Praise for the books of

LAUREN BARATZ-LOGSTED

THE THIN PINK LINE

“Wonderfully funny…a fine sense of the absurd and a flair for comic characterization.”

—Kirkus (starred review)

“Hilarious and original.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Proves once and for all that a woman can indeed be half-pregnant. Bridget Jones is snorting with laughter and wondering why she didn’t think of it.”

—Karen Karbo, author of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

“It’s impossible to put this debut novel down without knowing how Jane is going to end this charade after her ninth month.”

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

CROSSING THE LINE

“Chick lit with a twist!”

—Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries

“A delight! This fast-paced, fun-filled novel about babies and breaking the rules brims with laughter, love and a unique and buoyant wisdom.”

—Nancy Thayer, author of The Hot Flash Club

“Baratz-Logsted has a great voice…and the message she sends about unconditional love is touching.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

A LITTLE CHANGE OF FACE

“Baratz-Logsted offers a clever twist on makeover fiction.”

—Booklist

“A Little Change of Face not only has something to say about how women look, and are looked at by others, but it says it with a whip-smart, funny voice.”

—Christopher Moore, author of Lamb and Fluke

HOW NANCY DREW SAVED MY LIFE

“Charming.”

—Booklist

“A wonderful, bittersweet tale with a little Nancy Drew and Jane Eyre thrown in for good measure! The perfect combination!”

—Michelle Cunnah, author of Confessions of a Serial Dater

“Witty and wonderful…her best book yet.”

—Tom Groneberg, author of One Good Horse

Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

Lauren Baratz-Logsted

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Laura Wininger:

with love and thirty years of friendship,

this one’s for you.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Pamela Harty for being my agent and friend.

Thank you to my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, and her assistant, Rebecca Soukis, for their hard work on this book. Special thanks to Adam Wilson for services above and beyond.

Thank you to the Friday Night Writing Group—Jerry Brooker, Andrea Schicke Hirsch, Greg Logsted, Robert Mayette, Kristi Peterson, and Lauren Catherine Simpson—for being there.

Thank you to Kaethe Douglas and Sue Estabrook for being amazing first readers and friends.

Thank you to all my family and friends and, especially, my great mother, Lucille Baratz.

Thank you to my husband Greg Logsted and our daughter Jackie—no writer has the words to describe how wonderful you are.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

If you look for the particular Jimmy Choo shoes mentioned in this book, you won’t find them, except perhaps in resale outlets. Jimmy Choo did in fact make all these shoes, exactly as described, but this book was written in fall of 2005 and, since then, many catalogue seasons have come and gone, and many Choos have passed into the realm of fashion legend.

Prologue

It was a hand dealt straight out of a dream: two Aces.

What to do, what to do…

Easy answer: the dealer had just shuffled right before dealing, so there were nearly six full decks left in the chute, all of those beautiful Jacks, Queens and Kings. Even the Tens would be beautiful and a person didn’t need to be a pro at counting cards to realize that the game, for once, was strongly in the player’s favor.

So, very easy answer: split the Aces.

The next decision, if not as easy, relied totally on the player’s instincts: double down, or let the original bet ride? The original bet represented half of the player’s holdings, but the player was feeling cocky, riding high. Besides, the dealer was showing a Seven.

Big deal.

The player looked at the dealer, a face that had become so familiar. The player looked over one shoulder, at the man standing just behind, a man who gave a slight nod of his head: approval.

Giving the matter no further thought, the player pushed the rest of the chips forward, hitting the table limit. Those chips, tens of thousands of dollars worth of chips, represented everything the player had in the world.

Whatever two cards the dealer turned over next would decide the future fate of the player.

And so, let the real game begin…

1

Everything I learned in life, I learned from Shakespeare; about comedy and tragedy, about the reversal of expectations and fortune. Oh, and from my dad, Black Jack Sampson—I learned a lot from him, too.

I woke up that morning, brushed my teeth, ate breakfast.

I’ve read enough books in my life that I do realize it goes against wisdom to tell a story about a person waking up in the morning and then following them step-by-step until the storyteller puts them to bed at night. But the way I figure it, no wild journey ever began without someone waking up in the morning. I mean, if I never woke up in the morning, there’d be no story at all.

So, getting back to the beginning: I woke up in the morning, had breakfast. The stamp-sized kitchen was a natural light–deprived airless room, its walls perversely painted dark purple-red on a whim by me and my roommate right after we’d moved in. The paint wasn’t even dried when we realized that we mutually hated the color, which gave the room the air of a minuscule bordello plus four-bagel toaster (hers), but it would have taken more home-improvement initiative than either of us had to correct the Architectural Digest error of our ways. If we were going to revamp the place, we’d also need to replace the light blue-and-white tiled floor, turned yellowish with age, and the ceiling light fixture, behind which an extraordinary number of bugs gravitated to die. But this would have entailed more visits to Home Depot for just one room than I ever intended to make in my entire life. Let the ugliness ride.

I opened up one of the lower kitchen cabinets, pulled out an opened box of Cocoa Krispies, next to which were three more boxes—insurance—and poured some into a bowl. Then I reached into one of two dorm-sized fridges stacked on top of each other in the tiny kitchen, took out a fresh carton and poured milk into a glass. I always ate my cereal dry, had done so since I was a child, a fact that had made more than one previous boyfriend feel all squicky.

At present, I had no boyfriend. Maybe it was the cereal.

My dry-cereal habit also made my roommate, Hillary, feel squicky—the other fridge belonged to her—so it was a good thing she only had to watch me eat it on weekends, her job as a psychologist causing her to leave earlier in the morning than me.

Then I sat down to do the same thing I did during breakfast every morning: watch The Weather Channel, listening with half an ear as the forecast for Danbury played three times during the half-hour loop, while going through the New York Times—front page, editorials and crossword puzzle, always in exactly that order—all while crunching my dry cereal. When the last forecast was broadcast on the screen and I was finally convinced that it would indeed be sunny and dry with a high of ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, I pushed the paper aside, so that now it was bumping newsprint with my roommate’s newspaper of choice, the New York Post; considering my roommate had a more highbrow job than mine, her news tastes were lower, but she claimed the jumble puzzles were fun. Then I turned the TV to one of the morning news-talk shows and commenced packing my lunch.

As one of the TV anchors, pretending to be a serious journalist, droned on about the importance of doing the Back to School shopping thing before the last minute (still a month away), I opened the freezer and took out my lunch: an Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, carbon copies of which filled half the freezer—the other half of which was filled with what I would have for dinner, the same thing I had for dinner every night when I was at home: Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna.

I have a confession to make here: I am an addictive personality.

Like my father before me, like a rat repeatedly hitting a lever to get at a piece of cheese, for most of my life, when I liked something, I kept hitting that lever even after I was no longer hungry, even after I’d started to hate cheese. This single-minded stick-to-itiveness had served me well in some regards. Back in college, my refusal to let a thing go until I was done with it had led to me reading not just the eight plays assigned in my Shakespeare I class, but all of Shakespeare’s plays plus the sonnets. True, Titus Andronicus sucked, but I was glad to have cried through Lear’s Cordelia, Cordelia! Stay a little speech, empathized with Macbeth’s shattering tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and would have given my eyeteeth to have been Ariel listening to Prospero as Prologue clapped Shakespeare into retirement. But the same obsessiveness that had led me to bardolatry also meant that, once the next semester started, my discovery of Singapore Slings resulted in my drinking them every night at the pub, missing most of my classes and flunking just enough courses to forfeit my student loan. Sometimes my behavior is comic, sometimes it’s tragic, and it’s only the final outcome of each individual story that determines which one it really is. So that’s who I am—a rat repeatedly pushing a lever for cheese—and this is my story.

Of course, like many obsessives, I wasn’t always this way. My obsessions started when I was eight, the year my mom first got sick. I used to tell myself: If I just fold the towels the exact same way every time, if I knock on the door two and never three times each time I want to enter her room, if I eat the same foods at every meal, she won’t get sicker. She won’t die. But, of course, she did get sicker. She did die. The process took ten years from start to finish. And, true, my bargaining with the Devil of Obsessive Behavior hadn’t saved her. But, by the time she was dead, I was too used to the security of my obsessiveness to let it go.

While I waited the two minutes and thirty seconds for my pizza pocket to heat up in the microwave, I got out my purple insulated lunch bag and threw in an Igloo ice pack and two cans of my latest drinking obsession: Diet Pepsi Lime. There was a case of it in the fridge and a spare case in the stairwell. When I got home after work, when I had my dinner, I’d drink my other favorite drink with it: Jake’s Fault Shiraz, of which there were a half-dozen bottles in the fridge. I liked my wine red and cold, and I liked Jake’s Fault a lot, but despite my obsessiveness, I’d limited myself to one or two glasses at a sitting, despite the near overwhelming compulsion to drink the whole bottle.

Hey, if my daily diet lacked nutritional variety, if there was never a piece of fruit or a real vegetable in sight—not in my fridge, at any rate—at least I took a daily multivitamin. So, okay, so maybe that multivitamin was Flintstones, but still…There were plenty of fruits and vegetables in my roommate’s, just as there was a wider variety of food in the lower cabinets that were earmarked as hers.

I read a book once that said many people don’t like having overnight guests, not because they’re inhospitable or worried that the guests will be a nuisance, but because of a fear of having others see how intensely weird they really are in their own habits. That’s me, a woman intensely weird in her own habits, afraid to let the rest of the world see in.

As I zipped my purple lunch bag shut, the morning talk show switched over to commercial and suddenly he was there again: the man of my dreams.

I guess that bears explaining and really he wasn’t the man of my dreams, since the man of my dreams was faceless, but certainly he’d inspired a lot of my recent dreams.

The man in question was The Yo-Yo Man.

I mean, it wasn’t like he wore a streaming superhero red cape with a giant yellow Y emblazoned on his chest, but I thought of him as The Yo-Yo Man. And the commercials he starred in had been airing for about a month.

