Excerpt
The shoe kid had gone to the back room to retrieve my father's size in the one Velcro shoe Joseph's had. As he waited, my father wandered along the rest of the men's casuals, standing close, leaning in like he was looking into a car's glare-filled window at a car lot. Never once did he pick up another shoe, never once looked at their soles. When he stopped next to a full-length mirror, one that my own reflection filled from half a store away, our faces were framed side by side. I watched my father's eyes scanning each stitch, looking for something, and I could tell then that I didn't, like my father had many times said, have any blessed clue. “No half-sizes,” the sales kid said, rejoining us. “I brought an eight and a nine.”— from "The Golden Torch"