Shoe Addicts Anonymous (10 page)

“Great.” Lorna was thrilled. Always one to be afraid no one would come to her parties, setting this group up had been a leap of faith that appeared to be working out. She turned to Sandra. “How about you?”

Sandra’s cheeks flushed slightly. “I don’t get out much,” she said, then shrugged. “But I
do
have a lot of shoes.” She took a quick breath in and nodded. “So…sure. I’m in.”

“Fantastic. I still have the ad on Gregslist, so I guess I’ll just let it run a little longer, in case there are more of us out there.”

Helene smiled. “Oh, there are plenty. The question is, how many are willing to come out of their overstuffed closets and be counted.”

From there, the conversation grew easier, and at the end of the evening, the women had agreed to meet the next week, and to bring more shoes than they had this time.

When Sandra and Helene eventually left, Lorna was feeling optimistic about Shoe Addicts Anonymous. Things had gone so well. She carried the wineglasses into the kitchen with a new bounce in her step—probably thanks to her new brocade Puccis—and stopped to look out the window as Sandra and Helene parted ways under the lamp in the parking lot.

Lorna was about to turn away when she noticed the taillights on the car the man had been leaning against earlier flare to life.

Interesting coincidence.

A black BMW drew smoothly out of its parking space. Helene’s, Lorna assumed. But after a moment, the car she’d been watching backed up and left the parking lot.

Lorna watched for a moment, expecting to see Sandra’s car pass, but it didn’t. She was just beginning to wonder if the man had driven Sandra over and waited in the car the entire time when there was a knock at the door.

Lorna hurried toward it, secured the chain, then opened it just enough to see that it was Sandra.

“I left my purse,” she said.

“Oh! Wait.” Lorna shut the door, undid the latch, then opened it again. “I didn’t even notice. Come on in.”

Sandra did so. “I’m really sorry to come back to the door so late.”

“Don’t worry about it. Actually, I have a question. Did you notice a guy in a little blue compact car when you were in the parking lot?”

Sandra considered. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“Well, it’s nothing, really.” Lorna hesitated. Anything she said would sound paranoid at best, and would make Sandra nervous at worst, and to what end? The guy was gone. She’d watched him drive away. “I thought I saw an old boyfriend of mine out there, but it must have just been my imagination.” She gave a laugh. “He wasn’t really the stalking type.”

Sandra eyed her shrewdly. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yeah. It was nothing.”

“Stalking is nothing to take chances with,” Sandra went on very seriously. “If you think there’s any chance this guy is dangerous, I think we should call the police.”

Lorna was touched. She hadn’t really had any close girlfriends since high school, and while this didn’t exactly qualify as “close” or maybe even real “friendship” yet, she liked Sandra and Helene, and she was glad they were coming back next week.

“Honestly, it’s nothing,” Lorna assured her. Then, to make things seem even more benign, she added, “Just wishful thinking, I guess.”

“Oh.” Sandra nodded, her eyes understanding. “Well…sorry. But if you broke up, maybe it’s best if it wasn’t him.”

“Probably so.” Lorna gave a rueful smile.

Sandra retrieved her purse and said, “So I guess I’ll see you next week.”

“Can’t wait.”

Sandra hesitated by the door, then turned back. “I want to thank you for doing this.” She gave a small smile. “I wasn’t really sure I was going to come out here more than once. Like I said, I don’t get out much. This…well, it was really nice.”

Lorna felt warm. “I’m really glad.”

Sandra left and Lorna went back to the sofa, thinking about what Sandra had said. More than that, she thought about how Sandra had looked. Like she really meant what she said.

Lorna had gone into this as a way to solve her own problems, to make herself feel better. She’d never anticipated her silly little shoe swap might mean much to someone else.

B
art—
Bart!
Don’t lick that!” Jocelyn Bowen held one of her charges—twelve-year-old Colin Oliver—with one hand and reached for ten-year-old Bart Oliver with the other. His mother was having a cocktail party, so naturally Colin and Bart had decided to sneak out of bed to come down and make their presence known.