There was a new yo-yo manufacturer, Ball & String, which had been trying to unseat Duncan as the manufacturer of yo-yos for some time now. Their latest gambit involved a commercial campaign where this incredibly talented yo-yoist—yes, I did just say yo-yoist like it was an actual word—did things that were, well, downright amazing. I guess the theory behind making these commercials was that it wasn’t enough for one company to try to say in print ads that they were better than another; when a medium was so visual, they needed to actually show, not just tell. The things that The Yo-Yo Man could do were amazing, and yet he made it look so effortless, as if anyone, including the viewer at home, could potentially do the same, if only they used the Ball & String. He could spin two yo-yos simultaneously, he could juggle fire in one hand while doing Round the World with his other and, man, let me tell you, he could walk my dog any day.

Not that I have a dog. I don’t even particularly like dogs. But, really, The Yo-Yo Man could walk my dog any day.

And he was cute. Did I mention that The Yo-Yo Man was cute? Not that you could tell height from a TV commercial, but I still guessed him to be about six feet even to my own five feet even. His hair was the opposite of mine, his being long, curly and blond. And his eyes were a crystal blue-green where mine were somewhere between the light and dark chocolates in a box of Russell Stover. So he was the opposite of me, plus he was cool.

He was certainly cooler than his backup yo-yoists, for of course the commercial did have a supporting cast. How better to get the message across that the Ball & String yo-yo was the best device ever invented to aid someone in their journey to becoming as cool as The Yo-Yo Man than to surround him with also-rans, less cool men and women dropping their own yo-yos, setting their hair on fire, because they were not as talented just yet, because they did not have the right yo-yo.

What, I ask you, is sadder than being an also-ran to The Yo-Yo Man?

I particularly felt sorry for the guy furthest in the background. Furthest Guy, as I thought of him, was kind of geeky-looking, with short-cropped brown hair and uncool clothes; I couldn’t make out his eye color. And I guess that was part of the point: to even rate eye color in the commercial, to be as cool as The Yo-Yo Man, a guy needed Ball & String.

And ever since this commercial started airing, nearly every night I had a dream about a man with a yo-yo. The man in my dream was faceless, so it was hard to tell if he was supposed to be The Yo-Yo Man or not, but whoever he was, he was just as amazing with his tricks as The Yo-Yo Man. I don’t want you thinking I was obsessed or anything and it wasn’t as though I dreamed of him all night long, but, as I say, he haunted me often enough.

As soon as the commercial ended, the strains of The Yo-Yo Man theme song abruptly cut short, I switched off the TV.

I grabbed my lunch bag and looked down at my attire: a black Coldplay T-shirt that had seen better days, faded khaki shorts, scuffed Nikes.

Sighing at the underachieving squalor that was me, I grabbed the last Ernest Hemingway book I needed to read to make my tour of him complete and my yellow bucket, in which were my squeegee, a shammy, a paint scraper and two rolls of paper towels.

My employer? Squeaky Qlean Window Washing.

Yes, I wash windows.

2

Even if I hated the name Squeaky Qlean—the name dreamed up by the business’s proprietor, Stella Davis, a woman who had yet to realize that there were misuses for the letter Q—window washing was the perfect job for me. The repetitive motions fit the internal rhythms of my obsessive personality, plus, although there was not a whole lot of prestige involved—precisely, none—at least my mind was my own. I’d had jobs where I was actually required to think on someone else’s time clock and I found the lack of opportunity for free association to be just too mentally confining.

“You’re twenty-eight years old now, Delilah.” Hillary would attempt to grow me up from time to time. “Isn’t it time you thought about getting a real job?”

Those words always rankled some, but it was hard for me to get mad at Hillary or if I did get mad, to stay mad for too long, because Hillary Clinton was the best friend I’d ever had. She was not only my best friend, though, my mother long dead, she was like a mother to me, too. We may have squabbled like family members constantly, but I loved her. She was my favorite living woman in the world.

And, yes, her name really was Hillary Clinton.

But this was no time to be thinking about Hillary Clinton, or the fact that she was my best friend, or the fact that she’d remained my friend even though I was not much of an achiever and she was a huge one, or the fact that maybe I was something of a charity case for her, her continued friendship toward me making me something akin to her more lost-cause clients—Hillary always said that my obsessions were both a comfort to me and what victimized me most, making it a perfect vicious circle—because Stella Davis, my boss, was pulling up in the Squeaky Qlean van outside my condo, South Park. The van was pristine white, with a picture of a tuxedo-wearing penguin cleaning a window on it, the window having those little sparkly star thingies all over it, not unlike on a Windex bottle, in order to symbolize the acme of window-cleaning perfection.

South Park always seemed to me to be a silly name for a condo in Danbury, since Connecticut is north and there was no park in sight, but we at least had a stamp-sized balcony—fraternal twin to the minuscule kitchen—off the living room of our unit that afforded a view of the pool down below, so I tried to suck it up about the nonsensical name.

Another thing that impressed me as silly, as it did every workday, was Stella’s appearance and attire. Stella had her blond hair in an honest-to-God bouffant style, her green eyes highlighted by full makeup, her buxom top encased in a faux tuxedo T-shirt that had tails down the back, her perky bottom in pristine white shorts, with black socks on her feet and white leather sneakers over those that she polished every day. When we picked up Stella’s two other employees, Conchita and Rivera, both from Brazil, they would be similarly dressed, sans the hooker makeup.

“If we look better than the competition,” Stella was fond of saying, “people will want to use us instead. After all, who would you rather hire, a window washer that looks like she’s ready to accept an Academy Award or one who’s dressed sloppy like, well, you?”

I’d pointed out to Stella, repeatedly, that while penguins were my favorite non-cat animal, loving penguins and wanting to look like a penguin were two very different things and that with my shortness, I couldn’t help but look like a waddling refugee from Antarctica in one of her getups. If I were any other member of the crew, undoubtedly Stella would have fought me on this—Stella was big on fighting—but she grudgingly acknowledged that I was the best worker she’d ever had. My nickname among the crew, The Golden Squeegee, ensured that I’d have a job with Stella for as long as I wanted one. And, besides, the pristine white shorts they all wore always wound up splattered with gray window sploodge by the end of the day anyway, kind of spoiling Stella’s desired effect of bucket-carrying Hollywood stars on the red carpet.

As for Conchita and Rivera, and the all-girl crew, Stella was also fond of saying, “I don’t hire men anymore. The EOE people can sue me if they want to, but have you ever hired a man to do hard work? What a bunch of whiners. ‘It’s too hot out here.’ ‘When do we get off work?’ ‘I have a second job to get to.’ ‘That ladder’s too high.’ ‘I’m taking my break now.’ I swear to God, I always thought it was just me. But then I talked to a colleague who owns a landscaping service and he said the exact same thing. ‘Ask a 100-pound girl to pull a tree out of the ground with her bare hands and she gets right to it. Ask a 200-pound man and before he’s even touched the damn thing, he’s calling Worker’s Comp on his cell phone to verbally file papers for his bad back. Give me a six-pack of chicks any day.’ Naturally, I poked him in the gut with my pool cue for saying ‘chicks,’ but, believe you me, I know from whence he speaks.”

“So what did you do last night?” Stella asked, snapping her omnipresent gum as she keyed up the ignition. “What’re you reading today? Not that Hemingway guy again. Isn’t he the one who hated chicks?”

I knew that the barrage of questions—Stella was a relentless talker—would continue until we picked up Conchita and Rivera, at which point Stella’s attentions would focus solely on them. Unlike me, but very much like Stella, Conchita and Rivera were big talkers.

Like me, Conchita and Rivera were short and dark. But unlike me, where in Stella’s uniform I would have looked like a reject extra from March of the Penguins, Conchita and Rivera looked hot hot hot, like maybe they worked at an upscale Hooters or something.

“Stel-la!” Conchita and Rivera jointly trilled as they hopped into the van.

Conchita and Rivera lived in a neighborhood that would have depressed me, one of Danbury’s few rough neighborhoods, but they never seemed to mind, greeting each day of being alive with an exuberance I could only envy. Of their former home in Brazil, obviously worse, all they would ever say was, “You don’t even want to know, Delilah. Better for us here.”

The Girls From Brazil, as Stella and I referred to them, were illegal aliens. But I was sure not going to be the one to turn them in. If their situation here wasn’t scary enough, the tone they got in their voice when they told me I didn’t even want to know what it was like where they came from. During the three years I’d been working for her, whenever Stella had put ads in the paper prior to hiring them, despite the fact that Stella offered a generous hourly wage, the only people to apply were other Brazilians. The way I figured it, they weren’t stealing jobs from legal people, because no one legal wanted their jobs; no one except me, that is.

The Girls From Brazil also always greeted Stella as though they were trying to pick her up, in that way, which was not far from the truth since Conchita and Rivera were free-living lesbians, always willing to expand their circle of love. But while they incessantly flirted with Stella, they never once flirted with me, making me feel somehow pathetic in the extreme: my hot meter was turned so low, I wasn’t even hot enough to be desirable to free-living lesbians.

Oh, well. At least I owned the title of The Golden Squeegee.

And I did love the women I worked with, if for their sheer vibrancy alone, even if they did have a tendency to pick on me.

“Stel-la.” Conchita poked her head between the front seats. “How come she always gets to sit in front?”

“She” was their name for me.

“Because she gets carsick,” Stella explained for the umpteenth time. “And I don’t want her vomiting in my hair.”

“Sounds pretty flimsy to me,” said Rivera. “Have you actually ever seen her get carsick?”

“Well, no,” Stella conceded. “But do any of us really want to?”

A valid argument, I thought, even as I muttered, “‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’” Honestly, did there have to be three of them to devil me?

“What did she say?” Conchita asked.

“Something about fire and bubbles,” Rivera said. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s singing some kind of dumb-ass song?”

“Where are we working today?” Conchita asked.

