Column F

I drove the nineteen minutes in sixteen. I did not speed. I simply knew every light on Calloway Avenue, the way I know every pair on the Wall, and I timed them.

Dee stayed on speaker the whole way. She described the situation in the voice of a hostage who has come to admire her captors.

“So she doesn’t really do assessments,” Dee said. “That’s the first thing. She calls it an assessment, but it’s more of a sprint.”

“How many are bagged?”

“Define bagged.”

“Dee.”

“A hundred and forty-one. But they’re in very nice bags. Contractor grade.

“She brought her own label maker. It has a holster.”

“Why are they bagged at all?”

There was a muffled conversation. Then a new voice came on the line. It was low, warm, and terribly calm, like a meditation app that had been told my secrets.

“Hi, Tess. This is Harriet. I want you to know that this is a safe space.”

“It’s my apartment.”

“Your apartment can be a safe space. That’s the whole goal.”

I heard the soft click of a label being printed.

“The donation truck from Second Step comes at three-thirty,” Harriet said. “I always book it in advance. It keeps the process honest.”

I looked at the dashboard clock. It said 3:14.

“Harriet,” I said, “I need you to stop being honest for about twenty minutes.”

---

I took the stairs to the fourth floor two at a time, in W-162, comfort five. Column E had never felt so vindicated.

My apartment looked like a crime scene that had been tidied by the criminal.

The Wall was empty. All three sides of it. The little brass tags still hung on each cubby, W-001 through W-214, labeling nothing. It was like walking into a library after the books had left on vacation.

The shoes had moved to the living room. They stood on the floor in rows, sorted by color. The gradient ran from black near the kitchen to white near the window.

It was, I had to admit, very beautiful. It was also completely wrong. My system was by ID, and every one of my clear boxes had been flattened and stacked by the door.

“Boxes are clutter’s coat,” Harriet said.

She was fifty-two, slim, and dressed entirely in linen the color of oatmeal. Oat 2, if I’m honest. She wore reading glasses pushed up on her head and the label maker on her hip.

She did not seem surprised to see me. I had the impression that nothing in a home had surprised Harriet Voss since the late nineties.

Dee stood behind her holding a roll of packing tape. She looked like a child holding a baseball next to a broken window.

“I’m just saying,” Dee said, “she was very respectful the whole time.”

“Where are the blues?”

Harriet tilted her head. “Can I ask you a question first?”

“No.”

“Do the blues serve you?”

“Today,” I said, “they serve the wedding party of Corinne Vasquez. At four o’clock. In front of a hundred and twenty guests and a man who loves his oak floors more than his family.”

Harriet considered this. Then she nodded, once, and pointed at three black bags by the couch.

“Blue isn’t your color,” she said. “I made an assessment.”

---

We emptied the bags onto the rug. There were nine pairs in various blues, and none of them were in boxes. Without boxes, there were no labels. Without labels, I had to identify each pair the old-fashioned way.

I opened the laptop on the coffee table. I took a metal ruler out of the kitchen drawer.

“What is the ruler for?” said Harriet.

“Dusk 1 and Dusk 2 look identical in this light. But Dusk 1 is fifty-five millimeters. Dusk 2 is sixty.”

I measured the first heel. “Fifty-five. So it’s W-131 or W-140. W-131 has a scuff from a gazebo in 2019.”

I checked. There was no scuff.

“W-140,” I said.

Harriet slowly lowered herself onto the arm of the couch. She looked at me the way a bird-watcher looks at a bird she has only ever seen in books.

“You know which scuff came from which gazebo,” she said.

“It was a very memorable gazebo.”

I measured and checked and called out IDs. Dee read the matching rows back from the spreadsheet. Within four minutes we had the four Dusk pairs for Kiki, Bethany, June, and a spare. Within six, we had the gray-blue mistakes of hope in sizes eight and seven.

Dee put each pair in a tote bag and labeled the bag with Harriet’s label maker. KIKI, BETHANY, JUNE, ROZ, NADIA, SPARE.

Harriet watched her do it without comment. I think it was the hardest thing she did all day.

My phone buzzed. It was Ollie.

Status: Felix found a scuff. Not his this time. He is lying on the floor next to it.

Is he okay?

He says he is “communing.” Also Lorraine has taken over the seating chart. She has a tab for it.

The best man has stopped crying about the champagne. I told him it was shoes. Now he is crying about the shoes.

Copy, I wrote, because it seemed like the only possible answer.

Ha, Ollie wrote. That’s mine.

Then she reached over and turned my laptop toward herself.

“May I?”

“You may look.”

She scrolled. She scrolled for a while. Her finger stopped, and I knew exactly where it had stopped, because her face changed.

“Column F,” she said quietly.

“Don’t touch column F.”

“I’m not touching it. I’m reading it.”

She read aloud, very softly.

“W-044. Bought the day Dee signed the papers on her first house. She cried in the parking lot, and so did I. Still the best day.”

Behind her, my sister went very still.

“You never told me that,” Dee said.

“It’s in column F,” I said. “Nobody reads column F.”

Harriet kept scrolling.

“W-097. Barn wedding, Pruitt Farm. The groom’s grandfather taught me to two-step. He was ninety-one.”

She scrolled again. “W-162. Bought to replace W-160, which I gave to a bride whose heel snapped on the church steps.”

She looked up. “You gave a pair away?”

“She needed them more. I wrote it down.”

Harriet took the reading glasses off her head and put them on her face. I would later learn that this was the most serious thing she could do.

“Tess,” she said, “these aren’t shoes. These are receipts for your entire life.”

“Column K is receipts. The actual ones. This is just F.”

“I don’t think,” said Harriet Voss, “that I’m going to be able to recommend forty pairs.”

Dee cleared her throat. “I’m just saying,” she began, and then she stopped. In forty-one years, I had never heard that sentence run out of road.

She crouched down and started opening the next bag instead.

---

It was 3:24. I needed Pearl 1, W-088, and then I needed to be in the van.

“Ivory,” I said. “Where’s the white end of the gradient?”

Harriet pointed to the window. There was a short row of whites and creams on the floor. I went down it with the ruler.

Oat 1, and Oat 1 again. Cream, forty-five millimeters, W-150. Bone, a flat, W-012.

There was no Pearl.

On a box by the window sat one pair Harriet had set apart. It was chartreuse, with a square gold buckle. A sticky note on top said DISCUSS?

“These,” said Harriet, “have never been worn. Not once. I can always tell.”

She looked at me gently. “Why do you keep a pair you never wear?”

I didn’t answer. I picked up the box and put it in the bag with the others. I didn’t know why. It was faster than explaining.

“Harriet,” I said. “Ivory, forty millimeters, one strap resewn on the left. Where?”

Her face did something careful.

“The ivory ones,” she said, “went into the first bag. They were very worn. That’s usually how I know a pair was loved enough to let go.”

“Where is the first bag?”

Dee looked at the window. Harriet looked at the window. I looked at the window.

On the street below, a white box truck with SECOND STEP painted on its side was pulling away from the curb. It was six minutes early.

“He’s punctual,” Harriet said faintly. “I’ve always liked that about him.”