1 Evelyn has forgotten how to fold up the lawn chair Push Pull Right One hand on the back press a knee here yank upward and Ouch Evelyn shakes her hand hard as if she can fling out the pain She puts her throbbing finger in her mouth and sucks gazing up It is a bright Tuesday The sky is perfectly clear No popcorn bursts no cottony fistfuls of chair stuffing not a single down feather Only strange patches where the blue is so light that when Evelyn peers into them they lose color completely They’re like windows or tunnels Maybe to outer space Click-click A sparrow scrabbles for a hold on the
birdfeeder’s short peg Two more chairs to fold As always on the last day of summer holidays Evelyn and her parents have spent the morning scrubbing their brown two-bedroom house that stands in a row of other brown two-bedroom houses They’ve coiled the hose They’ve packaged up the badminton net with its rackets and birdies Evelyn’s mother who is Scottish calls them shuttlecocks and stowed everything tidily in the garage Finally Evelyn’s mother pronounces the house neat as a new pin She places three teacups on the table Evelyn’s father Lunch is tomato soup Evelyn’s father breaks his crackers into his bowl so the pieces float like icebergs on a red sea Evelyn thinks it’s rude of her father to dump his crackers in his soup as if he’s lazy and in a hurry at the same time It’s like when he cleans the wax from his ears with the end of his eyeglasses Evelyn’s mother never breaks her crackers She’s never in a hurry She is on top of things One of her habits is to press the last scrap of the old bar of soap onto the new bar Although the soap in Evelyn’s house is humpbacked no soap is ever wasted Let’s get our ducks in a row Evelyn’s mother says now
pours tea from his cup into his saucer then blows rippling the surface of the shallow brown pond He lifts the pond to his lips and slurps After lunch your father will wash the car Evelyn and I will go to Frederick’s for shoes Evelyn’s mother once read that children’s feet grow fastest in summer so Evelyn spends July and August in open-toed sandals She loved this year’s pair straps of white leather that softened as her skin browned But now her toes hang over the ends a little Evelyn and her mother walk to Frederick’s once a year It’s as sure as Christmas The day hovers between summer and fall the warm air stirred every so often by a cool breeze Suddenly Evelyn’s mother sinks into a bench Och no she moans She touches her heart and nods across the street Evie look Evelyn blinks Frederick’s Footwear is no more The store has been blasted with fluorescent light The wooden sign with swoopy letters is gone Instead a plastic sign with plain letters says BUDGET SHOES What can we do Evelyn’s mother says standing up Evelyn wedges her hand under her mother’s elbow The two step bravely into the street
The brass bell on the top of the door has been removed Instead Evelyn and her mother are beeped in Evelyn studies the plastic speaker low on the doorframe Infrared An invisible tripwire She’d like to try entering the store without triggering it Bellycrawl like a marine Or maybe a kung fu scissors jump would do the trick The biggest surprise is Mr Schumann He’s still here with his watery eyes and grayish skin and hair in his ears like packed snow But he isn’t dressed in his usual brown three-piece suit Instead he wears a T-shirt With a nametag Right Fit Technician FRED Perhaps it’s better this way Evelyn’s mother tells Mr Schumann soothingly after he explains the changes mentioning buy out and franchise a word that to Evelyn sounds like something pretending to be sweet After searching the half-empty shelves Evelyn’s mother finally reaches for a pair of blue canvas shoes Evelyn freezes If she moves a truck will pull up with a delivery of stiff leather loafers the kind that have dug at her ankles every year since kindergarten The blue shoes in her mother’s hands are neither leather nor loafer They’re like runners Lace-ups of course Evelyn’s mother would never buy shoes with Velcro