“First job, a big house in Westport,” Stella said. “Movie star.”

Westport and the towns around it had more movie stars per square mile than anywhere else outside of Hollywood and it seemed that they were all clients of Squeaky Qlean. In fact, we did so many homes belonging to famous people that Stella occasionally flirted with the idea of adding “Window washers to the stars!” to her business cards but worried that her upscale clientele would find that too presumptuous.

“So no salsa dancing on the ladders,” Stella cautioned. “You girls need to act like professionals today. The job is way overpriced and I’m hoping to talk them into having us back each month.”

Monthly window cleaning might seem like a ridiculous expense for a private homeowner, but Stella had secured one such client already, a famous record producer who lived out on the water. When we first did his house, he hadn’t had it done in ten years and he spent the whole morning following me from room to room—I was always the inside person—stoned out of his mind, laughing and muttering, “Clean windows. Way cool. I can see. I can see!” Mister Famous Record Producer had moved in around the time of the Clinton impeachment, something he still hadn’t gotten over all these years later. “The man got impeached for a blow job—a blow job! If people in the music business got fired for that, there’d be no music left anywhere in the world.” Stella had actually needed to talk him out of having us come every week, which was what he originally wanted, and, good as the money was, none of us wanted to listen to him do his “I can see!” number that often or listen to him whine about how Bubba had gotten treated, even those of us who agreed with him. If every window washer lost their job over a…

If traffic was kind and Rte 7 wasn’t one long parking lot, Westport was a good thirty-five minutes from Conchita and Rivera’s apartment, so I pulled out my book and went back to my Hemingway, figuring on getting some reading in. A few more chapters—I’d started the book the night before—and I would have read everything Papa’d ever written.

“What you reading today?” Conchita asked.

I held up the book, showed them the cover.

“No shit, chica,” Rivera said, “but the sun also sets, too, you know, every damn day.”

Indeed.

Stella had not been whistling Windex when she said the client we were doing was a movie star. Elizabeth Hepburn, star of stage and screen, may have been as old as television, but even I, who preferred pages to celluloid, knew who she was. She had two Academy Awards on her mantel—I was tempted to dance with them when she went down for her morning nap, book in hand, but resisted the urge—and had starred in my all-time favorite movie, A Bitter Pill, about a starlet who overcomes her strumpet past only to be taken out by brain cancer on the night of the Oscars. “Did someone turn the lights out in here?” was a line that always made me bawl like a baby and always made Hillary laugh at me for bawling like a baby.

Due to my fear of heights, I was always the inside person. Still, even though there were three of them outside and only one of me inside, despite Stella’s earlier admonitions to take this job seriously, they all goofed around so much that I was done long before they would finish.

Hey, they don’t call me The Golden Squeegee for nothing.

So I grabbed my lunch bag from the van and sat out on a far corner of the fieldstone terrace, figuring no one in the house could object to that too much so long as I cleaned up after myself, and pulled out my now-cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, popped open my Diet Pepsi Lime and polished off my Hemingway.

Food done; drink done; book, and therefore all of Hemingway, done. Crap, I hadn’t thought to bring a backup book. What was taking the other three so long?

“Miss?” The voice was tentative and a bit shaky, as though the speaker was recovering from something. And yet somehow the voice was confident as well, as though the speaker was also sure that whoever her audience was, that audience would immediately burst into applause. “Oh, miss?”

I looked up to see Elizabeth Hepburn, wearing a plush pink satin bathrobe despite the warmth of the day, standing in the sliding-glass doorway. She may have been close to ninety, but she was still a stunner, with blue eyes like a chip from the sky, hair as white as a new Kleenex tissue and a perfect smile that defied the viewer to claim those teeth weren’t real; poking out from the bottom of her robe, she had white fur mules on her pedicured feet. If I hadn’t worried it might be taken amiss, I really might have applauded for her.

But from doing other stars’ homes with Stella, I’d come to realize that stars could be, well, strange. It was like they didn’t know what they wanted. On the one hand, they wanted you to know who they were—“I am important!”—but on the other, they didn’t want you to acknowledge who they were, as if somehow that acknowledgment might be an intrusion.

I jumped up from where I’d been sitting, wiped my hands off on my khakis.

“I’m sorry,” I started to say. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Of course you should have.” She pooh-poohed my concerns away. “I just looked out the windows—they’re so clean! I can see!—and saw you sitting out here while you waited for the others to finish and I thought you maybe could use some company.”

There was something lonely-looking about her, making me think that maybe she was the one who could use some company, but I couldn’t say that. So I merely accepted the seat she indicated at the white-painted wrought-iron table.

“Here,” she said. “You sit here and I’ll go inside and get dessert. I baked cookies last night,” she added proudly.

Elizabeth Hepburn baked her own cookies?

She was back in a flash, cookies and fresh lemonade on a tray, and damn if those cookies weren’t good. The rest of the crew didn’t know what they were missing, being such slow workers. Of course, if the rest of the crew were fast workers, I probably would never have gotten to taste those cookies, so there was that.

“What were you reading?” she asked.

Why did everyone always ask me that? It seemed like it was a question I answered several times a day.

Like I’d done with Stella, Conchita and Rivera earlier, I flashed the book’s cover.

“Ernie?” she said. “People still read Ernie?”

Ernie?

“Once I start reading an author, I read everything they ever wrote,” I said. “This is the last and I don’t know what to read next. Why? Did you know—?”

“Oh, my, yes. When I was a lot younger, I hooked up with Ernie—is that how you say it these days, ‘hooked up’?—in Key West.”

“Really?” I found this amazing. For while some people might be thrilled to talk to a movie star, I was even more thrilled to be talking to someone who had met a writer.

“Yes, really.”

For the first time, she seemed miffed at something, maybe miffed that I had doubted her. But then I realized it was something else that had her going.

“Pfft.” She dismissed Papa with a wave of her manicured hand. “Ernie wasn’t such a big deal. All he used to do was go on and on and on about that goddamned fish.”

Before I knew it, Elizabeth Hepburn was telling all, everything about Ernie and everything about several of the other famous people she’d ever met or been with over the years. This might have seemed strange to some and I guess it was strange, but I was kind of used to it. I don’t know if it was that I was a former Psych major who had flunked out, or that Hillary’s own psychologist instincts had rubbed off on me by association, but whenever I found myself in similar situations, whenever I was done before the rest of the crew, whoever’s house we were doing wound up spilling the beans to me like I was Delilah Freud.

And, yes, it did turn out that Elizabeth Hepburn’s biggest problem was that she was lonely….

“There’s almost no one left in the world,” she said, “who shares the memories I do, nobody who can testify that the things I remember really happened or not. Why, when Ernie and I—”

“Yo, chica, get the lead—” Rivera skidded around the corner of the house but stopped talking abruptly when she saw me sitting, eating cookies with the client.

“Oops,” she said, “sorry to interrupt. But we’re all finished and we need to get to the next—”

“That’s quite all right,” Elizabeth Hepburn said, rising. “I’ll just go get my checkbook.”

A moment later, we were still packing up the van and tying down the ladders, when Elizabeth Hepburn met us out on the gravel drive. That drive was so perfect, I’d have bet money someone regularly raked the gray-and-white pebbles.

“For you.” She handed a check to Stella. “And for you.” She handed one crisp ten-dollar bill each to Conchita and Rivera. “Gracias.”

I wondered if the girls were going to hit her. Anytime someone tried to speak Spanish to them they got all hot under their penguin collars. “We’re Brazilian, you know? What do you think, that everyone who speaks with a certain kind of accent comes from the same country or speaks the same language? We speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish. If you want to thank us, say obrigado, none of that gracias shit, obrigado very much.”

I found their reaction a bit extreme, especially in relation to me but also because it was often Stella’s customers they were going off on and it seemed like the people were just trying to be polite. I know I was. But then I would think how I would like it if someone came to America from, say, Germany, and started talking to me with a Texan accent because that’s what they mostly heard on TV, and I wouldn’t like that at all.

But perhaps they saw the same vulnerability in Elizabeth Hepburn that I’d seen earlier, because they let the ostensible insult pass, merely muttering “Gracias” in return.

Elizabeth Hepburn turned to me. “And for you.” She handed me a large paperback book.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “you said you were out of reading material.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

I’d never heard of the author, Shelby Macallister, nor the title, High Heels and Hand Trucks: My Life Among the Books. And the cover, on which was one perfect blue-green stiletto, was pink pink pink.

Elizabeth Hepburn’s famous blue eyes twinkled as she answered, “Chick Lit.”

“Chick Lit? But I’ve never—”

“Go on,” she said, “treat yourself. They’re tons of fun. Myself, I’m addicted to them.”

Addiction was something I could well understand…

“Go on.” Elizabeth Hepburn nodded her chin, as if she were trying to persuade me to try crack cocaine rather than just a book outside of my normal realm of reading. “Try it. I swear to God, you’re going to love it and want more and more. And, oh—” she put her hand to her face in awe “—those Choos.”

“Choos?” I said. “Did you say ‘Choos’? Don’t you mean to say ‘shoes’?”

“Oh, no,” she said, awe still in her eyes, “those Choos, those Jimmy Choos.”

I had no idea what she was talking about and my expression must have said as much, because she reached out a hand, placed it reassuringly on my arm.

“A girl needs more than a fish in her life for fun, Delilah. Now don’t forget to come back and visit me sometime—” oddly enough, she was not the first customer to thusly invite me “—and don’t forget to tell me what you think of those Choos. I’d bet both my Academy Awards you’re going to love them!”

3

“How’s that Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna working out for you?”

Startled, I dropped my fork, causing some of the red sauce to splash up, speckling my wrist and the open pages of the book I was reading. I’d been so engrossed in High Heels and Hand Trucks: My Life Among the Books, which was about an underachieving independent bookseller who takes a job as the lapdog to a publishing bigwig, that I hadn’t even heard Hillary come in.

