She nodded and put one hand on her chest above her heart.
“If you mean you love her, I do, too,” I said. “When was the last time you saw her?”
The shoe-woman looked at the sky, seemed to calculate, then shrugged. “Lon.”
“If you mean long, it must have been, because she’s old now. Doesn’t bounce too much these days. But Mr. Bowditch… did you know him? If you know Rades, you must have known Mr. Bowditch.”
She nodded with the same vigor and the remains of her mouth turned up in another smile. She only had a few teeth, but the ones I could see were a startling white against her gray skin. “A’riyan.”
“Adrian? Adrian Bowditch?”
She nodded hard enough to sprain her neck.
“But you don’t know how long ago he was here?”
She looked at the sky, then shook her head.
“Was Radar young then?”
“Hu-hee.”
“Puppy?”
More nodding.
She took my arm and pulled me around the corner. （I had to duck under another line of dangling shoes to keep from being garroted.） Over here was a patch of earth that had been turned and raked, as if she was getting ready to plant something. There was also a ramshackle little cart leaning on a couple of long wooden handles. There were two burlap sacks inside with green things sticking out of the tops. She knelt down and motioned for me to do the same.
We faced each other that way. Her finger moved very slowly and hesitantly as she wrote in the dirt. She paused once or twice, remembering what came next, I think, then went on.
sh gud lif
And then, after a longer pause:
?
I puzzled over it and shook my head. The woman got on all fours and made her version of barking again. Then I got it.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s had a very good life. But now she’s old, like I said. And she’s not… not doing so well.”
It caught up with me, then. Not just Radar and not just Mr. Bowditch, but everything. The gift that was a burden I was supposed to carry. The decomposing cockroaches and finding the house at Number 1 Sycamore torn apart, probably by the man who had murdered Mr. Heinrich. By the pure craziness of being here, kneeling in the dirt with a mostly unfaced woman who collected shoes and hung them on crisscrossing clotheslines. But above all it was Rades. Thinking of how she sometimes struggled to get up in the morning or after a nap. Of how she sometimes didn’t eat all her food and then gave me a look that said I know I should want it but I don’t. I began to cry.
The shoe-woman put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me to her. “O’ay,” she said. Then, with an effort, she got it completely in the clear. “Okay.”
I hugged her back. She had a smell, faint but nice. It was, I realized, the smell of the poppies. I cried it out in big wet sobs and she held me, patting my back. When I pulled away, she wasn’t crying—maybe she couldn’t—but the crescent of her mouth was turned down instead of up. I wiped my face with my sleeve and asked if Mr. Bowditch had taught her to write, or if she already knew how.
She put her gray thumb near her first two fingers, which were kind of stuck together.
“He taught you a little?”
She nodded, then wrote in the dirt again.
frens
“He was my friend, too. He passed away.”
She cocked her head to one side, stringy clumps of hair falling to the shoulder of her dress.
“Died.”
She covered her slit eyes, as pure an expression of grief as I’ve ever seen. Then she gave me another hug. She let go, pointed to the shoes on the nearest line, and shook her head.
“No,” I agreed. “He won’t need shoes. Not anymore.”
She made a gesture toward her mouth and chewed, which was sort of awful. Then she pointed at the cottage.
“If you’re asking if I want to eat, thanks, but I can’t. I need to get back. Maybe another time. Soon. I’ll bring Radar if I can. Before he died, Mr. Bowditch said there was a way to make her young again. I know that sounds nuts, but he said it worked for him. It’s a big sundial. There.” I pointed in the direction of the city.
Her slit eyes actually widened a little, and her mouth opened in what was almost an O. She put her hands to her gray cheeks, looking like that famous picture of the woman screaming. She bent to the dirt again and swept away what she had written. This time she wrote faster, and it might have been a word she’d used often, because the spelling was right.
danger
“I know. I’ll be careful.”
She put her melted fingers to her half-erased mouth in a shhh gesture.