These Are My Flats

Nell Abbate had kept a tape measure in her desk drawer for eleven years without using it once. She used it now, at the gate of Fenwick Farm, in the rain, in front of twenty witnesses and a goose.

She knelt beside Vivian in the gravel. Nobody breathed. Nell hooked the end of the tape under the back of Boone’s borrowed boot and pulled it up.

She squinted. She checked again.

Then she stood up, took a laminated card out of her coat pocket and read aloud.

“Rule Four. A flat is any shoe with a heel under one inch, measured at the back of the heel by the pool administrator.” She lowered the card. “That heel is one and a quarter.”

There was a pause while twenty people did math.

“It’s a hiking boot,” said Marcy.

“It’s one and a quarter,” said Nell. “I don’t make the rules. Well, I did make the rules. But I made them in 2015, and I’m not changing them in a hay field.”

The gas man from Brannock Meadows quietly tore up his slip.

Vivian looked down at the borrowed boots. Then she looked up at her entire office, soaked and stunned in their lawn chairs.

“These,” she said, “are my flats.”

The gate fell apart. Marcy laughed so hard she dropped the binoculars. One of the title officers had to sit down on a cooler. Even Royce Danforth, still on his ATV, made a noise into his bolo tie that might have been a laugh.

Boone laughed loudest of all. He laughed until he had to lean on the fence.

“Viv,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I would list a farm with you any day.”

“Good,” said Ida Fenwick. “Because you’re going to.”

---

She told us in the barn, out of the rain. Mortgage sat in the doorway, guarding a feed sack with words on it.

“I’m listing with both of you,” Ida said. “Hadley & Marsh and Ridgeline, together. Split it however you like.”

Boone and Vivian looked at each other.

“Why both?” asked Vivian.

“Because one of you finds horseshoes,” said Ida, “and one of you finds pins. I want everything on this farm found before somebody else buys it.”

She pointed at Boone. “He knows land.” Then at Vivian: “You know people. And both of you walked it.”

Vivian held out her hand to Boone. Boone shook it, gently, which was still somehow worse.

“Fifty-fifty,” she said.

“Fifty-fifty,” said Boone. “And Viv? Keep the boots.”

---

The county surveyor came out the following Thursday. He found the brass cap exactly where Boone had uncovered it. He found Vivian’s black heels exactly where she had left them, still upright, still side by side. Nobody had been able to pull them out, so nobody had tried very hard.

He set a new monument beside the old pin, an aluminum cap on a long steel rod. Then he looked at the heels for a while and wrote something in his field book.

When the new survey came back from the county, it had a note beside the northeast corner, printed in small official capitals: STRAND’S CORNER.

“He asked me what to call it,” said Ida, when I showed her. “I told him.”

---

Fenwick Farm went on the market in May, when the fields had finally dried out. Boone wrote the land description, and Vivian wrote the rest. The hay lease was on page one, in her exact words: Comes with a good neighbor. Worth more than six acres.

It sold in nineteen days. The buyers were Ruth and Jonah Adeyemi, thirty-four and thirty-six, who had been goat farming on rented land for six years. They wanted somewhere to stay.

Ruth read the hay lease twice and then asked, “Is the neighbor nice?”

“He’s improving,” said Ida.

Royce brought them a pie on moving day. He told them his granddaddy would have hated it. Then he stayed for three hours and fixed their gate.

---

On closing day, Ida called the office at eight in the morning.

“Before I sign,” she said, “I want to walk the north line one more time. Just me and the town agent. Tell her to come.”

I drove. I picked Vivian up at her house at nine. She came out of her front door carrying her clipboard and her thermos.

She was wearing flat shoes.

Not the charcoal fours, and not Boone’s boots. Flat, plain, navy canvas shoes, the kind you can buy in any drugstore. They made no sound at all on her front steps. I sat in the car and stared through the windshield.

She got in. She buckled her seatbelt.

“Drive,” she said.

“Vivian—”

“Ida is four foot eleven,” said Vivian. “She’s leaving the farm she lived on for sixty years. I’d like to hear what she says about it.”

She looked out the window. “It’s hard to hear somebody from five foot seven.”

I drove.

---

They walked the north line together, slowly, in the sun. Ida wore Arthur’s boots. Vivian wore her drugstore flats. I stayed by the car, because some showings are not for the junior agent.

I watched them stop at Ashcombe’s Corner. I watched Ida point at the old fence post stump, and then at the heels, and laugh.

I watched Vivian stand still for a long time while Ida talked. The ground was dry now. It held her up just fine.

When they came back, Ida’s eyes were red. So were Vivian’s.

“Well,” said Ida, “that’s that. Arthur would’ve liked you.”

She considered. “He wouldn’t have understood you. But he’d have liked you.”

---

The closing was at the Hadley & Marsh office at two o’clock.

Vivian walked into the lobby ahead of me. I heard it before I understood it. Or rather, I didn’t hear it.

For two years, I had heard Vivian Ashcombe arrive. Everybody had. That quick, even rhythm on the lobby tile, like a metronome set to “certain.” Nell knew it the way you know your own doorbell.

That afternoon, there was no sound. Vivian crossed the whole lobby in silence.

Nell looked up from her screen. She looked at Vivian. She looked down.

She did not reach for her tape measure. She didn’t need to.

“Rule Four,” said Nell, very quietly. “Satisfied.”

The office went silent. Then it went loud. Somebody on the second floor started shouting down the stairs. Marcy came running with her binoculars, out of pure habit.

Nell unscrewed the jar. She poured the slips onto her desk and started going through them.

Thursday, Saturday, Saturday, my own birthday, Saturday.

Nobody had picked closing day. Nobody had picked any day in May.

“Rule Seven,” said Nell. “If no slip matches the date, the sealed slip wins.”

She picked up the small laminated envelope from the bottom of the jar. The one nobody was allowed to read. She slit it open with her letter opener and unfolded a note inside.

She read it. She closed her eyes. Then she held it up so everyone could see.

The handwriting was neat, sharp and very familiar.

When it’s worth it. — V.S., 2015.

I turned and looked at Vivian. Thirty people turned and looked at Vivian.

“I told you,” said Nell, to me, “she knows everything.”

---

The Flats Pool paid out two thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars. Vivian took the stack of bills and handed it straight to Ruth Adeyemi, who had arrived with Jonah to sign.

“For the north line,” said Vivian. “You need a new fence. Use black locust. It’ll outlast all of us.”

Ruth looked at the money, then at Vivian’s shoes, and decided not to ask.

Then the lobby door opened, and Boone Radley walked in to sign the closing.

He was wearing a gray suit. He was also wearing, for the first time in the living memory of three counties, a pair of polished black dress shoes. They squeaked on the tile.

The lobby stared at him.

“Ida said wear something nice,” said Boone.

Nell didn’t say a word. She reached under her desk and brought out a brand-new glass jar. She peeled a fresh label off her laminator, smoothed it onto the glass and set the jar on the corner of the desk.

THE BOOTS POOL. EST. TODAY. RULES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.

Vivian was the first in line. She wrote something on a slip, folded it twice and handed it to Nell with a five-dollar bill. Nell fed the slip through the laminator, sealed it in an envelope and dropped it in the jar.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Vivian just smiled. On Monday she would be back in six-inch heels, and she would not discuss it.

“It’s sealed,” said Nell.