“What’s that you’re reading?” she asked.

See what I mean? People always ask me that question.

Before I could answer, Hillary flipped the book over to the jacket to look for herself as I wiped at the red speckles on my wrist.

Hillary sniffed. “Not exactly Hemingway, is it?”

“It’s better than Hemingway!” I enthused.

Hillary cocked one perfect blond eyebrow in my general direction, an eyebrow that was waxed and sculpted regularly by the nice Asian ladies at Nail Euphorium, a place I’d never set foot in but heard tell of from Hillary.

“Okay,” I conceded, “maybe it’s not Hemingway, but this book is fun!”

She still looked skeptical as she opened her refrigerator, the one on top, and removed fresh vegetables. I had no doubt she was going to make some kind of amazing homemade sauce, but my Michael Angelo’s really was working for me just fine.

“As a matter of fact—” I enthused on “—after I finish this one, I’m going to—”

“Don’t say it.” Hillary stopped me cold, brandishing a sharp knife. “You’re going to go down to the bookstore and buy everything else this woman, this Shelby Macallister has ever written…right?”

“Wrong,” I said, a touch snottily, but it was so nice to uncover someone else’s wrongness for a change. “You are so wrong.”

“Oh?”

“Shelby Macallister hasn’t written any other books before, meaning I can’t get any more of hers until she writes them. So there.”

Hillary shrugged, contrite, and went back to chopping. “Then I stand corrected.”

It was a good thing her back was to me, so she couldn’t see my blush when I said, “But I am going to go to the bookstore and buy a stack more of this kind of book.”

“I knew it!” She slammed the knife home so hard that poor little green pepper didn’t stand a chance. “Every time you get going on something—”

“Hi, honey—” it was my turn to cut her off “—how was your day?”

This was how Hillary and I plugged along in our merrily dysfunctional way, had done so since back in our college days, at least before I flunked out: I was wacky, she called me on my wackiness, I sidetracked that call by being solicitous, and on we went.

Hard as it was to tear myself away from High Heels, I put the book down and reaching behind me—the eat-in kitchen was that small—opened the door to the lower fridge.

“May I interest you in a libation?” I asked, going all waiterly on her. “Tonight we have Jake’s Fault Shiraz, Jake’s Fault Shiraz and, hmm, let’s see, Jake’s Fault Shiraz.”

Hillary tried to be stern, but before long she started to laugh, which was just fine, that was the way it always was with us.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She rolled her eyes. “I guess I’ll take the Jake’s Fault Shiraz.”

“Good choice, madam.” I rifled in the utility drawer for the rabbit-ears corkscrew. “Why don’t you go change out of your work clothes while I pour you a glass.” Hillary wore the pants in our family and had a great selection of spiffy suits that didn’t deserve to get ruined. “I’ll even finish chopping your vegetables for you.”

“Thanks, it has been a day.”

Sure, she should change so as not to get anything messy on her nice suit, but I really wanted her out of the room so she wouldn’t see what I was about to do with that corkscrew. Hillary had given it to me in my holiday stocking the winter before because I always had trouble opening bottles with the old-fashioned, cheap, blue, plastic corkscrew I’d been using for years. But what she did not yet know was that even with the high-tech marvel she had given me, a corkscrew so wonderful it could make a sommelier out of a five-year-old, I still had problems with the damn thing, always pushing down on the ears too prematurely so that the cork only rose partway out and I wound up mangling it as I twisted it between my legs, trying to uncork it the rest of the way.

The cork came out almost without incident, meaning it snapped a bit at the bottom and I had to press that snapped part through into the wine down below. I poured us each a glass, but Hillary must have decided to indulge in a second shower and by the time she emerged, I was too deep into High Heels and Hand Trucks again to make polite conversation while she ate and did whatever else she did, only taking in her words in the most peripheral way. The written word being the way I connected with the world, my imagination caught up in the mere prose descriptions of all those Choos.

Her: “Do you want more of this wine?”

Me: (stretching out glass without looking) “You wouldn’t believe these shoes.”

Her: “Want to watch American Idol 25 with me?”

Me: “You would not believe these shoes.”

Her: “How about Jon Stewart?”

Me: “You would not believe these shoes.”

Her: “I guess I might as well hit the—”

Me: “You would not—”

Her: “Oh, stuff it, Delilah. ’Night.”

Well, that was rude.

But here was the thing: you would not believe these shoes, no one would, unless you read about them yourself, I thought, shutting the book after the last page.

Damn! It was after midnight. I’d need to wait until after work the next day, technically that day, to go to the bookstore and pick up more books like High Heels. I was definitely going to be reading more books like High Heels.

But then I realized something else: reading about the shoes, which the author constantly described as “architectural marvels” as if there were no other words for them, was a far cry from actually seeing the shoes. I mean it’s always show, don’t tell, right? And as good as the author was at describing the shoes—there were so many of them!—I suddenly was struck by an overwhelming urge: I needed to see those shoes.

But what to do, what to do…

I had no idea who in Danbury might actually sell Jimmy Choos, probably nobody, and even if I took the last train into Manhattan, all the shops there would be closed at one in the morning.

What to do, what to do…

There was only one computer in our apartment and it wasn’t mine.

I gently turned the knob on the door to Hillary’s bedroom, tiptoed over toward her computer, tried not to trip over anything in the dark—“Ouch!”—and shushed myself, silently cursed my own clumsiness and immediately thanked my stars I hadn’t woken her, sat down in her desk chair, turned on the monitor and Googled the obvious.

The PDF file for all things Jimmy Choo was on the screen before me—the Asha, the Asha, I really wanted the Asha!—when…

“Delilah, just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

But I was too caught up in the pretty images on the screen before me to feel as appropriately guilty, snagged and embarrassed as I might otherwise have felt.

“Oh, never mind that.” I pooh-poohed her. “Look. Look!”

“I don’t want to look,” Hillary said, totally peeved and sporting quite a case of bed head, I must say. “I want my sleep.” She grabbed the mouse and moved it toward the shut-down menu. “And I want you to—”

“No!” I stopped her hand. Then, feeling totally contrite, I wheedled, “Please look.”

“Oh, all right.”

At first, she just looked annoyed, but as I ceded control of the mouse and she started to click on the images of the shoes and boots and sandals, enlarging some of the images as I had done earlier…

“Well—” she was still resisting the pull “—I’m not crazy about some of the red ones.”

“Oh, me, neither,” I said quickly, trying to sound agreeable. And it really wasn’t much of a stretch since, despite red being one of my favorite colors, the red pairs didn’t grab me as much as the others.

I saw her eyes stray back toward the comfort of her rumpled sheets. Thinking I couldn’t let her get away, since I really did need a cohort here, if for nothing else than to keep me from being so lonely in the midst of my own obsessions, I grabbed the mouse back and quickly clicked on a different image.

“Look at this,” I said eagerly.

It was the Asha.

“Oh, my!” Hillary said, her eyes going all glittery, as my own had no doubt done a short time ago.

“And this,” I said, clicking again.

It was the Ghost, which was maybe even more spectacular than the Asha, if such a thing were possible.

“Oh, my!” Hillary said again.

“And this.” I clicked one last time.

It was the Parson Flat.

“I would buy that shoe!” she trumpeted.

I knew the Parson Flat would get her.

“How much…?” she started to ask.

In another second, she’d be racing for her Dooney & Bourke bag to fish out her Amex.

“But that’s the whole problem!” I all but whined.

“What?” Hillary said. “Are they too much money?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I keep clicking around, but I don’t see any prices here.”

“Oh, dear,” Hillary said. “That’s never good.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever eaten in a restaurant where they don’t list the prices on the menu?”

“Um, no. Who do you think I am, you?”

“Trust me, it’s never cheap when they don’t list the prices.”

We both stared at the screen.

I tried on a nonchalant shrug.

“So?” I said. “How expensive can a little bit of leather and maybe some glitter be?”

“Who knows?” Hillary said. “But I’m guessing very.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said.

“Hmm?” She was still transfixed by the Parson Flats.

“Road trip!”

“Oh, no,” she said, successfully tearing her gaze away. “This is your insanity, not mine.”

“Please.” I was back in wheedle mode. “Wouldn’t you like to at least see if you could afford them?”

Before she could answer, I clicked to the part of the catalog where boutique locations were listed. I didn’t think I’d ever persuade her to go to London or Dublin or Milan or Moscow or Kuwait City or Hong Kong, Korea, Bangkok or even São Paulo to shop for shoes, although I suppose Paris might have been nice. Hillary always said she wanted to see Paris. But at least I could try…

“There are two stores right in Manhattan,” I said. “One in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, the other on Madison. We could each use a day off from work. Come on, just one day. Nobody says we have to buy anything…”

“If I say yes, can I go back to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Five minutes later…

“And turn off that computer!”

“Sorry.”

Still, for good measure and so that I’d have something to remind her with should she change her mind, I printed pictures of our three favorites: the Asha, the Ghost and the Parson Flats.

“And stop using my printer!”

“Sorry.”

Then I went to sleep, too.

And all night long, I dreamt of the faceless Yo-Yo Man. I was in his arms, on my feet a pair of Ashas.

I was dancing in my Jimmy Choos.

4

But getting a day off from Squeaky Qlean was not as easy as I thought.

“If you absolutely need to be sick,” Stella said when I called her up with my lie, “then be sick tomorrow. We’ve got four jobs today and I need all squeegees on deck. Tomorrow there’s only one.”

This turned out to be not such a bad thing because, while eating my cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket in the van after I’d finished the inside of the second job, I was struck by inspiration.

On the bench between the driver’s seat and where I was sitting, feet propped up on the dash, lay Stella’s bible: her scheduling book. In it, were listed the names, addresses and phone numbers of the jobs for each day we worked. She usually left the prices out, perhaps for fear that if we ever actually knew how much she was bringing in, The Girls From Brazil and I—The Golden Squeegee, I might add!—would demand a higher hourly wage.

