Last Gift From Grandma
By: Dave Woehrle
November, almost two in the morning in Iowa, we watched snow and sipped whiskey on my apartment's concrete patio near a closed Wendy’s. There was one lone streetlight in the parking lot.
I'd been gym shoe-shopping with my ex-girlfriend that day, and I was thinking about footwear and regret.
I said, “You know that tissue paper near the toes of new shoes? What’s it for?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of odd. It's like a mouse nest by your toes," he said.
“And do you think a person at a factory puts it there, or is it some kind of machine?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure if tissue paper-pushing machines exist. There are all kinds of machines, though.”
“Yeah. Maybe it’s a sweatshop thing.”
“Probably.”
He sipped again from the flask.
He said, “Hmm. Reminds me of my grandma.”
“What? Sweatshops?”
“No. The tissue paper thing. She got me shoes as a gift once on my birthday. I think I was 7. I tried them on and they didn’t fit right. They hurt my feet, but I didn’t want to tell my Grandma. I thought…I don’t know what I thought, really. What does any 7 year old think? But for some reason I didn’t want Grandma to know they didn’t fit good. I just smiled and wore them. At the end of the day I took them off and the ends of my socks were all bloody. I reached and felt something. It was wet tissue paper, wet from blood.”
He shook his head.
I said, “Wow.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know about the tissue paper thing. Like I said, I was 7. Did you know about the tissue paper at 7?”
“Shit. I don’t know when I learned about tissue paper being in new shoes.”
“Yeah. Well, anyway, my Grandma saw my bloody socks and she cried.” He paused. “It’s weird to have your Grandma cry at your birthday party when you’re a kid. All my friends were looking at her. She left the room for awhile. Came back to watch me blow out my candles, though.”
I said, “Wow. That’s…that’s something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I haven’t thought about that in awhile. She died a few years after that. It’s really my only memory of her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s cool. She was old.”
It kept snowing. It was quiet.
He asked, “So what kind of shoes did you get?”
“Just white gym shoes. New Balance.”
"Yeah. Those will do."
We watched the snow.
I said, “I hope it’s a machine, you know? I hope a machine puts the tissue paper in there.”
We watched the snow.
I said, “I hope it’s a machine, you know? I hope a machine puts the tissue paper in there.”
He asked, “Why?”
“Because I can’t bear to think I’m the second set of hands to touch that paper. I mean, someone’s livelihood depending on paper crumbling. It’s just…just a bad thought.” I looked at the dark windows of the Wendy’s.
He said, “There’s always plenty of those. Bad thoughts. Bad jobs.”
He sipped more whiskey and said, “Well, I guess you never know.”
We said good night and I went inside. Later in the night, I drunkenly called up my ex, the one I’d gone shoe-shopping with, to ask at what age she learned about tissue paper being inside gym shoes. I left a message and haven’t heard from her since.