Colin did it by blowing spitballs at guests through a long narrow sterling silver straw.

Bart did it by licking the cheese puffs one by one and putting them back on the tray.

“Excuse me for just a moment,” their mother, Deena Oliver, doyenne of the Chevy Chase nouveau riche neotraditional housewives, came rushing over to her children and Joss with a pained expression trying to poke through her Botoxed face. “What are they doing down here?” she asked Joss through gritted teeth.

“I put them to bed, but they were determined to come down and see who was here.”

“So you
let
them?”

Joss wanted to point out that she was just their nanny and that, technically, since it was eight thirty at night, she was off-duty, but she wasn’t a person who enjoyed confrontation. “I tried to stop them, but the minute I went to my room they shot out of theirs like bullets.” She loosened her grip on Colin, whose wriggling was getting more intense. “Why don’t you tell your mom why you wanted to come down?”

“I wanted to say good night.”

“We already said good night, Colin,” Deena said, her expression frozen but her irritation clear in her eyes. “After dinner. I told you I was having company and I had a lot of work to do.”

One of the caterers walked by at that moment, stopping to offer Deena a glass of wine from a tray. She took one, and the waitress turned her gaze to Joss.

Before Joss could decline, Deena snapped, “She’s
working,
she’s not a
guest.
”

The red-faced worker moved on quickly.

“
Please
get these kids
out of here,
” Deena hissed at Joss. “Then come back down. I need you to run over to Talbots and get more wine. We’re running low.”

“We want to say
good night,
” Bart whined.

Deena stopped just short of rolling her eyes and patted Colin, then Bart, gingerly on the head, saying, “Good night, boys. Don’t forget you and Jocelyn are going to the library tomorrow.”

It was news to Joss, just like the wine run. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Oliver, but tomorrow is my day off.”

“Oh, is it?” Deena looked surprised, as if she hadn’t even realized Joss was supposed to have any days off. And, actually, given the way she treated her, it seemed she
wasn’t
aware of it, since she was constantly asking Joss to go above and beyond the call of her contractual duty without regard to time or day.

“Yes, it is,” Joss said, biting her tongue to keep from following up with some overstated apology.

Deena eyed her skeptically. “Do you have plans?”

Ah. Joss had gotten caught in this trap before. Staying in her room on a day off, or otherwise revealing she didn’t have solid plans for the day, had gotten her roped into extra hours (with no extra pay) on more than one occasion. It was hard, but she was trying not to fall into that trap, even though it meant she sometimes had to just go sit and read at the library or wander around the mall aimlessly.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like taking care of the children. They weren’t exactly angels, God knew, but caring for them was still easier than killing eight hours in a mall.

Just recently she’d begun looking into groups that met on her time off. The little southern Virginia town of Felling, where she came from, had a Kiwanis club, but that was it. Here in D.C. there were groups for everything—volleyball, softball, bikers, writers, puppeteers, you name it. Unfortunately, Joss wasn’t super athletic, and the grief groups were just too depressing. Still, she had to find
some
way to get out of the house when she had the chance or else she’d spend the rest of her life catering to Deena Oliver’s whims.

It was the principle of the thing. Joss wasn’t being paid for overtime and being a general cook and bottle washer, so she shouldn’t be doing it.

She also shouldn’t be doing laundry, scrubbing floors, picking up dry cleaning, grocery shopping, painting kitchens, or weeding the garden, but somehow, despite her resolutions to say no, she always ended up wimping out and saying okay.

“I do have plans,” Joss forced herself to say. And she was going to get plans for all these days, somehow, so she’d have a place to go. Maybe the karaoke club, though the one time she’d gone, there had been a really creepy guy who spent the whole night singing songs to her by some old group called Air Supply. “I’ve got this…meeting. Sorry.”

Before Deena could object or, worse, ask for details, Joss began herding the children off. “Let’s go upstairs, boys. Time for bed!” She knew those words were music to Deena’s ears, and, sure enough, Deena turned and went back to her party.