Quickly, feeling very Nancy Drew, I flipped through Stella’s bible. She always tore off the corner of the page once the day was done, so it was easy work for me to find the page from the day before, on which was listed Elizabeth Hepburn’s name, her address and her no-doubt unlisted phone number.

I found a pen on the seat and grabbed a parking ticket Stella was never going to pay anyway out of the glove compartment, and was just shoving the piece of paper into the pocket of my khakis when Rivera sauntered up.

“Yo, chica,” she said.

From time to time, I wondered if chica was actually a Portuguese word or if they just liked to play with me. A part of me was tempted to sneak onto Hillary’s computer that night and look it up on Babel Fish but then I decided I really did not want to know.

“What’s The Golden Squeegee doing now,” Rivera asked, “looking through Stella’s book to see what time we might get off today? Damn, it’s a hot one.”

“Heh,” I nervously laughed. “That’s exactly what I was doing. Heh.”

Five hours later, home, grimy, exhausted, I picked up the phone, punched in the number on the parking ticket.

It didn’t take more than a brief description, certainly there was no persuading required on my part, and Elizabeth Hepburn was on board.

“Are you sure?” I said. “We’ll be taking the train and no one said we’re actually going to buy anything.”

“Are you kidding?” she laughed. “I’ve been waiting for an offer like this for years—road trip!”

“Tell me again why we’re taking Elizabeth Hepburn to Jimmy Choo’s with us?” Hillary asked the next day just prior to pulling her red Jeep into Elizabeth Hepburn’s circular driveway.

“Because she’s old,” I said, “and we’ll be old one day, if we’re lucky, and we’ll hope to be invited out. Because she’s lonely and she’s fun.”

“Good enough.”

But, apparently, there was something about me that was no longer good enough for Elizabeth Hepburn.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk.” She tsked as I got out of the car.

It would have been annoying but it had been a long time since anyone had cared enough to tsk-tsk me. My late mother had been a great tsker, but since then…

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You don’t want to go into the city looking like a…ragamuffin, do you?”

“That’s exactly what I told her!” Hillary said.

“Who are you?” Elizabeth Hepburn demanded.

“Hillary Clinton.”

A slow smile rose on Elizabeth Hepburn’s soft features. “Of course,” she said.

“What’s wrong with the way I look?” I asked again.

But before they could answer, I could see it for myself. Hillary, as always, was dressed impeccably. Riding the rails into the city on a hot summer day, she had on a sleeveless peach sundress with a wide-brimmed straw hat and flat gold sandals that were pretty damn attractive, even if they weren’t Jimmy Choos. As for Ms. Hepburn, she had a slightly more modest aqua sundress on that brought out the color of her eyes, a straw hat with a big floral band à la the late Princess Diana and open-toed spectator pumps that matched her dress. For an octogenarian, she had a great set of wheels.

While I had on…

“All right already!” I said. “I get the point! But isn’t it true these days that so long as you can afford the price tag or pay the restaurant tab, no one cares how casual you look?”

“I care,” Elizabeth Hepburn said, drawing her spine up to its full acceptance-speech glory.

“Well, it’s a little late for me to go home and change,” I said.

Besides, I was thinking, what’s so wrong about jean shorts, a T-shirt and my Nikes? With ten million people or so in the city, there would be plenty of people who looked like me, probably be a lot more people looking like me than like these two garden-party missies. And, hey, my T-shirt was clean.

“I can fix this,” Elizabeth Hepburn said. Then she crooked a finger at me. “Come.”

Five minutes later, I was back on the gravel drive. Gone were my shorts and T, replaced by a fairly pretty peasant blouse and long skirt.

“What we wore back in the sixties,” Elizabeth Hepburn said, “it’s all come back again.”

The amazing thing was, having caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the way out, I didn’t look half-bad. It was a bittersweet pill to swallow, the idea that I looked better in an old lady’s clothes than my own.

“Sorry about the shoes.” Elizabeth Hepburn directed her apology to Hillary as though I wasn’t there. “But mine are all too small for her. I did always have such tiny feet. It was one of the things Rudolf Nureyev used to say he loved about me.”

Rudolf Nureyev? Wasn’t he—?

“That’s okay.” Hillary shrugged as she studied the tips of my Nikes as they peeked out from under the long dress. “We’ll just tell the salesgirls at Jimmy Choo’s that she’s our country cousin and that’s why we brought her in, because she needs their help…bad.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Maybe you two should just go on without me.”

“Now, now.” Elizabeth Hepburn rubbed my arm. “Where would we be without you? You’re the glue, Delilah, you are definitely the balls of the operation.”

A short time later, as we boarded the train, Hillary tossed over her shoulder, “Will you be able to manage a day without Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pockets for lunch?”

“Very funny,” I groused.

But, of course, I had my own doubts.

Later, as we exited Grand Central Station, she said, “We never did decide which Jimmy Choo’s we should go to, the one on Fifth or the one on Madison?”

“Oh, definitely the one on Madison,” Elizabeth Hepburn put in quickly. “It always reminds me of the time I slept with the president.”

“Which president?” I asked.

“Why, President Madison, of course,” she said huffily.

“She thinks she slept with President Madison?” Hillary and I mouthed at one another behind her back.

It suddenly occurred to me that maybe Elizabeth Hepburn had never slept with Ernie Hemingway after all.

“Besides,” Elizabeth Hepburn added, leading the way, “I never slept with anyone named Fifth, so what’d be the point of going there?”

I would have fallen in love with the Jimmy Choo’s on Madison even if it weren’t for the shoes, because walking into that cool air-conditioning after the August heat of the New York streets was like walking into a peppermint breath of…

Okay, really, it was the shoes.

There they were, at last, in all of their architectural-marvel glory.

And I’ll admit it: I was like a kid in a candy store or a chick in a Choo store.

“Ah,” said Elizabeth Hepburn, holding up the Momo Flat, its color matching her outfit, its latticed star cutouts lending elegance to an otherwise ordinary flat.

“Ooh,” Elizabeth Hepburn said, asking the salesgirl to get her a pair of Fayres to try on. They were gold evening sandals with a midsize curved heel that had ivory-colored oval stones set in the toe and ankle straps. “At the Academy Awards next year,” she said, admiring her feet in them, “I’ll finally outshine that Lauren Bacall. Who cares if I trip on the red carpet?”

Having thought she wanted the Parson Flat most, the shoe Hillary really fell in love with was the Pilar Flat.

“Where will you wear it?” I asked. “If you try wearing it to work, your clients will think you’re too out-of-touch wealthy to understand their problems.”

The Pilar Flat was a metallic aqua, with a spaghetti X-strap across the front and about a yard of strap wrapped a gazillion times around the ankle. It looked exactly like the sort of sandal shoe Cleopatra would have worn if she had a passion for aqua. Look out, Marc Antony!

“Who cares?” Hillary said, transfixed by the sight of her own feet. “I’ll wear them while watching Jon Stewart if I have to. I’ll make places to wear them.”

But then her attention was drawn back to the Parson Flat. It was a gold leather traditional thong sandal with a big red jewel at the center, surrounded by green stones with more jewels suspended from gold threads.

“It really is more me,” Hillary said.

And, really, Cleopatra would have gladly worn that shoe, too.

Elizabeth Hepburn and Hillary were so busy staring at their own feet, they almost forgot…

“Hey,” they both said at the same time, “I thought we came here for you.”

This had, of course, been the original plan. But now that we were here, I felt dwarfed into insignificance by the magical footwear around me. Sure, Elizabeth Hepburn and Hillary would be able to find places to wear their purchases, but what would I do with any of these shoes—start wearing Stella’s penguin suits with these on my feet as I wielded my golden squeegee? It was just too sad a picture and I said as much.

“Oh, come on,” Hillary said, “you took the day off from work to come here.”

“You’ve come this far,” Elizabeth Hepburn said. “How can you stop now?”

“Here,” Hillary said, holding up a shoe. It was a green high-heeled evening sandal with a V of diamond-shaped gold and crystal jewels cascading down from the twin chain strap: the Asha.

And yet, suddenly, I felt as though I could resist the Asha. After all, how many clothes did I own that would match with that green? It was way too impractical.

I was just about to tell them that they should buy their shoes and enjoy them with my blessing, but that I was going to pass, when I saw the salesgirl return a previously unseen floor model to the display.

The shoe she placed down, as if it were just another shoe, was another high-heeled sandal, only this one was copper-colored, more pink than bronze, with diamond-shaped sapphire-colored stones encrusted with crystal stones across the toe strap and more sapphire and crystal bejeweling the intricate mesh of chain around the ankle with three straps of chain anchoring it to more copper leather at the back.

It was the Ghost.

And while I might have even resisted the draw of that most perfect of all shoes, sapphires had been my late mother’s favorite stone. If nothing else than to do it in her honor, I had to at least try on that shoe.

“May I?” I tentatively asked the salesgirl.

She must have been a true professional, not like these rude people you sometimes read about in books, because she didn’t even flinch as she watched me remove my scuffed Nikes and workout socks, sliding the desired shoes on my feet and patiently helping me figure out the straps.

“Do you have a job where you stand on your feet all day?” the salesgirl asked with a vaguely European accent.

“How could you tell?” I asked. “Are my feet that awful-looking?”

“On the contrary,” she said. “I think you have the most beautiful feet I’ve ever seen in here. They are ideally suited to this shoe.”

It’s odd to think of a person’s life as being transformed by a shoe, but I swear I felt an electric shock, a magical shock, as the salesgirl slipped the Ghosts on my feet, as she strapped them on, as she stepped back so that she, along with everyone else, could appreciate the effect. And, oh, was there an effect. I swear, it was as though pixie dust was swirling all around my feet, spreading upward around my whole body.

And it wasn’t just that the shoe was achingly beautiful, although it was certainly that; it was that I, for once, felt beautiful. With those shoes on, I could do anything, leap tall buildings with a single bound, balance the national budget, find my prince, you name it. I could be normal and special at the same time. I could be like other women, and then some.

