The Lesson of Her Death

door.
    “Oh, Brian?” As he turned she said, “I just wanted to say, I’m sorry. I know this was difficult for you. To put the school above your personal loyalty. I won’t forget it.”
    “Sometimes,” Okun said, “as Immanuel Kant tells us, sacrifices must be made for a higher good.”

“Y ou said you’d polish them.”
    “I’ll polish them.”
    “You said today.”
    “I’ll polish them today,” Amos Trout said, slouching in his lopsided green Naugahyde easy chair. He scooped up the remote control and turned the volume up.
    His lean, wattle-skinned wife poured the Swan’s Down cake mix into a Pyrex bowl and decided he wasn’t going to get away with it. She set down the egg and said, “When I was to church Ada Kemple looked right down at my feet, there was nothing else for yards around, had to’ve been my feet, and if that woman didn’t have a gleam in her eye when she surfaced I don’t know what. I liked to die of embarrassment.”
    “I said I’d polish them.”
    “Here.” She handed him the navy blue pumps as if she were offering him dueling pistols.
    Trout took them then looked at the TV screen. It wouldn’t’ve been so bad if Chicago wasn’t playing New York and it wasn’t the bottom of the sixth and the score wasn’t tied with Mets go-ahead on third and only one out.
    But She had spoken. And so Amos Trout turned the sound up again and carried the shoes down to the basement.
(Don’t seem so scuffed that the toothless bitch Ada Kemple has anything to snicker about through her smear of cheap pasty makeup.)
    “… a grounder to left …
snagged
by the shortstop, backhand! What a catch! There’ll be a play at home.… The runner—”
    CLICK
. The TV went silent. His wife’s footsteps sounded above him on their way back to the kitchen.
    Ah, it hurts. Sometimes it hurts
.
    Trout grimaced then snatched a newspaper from the huge stack that had accumulated while they’d been on vacation in Minnesota. He spread it out on the mottled brown linoleum. He stood slowly and got the paraphernalia—the blue polish, the brush, the buffing cloth—and set it all out in front of him. He picked up each shoe and examined the amount of work. He turned one upside down. A broken toenail like a chip of fogged ice fell out. He set the shoe down on the newspaper and as he applied polish he focused past the shoes to the paper itself.
    Trout read for a moment then stood up. He tossed the shoes on top of the clothes dryer. One left a long blue streak on the enameled metal. He carried the newspaper into the kitchen where his wife sat cross-legged, chatting on the phone.
    “The game was too loud,” she said to him. “I shut it off.” Then returned to the phone.
    He said, “Hang up.”
    Her neck skin quivered at the command. She blinked at him. “I’m talking to my mother.”
    “Hang up.”
    She looked at the yellowed rotary dial for an explanation of this madness. “I’ll call you back, Mom.”
    He took the receiver from her and pressed the button down to clear the line.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Making a phone call.”
    “Aren’t you going to polish my shoes?”
    “No,” he said, “I’m not.” And began to dial.
    The Oakwood Mall. How Bill Corde hated malls.
    Oh, the stores were clean, the prices reasonable. Sears guaranteed satisfaction and where in the whole of the world did you get that nowadays without more strings attached than you could count? Here you could buy hot egg rolls and tacos and Mrs. Field’s dense cookies and frozen yogurt. You could slip your arm around your wife, walk her into Victoria’s Secret and park her in front of a mannequin wearing red silk panties and bra and a black garter belt then kiss her neck while she squirmed and blushed and let you buy her, well, not that outfit but a nice sexy nightgown.
    But malls for Corde meant the Fairway Mall in St. Louis, where two policemen had died because of him and that was why he never came here.
    He glanced at a Toys “” Us. In the window a cardboard cutout of Dathar-IV stood over an army of warriors from the Lost Dimension. Corde looked at this for a moment then walked on until he found Floors for All. He wasn’t more than ten feet inside before a sports-coated man all of twenty-one pounced. “I know who you are,” the kid said. “You’re a man with a naked floor.”
    “I’m—”
    “Floors are just like you and me. We want new threads sometimes, so does your floor. It gets tired of the same old outfit.