As soon as she and the kids were out of sight, Joss relaxed a little. “You shouldn’t have gone down there,” she said to the two red-haired, pajama-clad boys who slumped up the steps in front of her. “She told you she was having a party and didn’t want to be interrupted.”

“So what? She’s always doing something.” That was Colin, the older of the two, who was beginning to get his mother’s number already.

“Someone in the kitchen was smoking pot,” Bart said, folding his arms in front of him.

Joss stopped, midstep.
“What?”

Bart nodded, his expression faux-grim. “Mrs. Pryor was smoking pot. She always smokes pot. She is so dumb.”

Joss thought a moment, then remembered who Mrs. Pryor was. One of the older, richer neighbors. A woman with blue hair and facial skin so tight, you could bounce a quarter off it. “No, no, Bart, honey, she was smoking a cigarette.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s…” How the heck did he know about smoking pot but not about smoking cigarettes? Clearly the kid had his facts mixed up. Joss needed to give him just enough information to be correct, without overeducating him. “It’s tobacco. People smoke it, but it’s not illegal like pot is.”

“What’s
illegal
mean?”

“It’s—,” Joss began.

“It means the police will put you in jail, idiot,” Colin said, perfectly mimicking the spirit, if not the wording, of his mother’s impatience.

“If something is illegal,” she said, shooting Colin a silencing look before turning her gaze back to Bart, “that means it’s against the law. And yes, when people do things that are against the law, the police can arrest them and put them in jail.”

“Is killing someone illegal?”

“Yes. Big-time.”

“What about stealing?”

“Yes, stealing is illegal, too.”

“Then that’s why my Uncle Billy is in jail.”

“Shut up, stupid,” Colin interjected. “It is not.”

“Uh-huh. I heard Mom telling Dad he was stealing Coke.” Bart screwed up his face. “Why would anyone steal a Coke?”

Ooh,
that
was a little fact the Olivers probably didn’t want bantered around. “Let’s go up to bed, guys,” Joss said before they could repeat any of this loud enough to embarrass Deena and Kurt. Both of them prided themselves on their stations in D.C. society—stations secured and assured by Kurt’s booming German import car dealerships, Oliver’s Motorcars—and Joss shuddered to think what they might do to shut their children up if they heard them talking about Uncle Billy’s jail stint.

Joss took the boys up and told them they couldn’t play computer games anymore, then supervised tooth-brushing and face-washing, told them again that they couldn’t play computer games, put them into their beds, tucked them in, then stood outside their door and said a prayer that they would stay in bed so she could have a little break for the night.

She knew she should be firm with Deena about her work schedule. It didn’t matter, or at least it shouldn’t have, that she was at the house anyway; she was supposed to have her evenings off after 8
P.M.
and all day and night off on Tuesdays and Sundays, but if she was in the house, she was inevitably at Deena’s service.

Joss sat outside the boys’ room for ten minutes, watching the hall clock tick away into her supposed free time. When she was finally convinced that the boys were going to stay put, she went to her small room and took out the
City Paper
to read up on what other twenty-somethings were doing with their lives.

It was a pretty sure bet that most of them weren’t being held prisoner in Chevy Chase homes.

Around ten thirty, Joss’s stomach began to rumble, and she realized she hadn’t had anything to eat since the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’d had with the boys at lunchtime. The party was still going strong downstairs, so she figured she could slip into the kitchen the back way and grab a few of the hot appetizers without Deena spotting her and asking her to—who knows—mow the lawn or something.

“What a
bitch,
” one of the caterers, a middle-aged brunette woman who looked like she’d seen it all, was saying to another when Joss entered. “She’s one of those freaks that likes to yell at
the help
in front of her guests so she looks cool.”

“We should have made the spinach feta puffs so she’d have spinach stuck in her teeth,” the other woman, younger and blonder but with the same basic look, agreed. “And what about that forehead? Did you notice? She’s had so much collagen pumped in, it’s sticking out like she’s Cro-Magnon!”

