THE SOLE MEMORY

I WAS LOOKING FOR A SHOE shop to get my favourite pair repaired. The August Texan heat had loosened the sole on one of them. In other times, I would have thrown the pair away rather than go through the trouble of finding a repair shop. But I loved these shoes and searched for someone to bring them back to life.

- NITIN CHAUDHARY

“Try Logan's,” a neighbour, a longtime resident of the city, told me. “They're somewhere near the church in the town centre. There's a clear sign outside the shop. You won't find it hard to spot.”

The sign was a rusted metal shoe bolted to a flagpole anchored into the footpath. Its paint—once, I imagined, a cheerful yellow—was peeling. It read: “Logan's Shoe Shop - Over Fifty Years of Service,” its tip pointing toward a narrow doorway.

I entered a long, squeezed corridor. There was no air conditioning. A table fan whirred in full force, dispatching a woolly wind through the aisle. I passed shelves of shoe creams, laces, and racks filled with repaired shoes, leading to a man in a cowboy hat speaking to a woman behind the counter. He pointed at the shoes on the racks while a short Black woman with thick glasses and tightly cropped hair searched for them.

“Yes, I can see them there,” he said.