It was my Cinderella moment.

I had to have that shoe.

“How much?” I blurted out.

“Yes,” Elizabeth Hepburn piped up. “How much for all of these? It looks like you’ll be making at least three sales today.”

The salesgirl very coolly named prices for the Fayre that Elizabeth Hepburn had loved so much, the Parson Flat that Hillary coveted, my own beloved Ghost.

“Huh?” was all I could say, as the sticker shock of fourteen hundred dollars before tax sank in. Really, the tax probably came to more than I’d ever spent on a single pair of shoes before.

I suppose I must have realized in advance that the shoes would be expensive, but it had never occurred to me that for a few straps of leather and some fake jewels…

Elizabeth Hepburn and Hillary already had their credit cards out.

“Sure, it’s a lot of money—” Elizabeth Hepburn shrugged “—but I’ve got it. What else am I going to spend it on?”

“I’ll never find shoes that are more perfect for me,” Hillary agreed.

Easy to say, since the shoes they coveted cost less than mine. Hell, the ones Hillary wanted rang in at a measly six hundred and thirty dollars in comparison.

Reluctantly, I undid the straps and gave up the Ghost, handing them back to the salesgirl, who looked shocked.

“But you must buy these shoes,” she said, trying to hand them back to me.

“But I can’t buy those shoes,” I said, taking a defensive step back, hands up as though to ward off a vampire.

“Why ever not?” Elizabeth Hepburn asked. “Don’t you have a credit card?”

“Oh, she has a credit card,” Hillary said. Apparently, I was back to being “she” again. “But she never lets herself use it. I guess she must realize, with her obsessive nature, she’d charge herself into bankruptcy if she ever got started.”

“So what are you going to do,” Elizabeth Hepburn asked, “come back another day with cash? But what if they’re sold out?”

“You don’t happen to have layaway, do you?” Hillary turned to the salesgirl who sadly shook her head.

“I don’t have that kind of money saved anyway,” I said.

“How is that possible?” Elizabeth Hepburn asked.

“Hey, you met me when I was washing your windows, remember?” I said. “Hand-to-mouth is my way of life.”

Elizabeth Hepburn didn’t even need to think about that for a second.

“Oh, hell, Delilah,” she said, sympathy crinkling her blue eyes, “I’ll buy you the shoes.”

“No,” I said.

“Why ‘no’? I already said, I have all this money. What else am I going to use it for—monthly window washing? Leave it all to my housekeeper, Lottie, who awaits her inheritance upon my death like John Carradine playing Dracula waiting for an unbitten neck?”

“No,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “I can’t accept charity. I won’t. If I want the shoes badly enough, and I do, I’ll find a way to earn the money on my own.”

“But what if they’re not here in your size when you get back?”

“I’ll just have to take that chance.”

She must have seen that the window washer meant business because she stopped arguing.

And then she put her Jimmy Choos back.

And so did Hillary.

“Wait a second,” I protested. “Just because I can’t afford mine, doesn’t mean you have to put—”

“Oh, yes, we do,” Elizabeth Hepburn spoke with her own brand of firmness. “If you can’t get what you came for, none of us can. One for all and all for one and all that other crap Errol Flynn used to say to me.”

“Exactly,” Hillary said.

“But what if the shoes you love aren’t here in your sizes by the time I can afford to come back?” I asked.

“That’s just the chance we’ll have to take,” Elizabeth Hepburn said.

“Exactly,” Hillary said.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

“But, Delilah?” Hillary added.

“Hmm?”

“Try to come up with a way to make the money quickly. I want those damn shoes.”

5

“No.”

“But, Dad.”

“I said no, Baby. I’m pretty sure you’re still smart enough to understand both sides of no. There’s the n and there’s the o. What’s so difficult here?”

My dad had always called me Baby, for as long back as I could remember. It was my mother, whose own name was Lila, who’d named me.

“I’m Lila,” she’d say, “you’re Delilah. It’s like Spanish. It means ‘of Lila.’”

“There’s just one problem,” I’d say right back. “We’re not Spanish. Okay, two problems. There’s that extra h at the end, which your name doesn’t have, so technically speaking—”

“Just eat your Cocoa Krispies.” She’d always cut me off right there.

My dad always claimed he called me Baby because he couldn’t stand the name Delilah. Of course, totally besotted with my mother and therefore never wanting to hurt her, despite the numerous times he’d hurt her, he only claimed that outside of my mother’s hearing.

“Do you know whom she named you after, Baby?” he’d ask, as if he hadn’t asked me the same question at least a hundred times. “She named you after the girl in that Tom Jones song! Your mother was a huge Tom Jones fan! I swear, if I hadn’t been sitting right there beside her at his concerts, she’d have thrown up her panties right there on the stage. What, I ask you, kind of name is that to give to a baby? Delilah in the song drives her man crazy, then she cheats on him, and then she gets killed for it.”

“But, Dad,” I tried again now.

“No, Baby. If I taught you how to play blackjack, Lila would roll over in her grave, and then where would I be?”

“Where you are right now,” I could have answered, “alone.”

Where my dad was right now, physically speaking, was a one-bedroom apartment in a section of Danbury just a cut above where Conchita and Rivera lived. As a professional gambler, Black Jack Sampson had enjoyed his good years (we’d once lived in a five-bedroom house even though we’d only needed two of them) and his bad years (like the last one). And, if we’re being totally honest here, he was right: my mother wouldn’t approve of his teaching me how to play blackjack. But, oh, did I want those Jimmy Choos…

“Your mother might even come back to life just to kill me if I taught you how to play blackjack,” he said.

He was probably right about that, too.

I studied my dad, a man whose personality was too big to be contained by his present tiny circumstances.

Black Jack Sampson had just turned seventy but had only just begun to look even close to sixty, his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, tall frame and lean body, combined with the fact that he always wore a suit even in summer, making him look more like he belonged on a riverboat in the middle of an Elvis Presley movie rather than with the polyester bus crew going off to play the slots at Atlantic City. Black Jack had met my mother, a schoolteacher who loved her work almost as much as she loved him, at a voting rights rally back in 1965—Lila was rallying while Black Jack made book on the side on whether the act would pass—and it had been love at first sight. He was thirty at the time and she was twenty-eight, but it had been twelve long infertile years before they’d been able to conceive a baby, me, hence the huge age difference between me and my parents, and there had been no more babies afterward, try as they might. True, these days having first-time parents in their forties wasn’t a rarity, but, when I was little, my mother looked more like a grandmother by comparison to my friends’ mothers.

Not that I’d minded.

Growing up, I thought my mother was the greatest lady who ever lived, a belief I’d maintained until the day she’d died ten years ago. And my mother, in turn, had thought my dad was the greatest man who’d ever lived…except for his gambling.

“Blackjack killed your mother,” he said.

We’d had this conversation enough times over the years for me to know he wasn’t referring to himself when he said, “Blackjack killed your mother;” he was referring to the card game.

“Blackjack did not kill Mom,” I said.

How I missed my mother! She was the steady parent, the one who didn’t suffer obsessions that worked against her. In her absence, I’d become Daddy’s Girl. But what a daddy! From my dad, I’d learned to be the kind of woman who could sit with men while they watched sporting events but nothing about what it was like to be the kind of woman men would want to do more romantic things with. I’m not complaining here, by the way, just stating.

“Blackjack did not kill Mom,” I said again. “Mom died of cancer.”

“Same difference,” he sniffed.

“Not really.”

“There was a time, when you were just a little baby, Baby, that I dreamed of you growing up to one day follow in my footsteps.”

I had a mental flash of a younger version of my dad, holding baby me in his arms and crooning, “Lullaby, and good night, when the dealer has busted…”

“We would have made quite a team,” I said. “And we still could,” I added, thinking about what becoming great at blackjack could achieve for me: a pair of Jimmy Choos.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I promised your mom right before she died that I’d make sure you lived a better life than we’d lived, one free of the addictions that had destroyed the two of us.”

Clearly, the man didn’t know his own daughter. Me, free of addictions? Some days, I thought I’d never be free of them.

“Mom was an addict, too?” I was shocked. “What was Mom addicted to?”

He studied his wing tips, his cheeks coloring a bit.

“Me,” he answered. “Lila was addicted to me.”

“That’s not true, Dad. She wasn’t addicted. She just plain loved you.”

“Same difference.” He straightened his shoulders. “And she’d hate it if I passed the blackjack compulsion on to you.”

I thought he was making too much of this. My parents had had a happy marriage. I knew they’d been happy.

“C’mon, Dad,” I wheedled. “Wouldn’t it be great to have someone really follow in your footsteps. ‘Lullabye, and good night, when the dealer has busted’—”

“Who taught you that song?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I thought I just made it up.”

“It just sounded so familiar there for a second.”

“But wouldn’t it be great to have me follow in your footsteps?” I tried again.

“What about poker?” he said suddenly. “Everyone’s playing poker these days. At least if you started to gamble at poker, your mother might get confused when she comes back to haunt me since poker’s not blackjack.”

I considered what he was suggesting.

Even I was aware that poker was the current “in” game and it was a game that I had some familiarity with. Back in my junior-high days, my best girlfriend and I had started a poker ring while serving an in-school suspension for getting our classmates drunk during the science fair. We’d charged a dollar a game to play and even a couple of teachers, miffed that my best girlfriend and I had taken the fall when so many others had been involved, had stopped by to play a few hands while on their coffee breaks. I think we were all vaguely aware that they could have been fired for their complicit behavior, but it was a private school—this had been one of Black Jack Sampson’s better years for winning—and we were thrilled to take their money. Besides, once the weeklong in-house suspension had ended, life at school had gone back to normal and we’d folded up the gaming table with my best girlfriend and I each about fifty dollars richer. Of course, I’d never told my parents any of this because Lila would have been too mortified while Black Jack would have been too proud, thereby increasing Lila’s mortification.