The other laughed. “So instead of looking ten years younger, she looks two million years younger!”

They laughed.

“Thing is,” the younger of the two said. “She seemed so nice over the phone when she hired us.”

“Don’t they all?”

“Yeah, I guess. We’ve got to build a reputation somehow. Even if it means putting up with this shit sometimes.”

The brunette nudged the blonde and shushed her when she saw Joss coming in.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Joss said. “I was just hoping to grab a bite to eat.”

“Oh, sure, honey.” The brunette went to the oven and began putting an assortment of beautiful little puffs and dips on a plate. “I noticed you weren’t eating earlier when you were down with the kids.”

Joss smiled. “Unless it’s peanut butter, pizza, or spaghetti, I don’t really get the chance to eat it.”

“Lady of the house keeps you under wraps, huh?” the blonde asked.

“Carrie!” It was the brunette, looking alarmed at her coworker’s indiscretion. “Sorry about that—Carrie sometimes speaks”—she shot Carrie another warning look—“without thinking. I’m Stella, by the way.”

“Oh, so you own the company,” Joss said, thinking of the Occasionally Yours minivan out front that had the words
STELLA ENGLISH
and a phone number underneath it.

“We both do,” Carrie said, shooting Stella an affectionate look. “It’s sort of a family business.”

They didn’t
look
like family, but Joss didn’t ask questions. The food was delicious, and that was all she cared about right now. She chowed down on cheeses she’d never seen before, thinly sliced meats that tasted like bacon, puffed pastry things that looked sweet but tasted savory. Back in Felling, they didn’t ever serve this kind of food. If a clip-art picture of it wasn’t available for purchase to put on a restaurant wall, Joss had never eaten it.

The door from what Deena called the great room swung open, and one of her guests edged in, a diminutive woman with glossy dark hair and a tight green dress painted over her trim figure.

“Hello, ladies,” she drawled in a sharp Southern accent, her gaze lingering for just a moment longer on Joss than on the other two. “You did a marvelous job, just marvelous, on the food. Fan
tab
ulous. I just love those little cheese pies, what do you call them?”

“Quiche Lorraine?” Stella suggested.

“Is
that
what they were? I’ve only had that in big slices. Well, they were fantabulous, let me tell you.” She looked at Joss again, holding her gaze. “And you were really something, too.”

Joss felt uncomfortable.

“I mean with the boys,” the woman went on. “That Bart can
really
be a handful, and I know it. He’s in my Katie’s class, and my goodness, Ms. Hudson sometimes has to put him in time-out for the entire morning.”

Joss didn’t doubt it. Bart was on his way to being a real hellion. Joss was able to get him under control sometimes, but Deena invariably undid all her work by ignoring everything he did wrong when she was around. If Joss tried to discipline him at a time like that, Deena would object, favoring quiet over tantrums at all costs.

“Where are my manners?” the woman went on. “I’m Lois Bradley.”

Joss had heard Kurt Oliver talking about Porter Bradley’s pool and patio business several times, so Joss figured Lois must be his wife. “Joss Bowen,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Lois put a hand on the small of Joss’s back and guided her farther away from Carrie and Stella, to a darker corner of the kitchen.

“Is there something I can do for you?” Joss asked uncomfortably. She didn’t know what Lois Bradley was up to, but in Felling people didn’t touch people they didn’t know.

Everything was different up north.

“As a matter of fact, there is,” Lois said in a hushed voice. “And I think there’s something
I
can do for
you.
”

Instinctively, Joss glanced around, looking for an exit, or maybe emergency intervention from Carrie and Stella. But Carrie and Stella were banging around with dishes, not paying attention to Joss and Lois.

“I don’t understand,” Joss said, looking down at Lois, who had gotten disturbingly close.

“If you come work for me, I will give you a twenty percent raise,” Lois whispered, glancing around herself, just as Joss had a moment before. “And I can
guarantee
you that my Katie is a whole lot easier than Bart and Colin Oliver.” She practically spat the boys’ names out.