Schaefer in eighty-three. Eighty-four. A man pulled over to help me and I told him I had it, and he stood there a while and then he went on. I got the wheel changed and put the jack back in the trunk.

When I sold that car I put the magazine in the barrel at the Shell station at Grand River and Southfield. Eighty-five. I didn't look at it, I just put it in and went inside and paid for the gas.

Jayla asked me what he was to me. I said he fixed shoes.

He shut the shop in eighty-eight. It was his hands. He'd get a thing where the knife came out of his fingers, and you can't do that work, and he knew it before I did. He told me in June and he was gone by the end of August and the machines went to a fellow out in Redford. The last day I came by he had a box of claim tickets out on the counter for shoes nobody ever came back for, some of them going back to the Fenkell shop. He gave me a pair of black oxfords a man left in seventy-nine. They fit me. I wore them to a couple funerals.

I had that block four more years after that. Twenty-two years on that same walk, all told. They papered the window over. Somebody put a beauty supply in there for a while.

I found out he died out of the paper. February of ninety-four. Three lines. Survived by a sister in Saginaw. I read it at this table with my coffee and then I went in to work.

Year after that, Delores's aunt passed and we had to go up to Saginaw for it, and I had that sister's address off the obituary in my head the whole drive. Sunday morning while everybody was still getting dressed I went and found the street. I didn't slow down. I got back on 75 and came back and got Delores and we went on to the church.

Delores has been gone since 2019. Forty-seven years we had. That's a separate thing.

Jayla wanted to know did I have a picture of him. I don't. There's a claim ticket in the drawer in the front room, number 41, his writing on it, for a pair of shoes I did pick up thirty-some years ago.

She's got another one written down under that one. I got up for the pot and got some coffee on the table.