The old man in the Purdue cap took off his hat on my front step and held it against his chest with the hand that was not holding the bag. He was about eighty, with a white mustache and a face like folded paper, and he stood very straight. “Mrs. Kittle,” he said. “My name is Everett Dill. I am the father of Lily. I did not come here to make a scene. I came because this morning a woman in a Bears jacket told me your husband was dead, and I could not sit in my house another hour.” I opened the screen door and said, “Come in, Mr. Dill.”
I made coffee because my hands needed work. He sat at my kitchen table in the chair where Duke used to sit, and he set the plastic bag between us. The sneaker inside was pink, small, with a Velcro strap, and gone gray with age. “They found that one in the ditch beside Route 41,” he said. “The other one was never found.” He looked at it. “I have kept this thirty one years. I thought that some day the other would turn up, and I would know.” I put the coffee down, and I went out to the garage without saying a word.
I do not know why I went to the toolbox. Duke had a big red steel chest on wheels, which he used in the shop and then at home, and I had not opened its bottom drawer since the funeral. I knelt on the concrete in my good dress and pulled it. Under a stack of greasy rags and a coil of wire, wrapped in a faded blue bandanna, lay a small pink sneaker. Beside it was a rubber banded stack of money order stubs, every one for fifty dollars, and a note in his block hand. Marv, if you find this, I am sorry. Please give it to the father.
A man can carry a shoe in a toolbox for thirty one years and never once find the words to set it down.
I carried them in together, the shoe and the note and the stubs, and I laid them on the table next to the other. Two small shoes, a pair again. Mr. Dill looked at them for a long time. He did not touch them. Then he put his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook, and I stood beside the stove with the dish towel against my mouth. Neither of us said a word for what felt like an hour. The clock over the sink ticked. Outside, a mourning dove called in the maple. At last he lifted his head and said, very quietly, “Thank you.”
I told him what I knew, which was not enough. I told him about Thanksgiving week of 1994, and the rented pickup, and the story about the deer. I told him that I had never asked, and that I had let myself not know for thirty one years, because I loved my husband and could not bear what the question might find. I said I was ashamed. Mr. Dill listened with his hands folded on the table. When I finished, he said, “Mrs. Kittle, I have been angry for three decades. I do not think I have any anger left in me today.”
What he wanted, he said, was not revenge. He was seventy eight years old, a widower, with a heart that skipped. He wanted two things before he died. He wanted the truth written down where the law could see it. And he wanted the name of Ricky Gaines cleared, because Ricky had been a drunk and a sinner but he had not killed Lily, and he had died thinking the whole county believed he had. “That boy served seven years for a sin that was not his,” Mr. Dill said. “I would like to say so out loud before I join my daughter.”
We went to the Lake County prosecutor on Monday, the two of us, in my Buick. I carried the note, the stubs, the shoe, and the clipping. A young woman in a gray suit, who had been born the year Lily died, took them from me with both hands. She said it was the strangest file she had ever received. It took five months. In March, a judge in Crown Point vacated the conviction of Richard Gaines posthumously, with his sister Tonya in the front row in a borrowed dress. Mr. Dill stood and read a statement. He did not mention my husband by name.
I sold the split level that summer and moved to a small apartment near Trinity Lutheran. I gave the proceeds of the life insurance of Duke to Tonya, every dollar, and set up a scholarship at the church in the name of Lily for any child who wanted to learn music. Tonya cried when I handed her the check. She said it was too much. I said it was thirty one years, and that I did not think it was enough, and she hugged me, a stranger in a Bears jacket, in the middle of the parking lot of the bank.
Mr. Dill put the shoes in a glass case on his mantel, side by side. He asked me to come see it on a Friday in April, and I drove out to his small house in Hobart with a tray of tomato plants in the back seat. He was in the garden, on his knees in the dirt, planting zinnias. Lily used to love zinnias, he said. We worked together for an hour without speaking much. At five o clock he washed his hands at the spigot and said, “I make a decent pot of chili.” I said I would bring the cornbread.
On Fridays now, I do not stop at the post office. I stop at the nursery, and I pick up a flat of flowers, and I drive out to the garden at the church where a little swing hangs from an old maple and a bronze plaque says Lily Dill, who loved to sing. Mr. Dill is often there. He sits on the bench with his cap on his knee. Sometimes I sit beside him. Sometimes the Sunday school children come out and sing, and we listen, and nobody speaks of anything sad.