Jane complained to her mother about her marriage. Martha counseled her to try to work it out with Alan. Jane began wearing better clothes and tried to be gracious. Alan didn’t notice but other men did.

By the time Jane stopped growing at seventeen, she was five foot six and wore size eleven shoes. She didn’t buy heels until she experienced the dullness of Alan and loveliness of John Jerra pumps.

They were plain strapless shoes, not too pointy in the toe, with three inch heels that got stuck in the silicon grout between the sidewalk bricks on Market Street. But they looked so good and felt so comfortable that she bought them in five colors and learned to tiptoe on those bricks. For the first time in her life she felt like she had pretty feet. She wore shorter skirts. She moved with more confidence.

One day she walked by the shoe store and saw the pumps, her John Jerra pumps, in a perfect shade of forest green. She owned a new dress that begged for those shoes; she had to have them. She went into the store and learned that the closest they had to her size eleven medium was a ten narrow. She asked the clerk to stretch them, and she bought them anyway.

She decided to wear the new shoes and dress the following day. She had an important morning meeting at work and was then to lunch with Charlie at his favorite restaurant.

The shoe stretching was not sufficient. She got through the meeting, but by the time that was over her pain was excruciating. She limped into her office and pried off her new pumps. The problem was that most of the nail on her right big toe came off with the shoe. Beneath her nylon she was bloody.

She couldn’t wear the new shoes to lunch. She didn’t have others with her. She had to go to the restaurant via her place, which meant she was late for her date with her brother.

And lived to tell about it. Charlie knew about the restaurant from one of his outlaw buddies. He had so many friends to drink and smoke and gamble with, some of them were bound to be real criminals. It probably wouldn’t have surprised Charlie to learn that his favorite restaurant was a likely place for a violent act, if he thought about it. But Charlie didn’t think about it. Sitting at a table, drinking Johnny Walker Black Label over ice, waiting for his sister, Charlie didn’t think about anything as the three men in dark clothes filled the doorway and then sprayed the place with bullets from their automatic guns. Jane in her old comfortable black flats was still two blocks away from the restaurant when her brother breathed his last.

Three months after Charlie’s death, a woman showed up with a four-year-old son. Her name was Kathy and she had a story everyone believed about an affair with Charlie. The boy’s name was Kevin and he even looked like Charlie. Kathy thrust Kevin into LeAnn’s arms and ran away. Literally. No one ever saw or heard of her again.

LeAnn wasn’t having any of Kevin. She said she had to get on with her own life. There was no one for it but Jane and of course Martha. That’s how Jane got to be Kevin’s mom.

Nowadays, in the new millennium, many women are wearing slide shoes. Toeless backless things on platforms of various thicknesses. They have to shuffle a bit, or risk kicking off their footwear. They all paint their toenails, and many wear silver toe rings.

Jane’s surprised by the style of showing so much foot. Again. She thinks feet are in general ugly. Fundamentally lumpy. Contorted by use.

She and Kevin are walking side by side down a street in the financial district. They’ve been talking about silly slide shoes and bright colored nail polish. Kevin is fifteen and he looks remarkably like Charlie. Jane is now fifty and she looks a lot like Jane. Kevin has just been explaining how important the big toe is for balance. He learned that in his martial arts class. Jane understands, remembering. When Charlie died and even months later when Kevin came into her life, Jane had an injured big toe. She discovered then how important that toe is for walking. She recollects how exposed and vulnerable it felt.

Kevin and Jane look at the feet of women walking toward them in slides, big toes lifting with each stride, big painted toenails facing upward while all the other nails scrunch forward and down. Aunt and nephew observe those feet. Alike repulsed.