Tuesday morning, he took the bus down Lincoln Way, opened his shop with his own key, put on his apron, and started stripping a pair of Red Wings that had been sitting on the shelf since October.
Ricky was already there with the realtor and a tape measure, saying something about the hip and about being reasonable. Mr. Sabatino did not look up from the boot.
At eleven the bell over the door went.
Good suit. Same as always. Except this time the man stopped two steps inside, because half the machines were in boxes and a woman with a clipboard was standing on that floor.
He set his package on the counter anyway. Then, for the first time in twenty-two years, he spoke.
His name is Amos Pettigrew. He runs the cardiac program at the medical center two counties over. In 1979 he was nine years old on Ash Street in his brother’s shoes with cardboard cut in the bottom, and every fall for six years Mr. Sabatino resoled them and told his mother the work was already paid for by somebody else. There was no somebody else.
Since 2003 he has come in every Tuesday at eleven and left one package. New children’s shoes. Mr. Sabatino sizes them and works the soles so they last two winters instead of one, and they go out through the nurses at three elementary schools with no name, no form, and no questions asked of anybody’s mother.
Eleven hundred and some pairs. There is a count in the back room and it is the only record either of them kept.
Every package has the same card taped to it. Typed, same eight lines, twenty-two years running.
One pair. Same as you did for me. Do not tell anybody it was me and do not tell anybody it was you. I will keep bringing them as long as you keep opening the door.
The realtor put her pen in her purse. She told me later she has never wanted out of a room so bad.
Ricky stood there holding a tape measure and found out what his grandfather had been doing in the back of a shop he had decided was worth more empty.
The power of attorney was gone by Friday. A man walking out of rehab on his own two feet, doing his own banking, has no trouble getting his doctor to write two sentences about capacity, and the lawyer did the rest in twenty minutes.
The building is not for sale. The machines came back out of the boxes, and the finisher has never run quite right since, which Mr. Sabatino mentions to Ricky about once a month.
Because Ricky comes Saturdays now. That was not his mother’s idea. The old man asked him. He is twenty-nine, not good at it, and he has learned to half-sole a work boot in a way that will not embarrass anybody.
Dr. Pettigrew still comes at eleven on Tuesdays. Nobody has ever thanked him out loud and nobody ever will.
A hallway full of people heard a young man say nobody needs a cobbler anymore. Eleven hundred kids in this county walked to school warm and dry off that man’s bench, and not one of them ever knew his name either.