“And for so much other things also.” Dijana told Neil how his father had helped her wire money home, he’d helped her with dentist bills, he’d even driven her all the way to the immigration office in Denver to see if they could get her a proper work permit.
“And you know, while I am in U.S. there is one really terrible thing happening. This daughter to my friend, she died, but out of country, yah? And your father, he is helping me so much to find where is my friend because actually she is very sick, in hospital, but I am not even knowing which one.” Neil’s father had called up somebody at the Lithuanian consulate in Washington and got them to track down the girl’s mother. “When it is happening Magdalena is calling me and crying, telling me her friend is died, and me I know I must find the mother and tell her, so horrible, you know? But I have no number for her. And your father he was coming to drive me for cleaning, and he sees me like this, so crying everywhere, and he finds for me how to call her. She is in really bad place this friend, in hospital for crazy people. But I make them let me talk to her—she’s not so crazy, just all the time drinking—and better it is me who tells her this thing, not people of hospital.”
It must have been the girl in the box, Neil thought, and his toes curled under at the memory of the puff of white dust as the ashes poured onto the floor of Gare du Nord.
Dijana refilled her glass and added to Neil’s too, though it wasn’t empty. The things she was saying didn’t sound at all like Neil’s father, who was always so caught up in the past that he was barely able to navigate the present, who had forgotten Neil’s birthday, and who hadn’t gotten around to changing the answering machine message with Nan’s voice on it in the five years she’d been dead. Neil could hardly imagine him on the phone with foreign bureaucrats, tracking a dead girl’s mother through a warren of Lithuanian mental institutions. He wondered through a haze of wine and cherry brandy if it really was his father they were talking about, or if Dijana had gotten confused and was telling him about some other man she’d met in America.
“So do you and my dad still talk much?” Neil asked, then realized that maybe he shouldn’t have. It might hurt her feelings that his father hadn’t mentioned her more. “I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve spoken to him.”
“No,” Dijana said. “I think he is so sad when Walter have died, he isn’t calling me anymore and now I have left America. But I have always telled him please to visit me some day.”
“Well, the ranch, you know, it’s a lot for him,” Neil said. “But I think it’s great he had you to help with the house. I mean, the place is a mess.”
“Yah, this is for sure,” she said. “You know I have found also one entire—how do you say? For making alcohols like they do in country? I have found this too not even used and I am remembering when I am little girl in country and my uncles are making schnapps, you know? From apples. So much old things in this house. But with really good quality, and I am telling your father he must sell, not just give away.” She leaned in, as if she were going to tell Neil a secret. “Actually, Ni-yell, pizza, this is not my greatest dream. What I am really loving is having someday one shop where is filled with old beautiful things, all very fashion and antique. So I am all the time looking for old things with big value. Like these things what I’m wearing. Such beautiful belt, yah? Is all silver. And for shoes, these I’m finding in back of aunt’s closets and I can see she is not wearing for so long time. They are all the time folded in newspapers, like so old I have never seen.”
“How old?” Neil asked. The thing for making alcohol must have been some kind of still. He tried to remember if the dude ranch had been built during Prohibition—that would be interesting—and he wondered why his father had never mentioned he was cleaning out the place.
“Well, this is how I know they are really big value,” she said. “These shoes are in newspapers all from before even I am born. And I am some old lady, so, you know, they are for real antique! I am thinking I could sell them, but see, they are, how do you say? With repairs.”
Dijana hefted her foot up for Neil to see the restitching along the sole of one shoe, nearly spilling her wine and giggling “oh-pah!” when she flashed Neil a bit of veiny thigh. “And when I am thinking it is your father coming tonight, I’m glad I haven’t selled, so he can see these things what I find, how it looks. He is always saying to me, so many old things, they are too long going not used.”
Neil had clearly had more to drink than he’d realized, because as soon as he saw the shoe up close, he started giggling too. It all seemed very funny, though when he tried to share the joke with Dijana, his tongue was a little too thick and his thoughts were a little too slow to make much sense. “Double stitch below the anklebone. Straps cross left over right on the right foot, right over left on the other.” He’d heard his father say it a million times.
“Yah!” Dijana said. “Exactly. The working is so nice.”
“Does my dad know?” Neil asked.
“What?” Dijana said.
“Does he know you have these? Does he know where you found them?”
“He is telling me I can take all what I like,” she said.
“No, totally, I didn’t mean—”
“He is all the time saying this.”
“Of course,” Neil said. “I just meant, did you show them to him or anything?”
“I am telling you I wear only tonight like for surprise.”
“Wow, this is crazy,” Neil said. His father really had remembered them. The shoes on Dijana’s feet looked exactly like the ones his father always talked about. Neil was surprised at how well he knew them himself, just from his father’s description.
“Oh man,” Neil said. “My dad is going to have a fit.”
“He won’t like?” Dijana said, and suddenly Neil forgot what was funny. The room, which had begun to tilt a little from the brandy, righted itself. Inga Beart’s red shoes had been lost in Paris—it was one thing Neil’s father and all the historians agreed on. So how was it possible they’d ended up at Nan and Pop’s ranch?
“They must have been Nan’s,” Neil said.
“What?” Dijana asked, but this time Neil didn’t even try to explain. The red high heels with the crisscross straps that his father remembered seeing—there was no other way. They’d probably been there for years, wrapped up in newspapers at the back of Nan’s closet, a place Neil’s father never would have thought of looking, because he knew that Inga Beart had left her red shoes in France. These red shoes, which Dijana had now taken off and was holding up to the light, and which Neil could see really did have creases on the straps just like his father remembered, couldn’t have been Inga Beart’s. They must have been Nan’s all along.
“Neil? Is okay?”
“Yeah,” Neil said. He looked for a tissue in his pocket. “I think I have allergies.”