This was still in the weeks when we were waiting for the new motor. Tamara brought her shoes in for the third time that year, and that was noticeable not from the shoes but from me: I recognised the pair before I looked in the register.
"Along the outer edge again," I said.
"Again."
She sat down on the chair by the counter and at once put one leg out to the side, as though she were still standing while sitting. The heels were worn down the same way on both shoes, which happens with people who walk fast and a lot, and the sole in front was rubbed almost to daylight, and that is already about hurrying.
"You walk a lot."
"Two jobs and my mother," said Tamara. "Mornings on Sadovaya, evenings on Pionerskaya, and my mother on Eighth of March Street in between. Walking is faster than waiting."
I entered a sole guard and new heel tips on the ticket and asked whether it wouldn't be easier to ride.
"Easier if you get a seat."
She thought and added, and you could hear that she had had nobody to talk to about it for a long time:
"You know, I know the whole town by heart by its benches. Where you can sit down for five minutes and where you can't. Where you can in summer and can't in winter, because there's always a wind off the river. I've got a whole map in my head."
We talked a little more. She said her mother is post-stroke and understands everything but speaks badly, and that the hardest thing isn't that, it's that her mother is ashamed.
"Ashamed of what?"
"Of me." Tamara said it evenly. "She was a head nurse for forty years. And now I hold the spoon for her."
Then she talked about Sadovaya, where the manager is young and good, and about Pionerskaya, where the manager is young and bad, and how to tell them apart: the good one asks what time you're leaving, the bad one asks why you haven't left yet.
"And when are your days off?"
"Sunday. Half a day."
"And the other half?"
"And the other half is my mother."
She said it without any emphasis, simply answering the question, and I couldn't think what to say, and so I asked whether she wasn't cold in those shoes in November. She said she was, but the winter ones weren't right for the weather yet.
"And haven't you counted them?" I asked.
She looked at me the way one looks at a person who has asked an indecent question.
"Counted what?"
"The benches. How many there are on your route."
Tamara was silent for three seconds, and in that time managed to start counting and lose count.
"I don't know," she said at last. "A lot. Forty or so. Or more."
Then she left, and I didn't think about her again until she came back.
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