“Nah,” I finally concluded. “Sure, poker’s a trend right now, but any trend can end at any minute. Blackjack, on the other hand, is a classic. It’s eternal. And, hey, I’m Black Jack Sampson’s daughter, aren’t I? I’m certainly not Poker Sampson’s daughter. C’mon, Dad. It’ll be great. It’ll be like having the son you always dreamed of.”

It was a cheap shot to take, and I knew it even as I said it. Black Jack had always wanted a son; anyone could see that every time he tried to teach me how to hit a baseball only to have the bat twirl me around in such a big circle that I wound up dizzy on the lawn or every time he tried to teach me how football was played, keeping in mind the importance of covering the spread, only to have me yawn myself to sleep. But it was the one card I had to play, the only card that would get me what I wanted.

“C’mon, Dad. It’ll be fun.”

He ran one hand through his hair.

“You have to promise not to tell your mother about this,” he warned.

I raised my right hand. “Scout’s honor.”

“‘O, I am fortune’s fool.’”

See where I got it from? Black Jack and Lila were always quoting Shakespeare at me.

He walked out to the kitchen and I heard a drawer slide open and shut. When he returned, he had a fresh deck of red-and-white Bicycle cards in his hand. He tore off the cellophane wrapper and as he did so, he looked me dead in the eye, giving me the answer I’d come there for in a single word.

“Yes.”

6

“Those are some whack shoes, chica,” Rivera said.

I’d been using the sheet of paper with the pictures of Jimmy Choos on it that I’d copied out of Hillary’s computer as a bookmark and Rivera was studying the lovely lines of the Asha as it peeked out from the top of the latest Chick Lit book I was reading, Still Life with Stiletto, by Bonita Sanchez.

“Is whack good?” I asked. I honestly had no idea.

“Whack is beyond good,” she said, then she reflected for a moment. “And whack is beyond bad.” Further reflection, shrug. “Whack is whack.”

“Ah.” Well, that was illuminating. I wasn’t sure if she was playing with me or not.

“Whack can mean bad or crazy,” she elaborated. “If I say the shoes are whack, it could mean they’re really ugly or really cool. If I say some guy is whack, it could mean stay away from him or that he’s doing something unbelievable, like saying ‘Shaq is whack.’ Get it? Shaq’s so good it’s unbelievable.”

“Wow,” I said, “a linguistic paradox.” Then I remembered something from TV. “What about that pop star who says ‘crack is whack’?”

“She means it’s bad for you.”

“Huh. And here I thought she meant ‘I love crack! Give me more!’”

Rivera favored me with a rare smile before looking back at the picture of the shoes. “I think I’m going to get me a pair,” she said. “How much?”

While visiting the store in Manhattan, before leaving I’d asked the salesgirl the price of a few more pairs of shoes that interested me. You know, just for fun. Then I’d committed the prices to memory.

“Unless I’m mistaken, those shoes go for one thousand and one hundred and fifty dollars a pair.”

“For real?”

“Yup,” I said. “You get both for that price.”

“That’s insanity!”

“Mmm-hmm,” I agreed, “but look at these.” I showed her the Ghost.

“Now those shoes I would pay one thousand and one hundred and fifty dollars for,” she said. “Those shoes are beyond whack.”

“That’s nice,” I said, “except those shoes will set you back one thousand and four hundred dollars.”

“Insanity!” she said.

“Beyond insanity,” I agreed.

“So how come you’re carrying around a picture of them like they’re a prayer card from church?”

“Because I really want them,” I admitted, “more than I can ever remember wanting anything.”

“Wanting and getting are two different things, chica. How do you think you’ll ever be able to pay for something like that?”

“I’m working on it,” I said. “As Shakespeare says, ‘To do a great right, do a little wrong.’”

“Fuck Shakespeare. You think Stella is just going to give you a raise? Even if she gave you like a dollar an hour raise—and do you think Stella’s going to ever part with another dollar, let alone forty of them a week?—it’d take you half a year to save that much money at that rate. By then those shoes’d be long gone.”

“Hey,” I said, ignoring her last sentence, “your math skills are whack.”

“What I should do is whack you,” Stella said to Rivera, surprising us. “What are you trying to say, that I’m cheap?”

“No way, boss.” Rivera took a step backward, hands raised in self-defense. “You are an all-American entrepreneur and you are very, very smart.”

“She’s right, boss,” Conchita said. She was suddenly there, too. “You’re just a very smart entrepreneur. No exploitation going on here.”

Stella stared at them both closely, as if trying to judge if they were each pulling a leg. She must have been satisfied with what she saw, for she turned to me next.

“If I’m not going to give you a raise—and I’m not, because you know times are tough and the economy is rocky—then where are you ever going to get the money for those Choos?”

“You know Choos?” I was surprised.

“Of course I know Choos.” Stella fluffed her hair. “I’m an all-American entrepreneur, aren’t I?”

The way I figured it, Conchita and Rivera were stroking her ego enough. Certainly, I didn’t need to do that, so instead I merely told them of my plan, the one Hillary and I had devised the night before.

“I’m going to Foxwoods Casino,” I said, “this Saturday night.”

Conchita’s eyes grew big. “You mean the one run by the Mashantucket Pequots?”

“Is there any other?” I replied.

“You’re just going with your roommate?” Stella asked now.

“That’s what I had planned on,” I said.

“What are you planning on wearing?” Conchita demanded.

“I hadn’t thought about it.” I shrugged.

“Hadn’t thought about it?” Rivera whacked me in the head, lightly, but it was still a whack. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I figured I’d just wear some shorts, maybe a T-shirt. It’s been so hot lately.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she snapped, raising her hand.

“Don’t hit me again!” I said, moving my arms up to protect the coconut, meaning my head.

“She’s right,” Conchita said, hitting me from the other side. “You can’t go to a place like Foxwoods Casino, especially not on a Saturday night, looking like you’re just going off to McDonald’s for a Big Mac.”

“If you want to be a winner, you need to dress like one,” Rivera said.

“Saturday morning, we’re taking you to the Nail Euphorium,” Conchita said.

“How do you know about the Nail Euphorium?” I asked. It was the place Hillary always went to.

“Who do you think we are—” Conchita hands-on-hipsed me “—you?”

Hey, I resented that. Every time someone said that to me, I resented it.

Then they all started talking about me, as if I wasn’t even there, so much talk that the sounds started swirling together until it all sounded like, “Delilah, Delilah, Delilah.” That’s what it all sounded like, exactly…

“Never bet more than you can afford to lose,” Black Jack had told me.

“Always start with a stake you can afford,” Black Jack had told me.

“Set a goal on how much you want to win,” Black Jack had told me, “and if you reach it, walk away.”

“When you start to lose, walk away,” Black Jack had told me. “If you lose your whole stake, definitely walk away.”

Then he’d handed me a hundred-dollar bill.

“What’s this?” I’d asked.

“It’s your stake,” he’d said. “Whatever you do, don’t lose it.”

Then I distinctly heard Stella say, “Of course I’m going to go, too.” Her words when they came were spoken in a huff. “You don’t think I’m going to be the only one left behind, do you?”

“I don’t know, boss.” Rivera shrugged, awkward. “It would just be way too weird—you know?—partying with the boss.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “No one ever said anything about partying. And, anyway, what are you all talking about? You’re not all coming with me.”

“Oh, uh-huh, yeah, we are,” Conchita said.

“When was this decided?”

“Weren’t you paying any attention to us at all?” Rivera demanded.

“It was decided,” Stella said, “while you were busy daydreaming. But, don’t worry, we’ve got it all figured out…Golden Squeegee.” Then she picked up my bucket and thrust it at me. “Now get back to work!”

“Wait just one second,” I said. “You’re all coming with me, with me and Hillary to Foxwoods—is that what I’m hearing?”

“Pretty much,” Stella said.

“Then one other person is coming, too,” I said, “Elizabeth Hepburn.”

“My customer?” Stella said.

I nodded firmly.

“You’ve been talking to my customer?” Stella said.

I nodded meekly.

“She won’t want to go,” she scorned.

“Oh, yes, she will.” I nodded enthusiastically, knowing the answer instinctively. “She’ll be the balls of the operation.”

“The…?” Stella could barely mouth the words.

“Wait just one more second,” I said. “You, me, Hillary, Conchita, Rivera, Elizabeth Hepburn—” I did the math in my head “—there’ll be six of us. How will we all fit into something to get us there?” I eyed the Squeaky Qlean van, the only vehicle any of us owned that would be big enough. “I’m not going off to win my fortune in that thing.”

“Thanks a lot,” Stella said. “I’ll have you know—”

“Don’t worry about it, chicas,” Rivera said, putting one arm around Stella and the other around me. “Me and Conchita will work all of that stuff out. Delilah, you just be up early Saturday morning. Really, we’ve got all your bases covered.”

Which was how I found myself, up brighter and earlier than usual on Saturday morning, surrounded by my helpful elves.

Of course, my elves were all taller than me and their help was probably going to wind up killing me, so there was that, too.

“If they just shape them so that they actually have some shape, it’ll be an improvement,” Hillary said when we got to Nail Euphorium. “Maybe a little clear polish for gloss.”

“She should get a full set of acrylics,” Conchita said, “painted red.”

“Who do you want her to look like, you?” Rivera demanded.

It was nice at least to hear someone else get asked that question for a change.

“She should get the acrylics,” Rivera said, “but then she should get a French mani, pedi, too.”

“She’ll look like Jackie Kennedy Onassis,” Conchita objected.

“And this is bad?” Rivera said. “May she wind up with a mansion and a yacht.”

“Wait a second,” I said, which had apparently become my new favorite thing to say. “I can’t afford this. If I get a French manicure and…and…and a…pedi—” the word was so foreign to me “—half my stake money will be gone…and that’s if I don’t leave a tip!”

