But the next morning I got up, put on my one good shirt, and drove down to the shop on Baltimore Street to start packing up thirty-one years. I figured I would do it alone, quiet, the way things end.
There was a line of people waiting at my door.
Who gets shoes fixed anymore, the landlord had said, keys jingling in his hand.
Word had gone around town overnight the way word does in a place like ours. That the cobbler was being pushed out for a coffee franchise. And half the town had come down to my little shop, not to get a resole, but to stand with me.
There was the man whose work boots I had kept alive through three years of unemployment, free of charge, so he could keep looking for a job. There was the widow whose husband funeral shoes I had shined the same week I had, years before, fit her wedding shoes. There were people I had half forgotten and people I saw every week, and they were all just standing there on the sidewalk in the cold.
And then Hollis, who owns the old feed store two blocks over, stepped up and said he had a whole front corner sitting empty, good light, big window, and that it was mine for next to nothing for as long as I wanted it, because a town without a cobbler is not a town he cared to live in.
The men picked up my workbench right then and there, my father stitching awl and my brass shoe horn and all, and they carried it down the street on their shoulders like it was something in a parade. Somebody made a new sign. Somebody hand painted an arrow on a board that said the cobbler moved, and stuck it in the ground outside the old place.
I reopened two blocks over that same week. And do you know, I have been busier than I was in years, because every single one of those people made a point of finding me, and telling their neighbors, and bringing in shoes they had been meaning to fix for a decade.
The coffee franchise opened where my shop had been. I hear it does fine. But there is something I know that the landlord never understood. A corner is not worth more as a coffee spot. A corner is worth exactly as much as the person standing in it, and for thirty-one years the person in that corner had kept this whole town on its feet.
That does not clear out by the first. It walks down the street with the cobbler, carried on the shoulders of the people he served, and it sets up two blocks over and keeps right on going.
Who gets shoes fixed anymore, he asked. Half this town, it turns out. They just needed to know where I moved.