She gave a final hop, as if for emphasis, then made a twirling gesture at me with her finger: eat, eat.
Radar struggled up, and when she finally got her back legs under her, she came to Dora. The woman slapped the heel of her gray hand against her gray forehead in a what was I thinking gesture. She found another bowl and put some meat and gravy in it. She looked at me, scant eyebrows lifted.
I nodded and smiled. “Everybody eats at the House of Shoes.” Dora gave me her upturned crescent of a smile and set the bowl down. Radar got busy, tail wagging.
I scoped out the other half of the room while I ate. There was a neatly made bed, just the right size for a little shoe-woman, but most of that side was a workshop. Or maybe a rehab unit for wounded shoes. A lot of them had busted backs, or soles that were hanging down from the uppers like broken jaws, or holes in the soles or toes. There was a pair of leather workboots that had been slit down the backs, as if they had been inherited by someone whose feet were bigger than those of the original owner. A crooked wound in a silk bootee of royal purple had been stitched up with dark blue thread, probably the closest Dora had for a match. Some shoes were dirty and some—on a workbench—were in the process of being cleaned and polished with stuff in small metal pots. I wondered where they had all come from, but I wondered even more about the object that held pride of place in the workshop half of the cottage.
Meanwhile, I had emptied my bowl and Radar had emptied hers. Dora took them and raised her eyebrows in another question.
“Yes, please,” I said. “Not too much more for Radar, or she’ll sleep all day.”
Dora put her clasped hands to the side of her head and closed her eyes. She pointed at Radar. “Nees.”
“Knees?”
Dora shook her head and did the pantomime again. “Nees!”
“She needs to sleep?”
The shoe-woman nodded and pointed to where Radar had been, by the stove.
“She slept there before? When Mr. Bowditch brought her?”
Dora nodded again and dropped to one knee to pet Radar’s head. Rades looked up at her with—I could be wrong, but I don’t think so—adoration.
We finished our second bowls of stew. I said thank you. Radar said it with her eyes. While Dora cleared away our bowls, I got up to look at the object in the shoe hospital that had caught my attention. It was an old-fashioned sewing machine, the kind that runs by pumping a treadle. Written on its black casing in fading gold leaf was the word SINGER.
“Did Mr. Bowditch bring you this?”
She nodded, patted her chest, lowered her head. When she looked up her eyes were wet.
“He was good to you.”
She nodded.
“And you were good to him. Also to Radar.”
She made an effort and produced a single understandable word: “Yezz.”
“You surely have a lot of shoes. Where do you get them? And what do you do with them?”
She didn’t seem to know how to reply to that, and the gestures she made didn’t help. Then she brightened and went to the workshop. There was a wardrobe which must have contained her clothes, and a great many more cupboards than in the kitchen half of the cottage. I assumed she stored her various shoe-repair equipment in them. She bent to one of the lower ones and brought out a little chalkboard, like the kind a child might have used in the old days of one-room schools and desks with inkwells. She rummaged further and came up with a stub of chalk. She pushed aside some of her works-in-progress on the workbench, wrote slowly, then held the chalkboard up for me to read: yu see googir.
“I don’t understand.”
She sighed, rubbed it out, and beckoned me to the bench. I looked over her shoulder as she drew a little box and two parallel lines in front of it. She tapped the box, waved her arm around the cottage, and tapped the box again.
“This house?”
She nodded, pointed at the parallel lines, then pointed at the single round window to the left of the front door.
“The road.”
“Yezz.” She raised a finger to me—attend this, young man—and extended the parallel lines a bit. Then she drew another box. Above it she wrote yu see googir again.
“Googir.”
“Yezz.” She patted her mouth, then brought her fingers together rapidly in a snapping-crocodile gesture I understood perfectly.
“Talk!”
“Yezz.”
She tapped the non-word googir. Then she took me by the shoulders. Her hands were strong from her shoe-work, the gray fingertips hard with calluses. She turned me and walked me to the front door. When I got there, she pointed at me, made walking gestures with two fingers, and pointed to the right.