Stocking Feet

Moving day came for Jeremy and his new family. The jet lag had set in hard. Worse than he could have ever imagined. It gave him a pounding headache and horrible disorientation. He’d been a coast-to-coast redeye guy for years, but this was a whole nother level.

Exhausted as he was, the nature of what he was seeing got his attention. Those movements, eerily efficient. Silent as mice. Clumping through the house in their stocking feet. Grabbing huge boxes and furniture, lifting it over their heads, and then gently slipping into their shoes when they got to the doorway.

The door was propped, and they were moving fast, hardly watching it all, as if they’d done it a million times a day. The effort was recognizable only from the beads of sweat, and the occasional grunt when they hoisted something particularly large.

Watching them tag-team a refrigerator, stuffing their feet into their shoes in a choreographed two-part motion, actually made him laugh out loud. That got their attention. A glare, just for an instant, from both of them in tandem. They conveyed so much in those disapproving stares, and he didn’t like it.

But then again, he’d just mocked them. The foreigner, laughing at the locals and their weird customs. He was lucky he got away with just an angry glance.

Kimoko had noticed, too. As she fussed with the baby, patting his back and making sure he didn’t add to the noise, her disapproving stare was even more severe than the moving men. As she caught his eye dead-on, she added a tsk sound with her tongue, as much admonition as any angry word.

Baby Ken, conversely, was being very good. How the jet lag hadn’t affected him, Jeremy would never know. He hadn’t screamed on the flight either, maddening as that was. Jeremy himself had wanted to scream. Transcontinental was nothing to sneer at. Nor was a new life in a new world, with all kinds of rituals he had no preparation for.

Jeremy offered to take the baby, hoping to make up for himself. But his wife shook him off, gently bouncing the child up and down on her shoulder as the chaos swirled around her.

Over the next few weeks, service people came and went, turning on utilities and delivering goods. Having a professional in full work uniform stomp in his house like they lived there was one of the things he had issues with, but it was one of a million. He had a lot to get used to.

He made plenty of mistakes along the way, but none worse than the day he missed that most basic, cardinal rule. Never had he seen his wife go red like she did that day she caught sight of his accidental boot. He almost fell over himself trying to backtrack on his knees, so the soles couldn’t hit any more of the floor.

In the end, he got used to it. As time passed, he came to find a comforting routine in this place. The rules, all of them unspoken, became structure. Stability. Predictable and familiar.

The day the heart attack came, he was watching his son. Little Ken, still quiet, kicked and cooed as Jeremy fell to the floor. As the sides of his vision fuzzed and swam, he saw the front door swing open.

Kimiko dashed in, the horrified look on her face breaking Jeremy’s heart. He knew from her expression how dire things were. As the room swam nauseatingly, a loud ringing drowned out her frantic pleas into the cell phone, that cherry red color he’d picked out up against her small ear. He strained to keep sight of her, to hold on.

Then the long minutes: Kimiko holding his hand, tears streaming down her cheeks—Jeremy trying to stay alive, for her sake if nothing else. He looked over at the baby.

But his head grew too heavy, his struggles, too hard. He slumped as he heard the clomp of feet, one last look up at the flash of badges. Eyes down again, to the spotless floor. The last thing he saw was the black, stockinged feet of the emergency responders.

* * *

“My condolences, Mrs. Everton,” the chief muttered, pronouncing the unfamiliar name ‘evaahtaan’.

The coroner crew lifted the gurney up with care, so as to leave no scuff marks. Such a routine, so impressive. But Kimiko felt no comfort that day.

The officer was still speaking, “Evahtaan-san, your husband simply ran out of time. If only we had been here sooner. Seconds may have made a difference.”