"And Wally." She glanced at him. "You don't have to wear his shoes, honey. You know that, right? Nobody needs you to wear his shoes."
He looked out the window at the bars going by, the Sportsman's and the Kneisler's and the one with no name that had a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign with half the letters burned out so it said P BST BLUE RI ON, and he didn't say anything, because he didn't know how to explain that it wasn't about needing.
* * *
Busia was waiting at the kitchen table when they got home. Busia was his father's mother, eighty-one and four foot ten, and she had moved in after the funeral with two suitcases, a picture of Pope John Paul II, and a cast-iron pan she claimed was older than Poland. She watched The Price Is Right every morning with the volume all the way up and yelled at the contestants in Polish when they bid wrong.
"So," she said, as Wally came in. "The bowler."
"Hi, Busia."
"Sit." She pointed at the chair across from her. On the table there was a plate of kolaczki, apricot and prune, and a glass of milk, and Wally understood that this was going to be a conversation.
He sat. He had the shoes in the grocery sack. He put the sack on the table.
Busia opened it and took out the left shoe and turned it over in her small, spotted hands. She looked at the grease, and the chewed lace, and the scuff on the toe. She ran her thumb over the leather sole, which was worn smooth and pale in a crescent at the ball of the foot, the place where Eddie Nowicki had slid out ten thousand times on Tuesday nights.
"I bought these," she said. "Did you know that? Nineteen fifty-nine. From the shoe store on Mitchell Street, the one that's a liquor store now. Twenty-two dollars. A lot of money. His father said, twenty-two dollars for shoes you only wear to throw a ball, are you crazy, woman? And I said, the boy is good. When the boy is good at something, you buy him the shoes."
She put the shoe down.
"Your father," she said, "was not quiet. You know this. Edziu was loud. Loud like a radio. When he was your age he could not shut up for five minutes, the sisters at St. Josaphat's sent him home every week with a note." She looked at Wally. "You are not loud."
"No."
"You are like my husband. Your dziadek. He did not talk either. He would sit at the table and say nothing and nothing and nothing, and then once a day he would say one thing, and it would be the smartest thing anybody said in the whole house all week." She pushed the plate of kolaczki at him. "So. Today you said one thing, I hear. With a shoe."
Wally took a cookie. Powdered sugar got on his fingers.