He tried on four pairs. The ones he liked best were the ones that cost a hundred and thirty-nine dollars. He picked up the ones that cost eighty-nine.
"No," Rosalba said.
"Tía."
"I watched you put those on. You made a face like your feet were sad. Put on the others."
He put on the others. His feet were not sad. He walked up and down the aisle in them and they felt like nothing, like nothing at all, like his own feet with a little more floor under them, and his big toe did not hurt for the first time in a year, and he stood in front of the low mirror by the bench and looked at them and did not know what to do with his face.
"These," Rosalba said to the kid, and took out her wallet.
In the parking lot, sitting in Rosalba's Corolla with the shoebox on his lap and the old Copa Mundials in the plastic Big 5 bag at his feet, he said, "Tía. Can I tell you about the guy at the park?"
She started the car and then turned it off again.
"Yes," she said. "Finally. Yes."
He told her all of it. It took twenty minutes. She did not say anything the whole time, except once, when he got to the part about the father and the stopwatch, when she said something under her breath in Spanish about the man's mother that he chose not to hear. When he was done, she sat for a while with her hands on the steering wheel.
"The shoes," she said. "You're going to give them back to him."
"I think so."
"Good." She started the car again. "And Sunday you bring him to the house. For dinner. I'm making pozole. You tell him I said so."