“I’ve got you covered on this one,” Hillary said, waving her Amex gold card in the air.

All I had was a regular Amex card, no gold for me, and as I’d shown when we went to Manhattan, I never used the damn thing, not even to buy something I wanted as much as the Ghost. For an addictive personality like me, that way, the credit card way, madness lay.

“I already told you when we were in New York,” I told her. “I won’t accept charity.”

“It’s not charity,” she said. “It’s my birthday present to you.”

“My birthday’s not for another five months. It’s in January, remember?”

“So? Just don’t expect anything else on January 10.”

It was the same at Now We’re Styling!, the salon where Conchita and Rivera regularly got their hair done. Hillary had suggested The Queen’s Coif, where she got her own hair done, but had been outvoted. Still, she paid.

“Christmas present,” she said, surrendering her Amex card again.

“Christmas isn’t for another four months,” I pointed out.

“So?” she said. “Don’t expect anything on December 25.”

“She looks sooo…not like her,” Stella said when the hairdresser was done and we were all admiring the new me in the mirror.

It was weird because my hair didn’t look radically different than it usually did. It was the same short, dark hair, kind of spiky. But whatever magic the stylist had performed on it, using paste artfully as well as a razor to create tiny little jagged wisps all around my face, well, it made me look like I was styling.

“You’ll need to get your makeup done, too, of course,” Stella said. “You can’t have hair like that with no makeup.” Sighing, she extracted her own Amex gold card from her purse.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s your early Halloween bonus,” she muttered. “You can get it done here. They do makeup, too.”

“Boss has got a he-art! Boss has got a he-art!” Conchita and Rivera singsonged.

“Ohh…shut up,” Stella said.

“She still needs the right clothes,” Rivera said.

“We still need to get a car big enough,” Conchita said.

“I’ll get the clothes,” Rivera said.

“I’ll get the car,” Conchita said.

The clothes turned out to be items from Rivera’s own closet.

“I wore these black slacks the night Flavia fell in love with me,” she said, holding up a pair of black capris.

“Flavia?” I asked.

“Long gone.” She shrugged. “And don’t worry about the length. I’ve got Hollywood tape in my bag, works like a charm.”

She pulled a silver lamé tank top out of her bag.

“And I wore this,” she said, “the night Emmanuella fell in love with me.”

“Emmanuella?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “I think she’s with Flavia now. We can use the Hollywood tape to tuck up the hem of the tank, too.”

As I put on the clothes, I tried not to think about the fact that I was being clothed wholly in garments that had loved and lost a lot of girl-on-girl love.

In the beginning I’d felt resistant to their efforts. Why, I felt, bother trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse? But, and here was the strange thing, as the day wore on, a feeling welled in me, the same Cinderella feeling I’d had when I’d slipped the Ghosts on at Jimmy Choo’s in New York. Here were all these women—Hillary, Stella, Conchita, Rivera—doing everything in their power to help me achieve my moment. I was like the real Cinderella, with the Fairy Godmother and all the creatures in the house helping her get ready for the ball. I felt magical. There was still one thing missing, though…

“Who would have guessed you could look so good?” Rivera admired her own handiwork when I was done dressing, when she was done taping me. “But shoes—” she put her finger to her lips “—that’s the big problem.”

“That’s how this all started,” I pointed out. “Remember? Once I get those Jimmy Choos, I’ll have great shoes.”

“Right,” she said, all business, “but you don’t have them now.” She looked in my closet. “All you’ve got right now are a pair of flip-flops, some winter boots and those stupid Nikes you’re always wearing.”

“Stupid—?”

“I know,” she said, cocking an ear. Yup, the shower was still running. “While your roommate’s in the shower, we’ll raid her closet.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, no, no, no, no. I’m sure she won’t like—”

“Come on.” Rivera yanked on my arm.

I was right: Hillary didn’t like it…At All.

“Those are my New Year’s Eve shoes!” she shrieked, towel still wrapped around her head, another around her body, when she glimpsed my twinkle toes five minutes later.

“I know,” I said.

They were her New Year’s Eve shoes, the same shoes she’d worn every New Year’s Eve for as long as I’d known her. Shaped like a simple high-heeled pump, they were covered in glittery silver, kind of like Dorothy’s red slippers, only a different color and without the bow but with a big heel. Hillary claimed they were good luck and that wearing them on that one night, and only that one night, ensured her a great year ahead.

“You look great in those towels.” Rivera winked at her.

“Shut up,” Hillary said. “My shoes! But wait a second. Your feet are much smaller than mine.”

This was true.

Extracting one foot from one shoe—really, that expensive pedi was wasted inside a closed-toe shoe—I revealed Rivera’s handiwork: wadded tissue paper. Honestly, it was hard to feel like a glam winner when there was Kleenex cuddling my piggies before going to market.

“But it’s such a good cause, Hillary Clinton,” Rivera said sweetly, enunciating each word of my roommate’s name silkily as though she were trying to sell rich cordovan leather. “And it’s not like it’s as bad as it could be, like if her feet were bigger than yours and there was a danger she might stretch them out. And you really do look great in those towels.”

“Ohh…what…ever,” Hillary conceded with poor grace, going off to dry her hair.

“Where the hell did you get that thing?” I shouted down to Conchita from the balcony of the South Park condo.

A minute before, a white stretch limo had pulled into the parking lot and Conchita had emerged from the driver’s seat, opening one of the passenger doors from which emerged Elizabeth Hepburn. Seeing the four of us out on the balcony, Elizabeth Hepburn did a little red-carpet curtsy.

Conchita smiled up at me, shielding her eyes against the blaze of sun going down behind us. “You don’t want to know, chica.”

“Ready to roll?” Elizabeth Hepburn asked. “You know, John Wayne used to always say that to me. Count Basie, too, come to think of it.”

“But wait a second,” I said. “Don’t you all need to get dressed?”

I looked at the five of them. It wasn’t that they were shabbily dressed. Indeed, they all looked better than I looked most days, but they were still all relatively casual, in summer slacks, light blouses and sandals. Really, I was the only one who looked like she might be going out on a Saturday night to a casino that had nightclubs in it.

“Oh, no,” Elizabeth Hepburn said softly. “This is your big night.”

7

Foxwoods Casino was a fair drive from where we’d started, but when we walked into the casino en masse it felt as though no more time had passed than the length it would take for a reader to turn the page.

Maybe it was that Conchita drove like a maniac. Or maybe it was the single drink I’d allowed myself from the minibar—“Never get drunk while you’re playing—” my dad’s words rang in my brain “—only losers get drunk at the table”—the champagne going down like silk bubbles as I listened to the Brazilian music Conchita was blaring on the stereo.

“Hey.” Hillary smiled at me lazily over the top of her own flute of champagne. “You’re drinking something with alcohol in it and it’s not even Jake’s Fault.”

For a moment, I felt a frisson of anxiety. I was starting to get hungry and I wondered if they had any Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna kicking around the casino kitchen, but then I pushed the anxious feelings away. This was a special night. I would do special things.

Whatever the case, whether the ride went so quick because of the speed of the driver or because of the buzz from the champagne, I felt great as we walked through the door.

I’d never been part of a group like that before. Much in the way of people who are serially monogamous in their romantic relationships, I’d always been serially monogamous in my friendships. My mother was so sick for so many years before she died, we’d spent so much time one-on-one, it was as if I could only relate to other women one-on-one. Back at the private junior high, there’d been the best girlfriend I got drunk with during the science fair. During high school, there’d been another best girlfriend. And, ever since then, there had been Hillary. Hillary herself had other friends she sometimes did things with, and sometimes I went along, but for whatever reason, the dynamic never worked for me, unless it was something fairly innocuous like a group going to a movie. I didn’t mind her other friendships, wasn’t jealous of them in any way; the group thing just wasn’t for me. Oh, for years I wished I could be the kind of woman you see in the middle of a group of other women—laughing louder than anyone else, living large—I just didn’t know how.

It was hard to believe then that, as we strode through the casino, for the first time in my life I had a posse.

In the entryway, just outside of the casino proper, there was a woman with balloons pinned all over her clothes—she even had on a balloon hat—who was blowing brightly colored balloons into all different shapes: flowers, animals, one even looked weirdly like Bill O’Reilly. She was handing out her creations to anyone who wanted them.

“That’s kind of an odd thing to have in the entryway,” I said, “don’t you think?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hillary, “it’s probably one of those little extras, like free rolls of coins for the people who get bused in, that are devised to lull gamblers into forgetting how much money they’re pissing away at the tables.”

She must have seen my expression, because she quickly added, “Oops, sorry.”

“Plus,” said Stella, “they need to give people something to entertain them when they’re not gambling.”

“Yeah,” said Conchita, “but every time one of those things pops, I’m going to be wondering about who’s getting shot.”

“I once dated a balloonist,” said Elizabeth Hepburn.

And then, before I even knew it, my posse was splitting up.

Going up to an information desk, Stella grabbed a bunch of brochures that she distributed to the others.

“Ooh, I want to go to the Club BB King,” Hillary said. “Look—” she pointed “—Hall & Oates are playing later on tonight, with Todd Rundgren.”

“I used to hang with B.B. King,” Elizabeth Hepburn said.

“I want to go to the Hard Rock Café,” Conchita said.

“And how,” Rivera said. “They’ve got a ‘Pimp and Ho Party’ going on with The Dizzy Reed Band.”

For once, Elizabeth Hepburn looked perplexed. “I don’t think I know anyone from the Pimp and Ho band,” she said, then she brightened, “but I did used to go out with Dizzy Dean! He played ball for—”

“I’m hungry,” Stella said, flat statement.

“Oh, I’m sure there are lots of great places to eat here.” Hillary cheered her. “How about this, I’ll go with you to get a quick bite…and then we’ll both go to the Club BB King!”

“Meanwhile,” said Conchita, “we’ll go see Dizzy and then we’ll all meet up after the shows. How does that sound?”

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