Shoe Addicts Anonymous (14 page)

She turned to see a great-looking guy with a slight build, perfect wavy brown hair, chocolate brown eyes, and skin so smooth, it screamed
exfoliation!

“Sandra Vanderslice?” Her name was formed by beautiful, movie-star-quality lips.

The voice, however, was a little bit high. A little short of masculine. Not that that meant anything. He was just a high talker.

What was strange was the fact that he knew her name.

How?

“I’m sorry….” She reflexively raised a hand to her head, remembered the green, and felt a contrasting red fill her cheeks.

This had been a bad idea.

“It’s me,” the guy said, raising his eyebrows and looking at her expectantly.

No idea. She was drawing a complete blank, and she could feel it written all over her face. “I—”

He rolled his eyes. “Mike Lemmington?” Pause. “From high school?”

Her jaw dropped. Mike Lemmington! How was that possible? Mike Lemmington was the one person in high school who she could stand next to and feel, if not
slender
exactly, at least comparatively less fat.

“Mike!” Her own self-consciousness disappeared in the face of his incredible transformation. “Are you serious? Oh, my God, what—?” She shook her head. “I’ve got to ask, what did you do?”

He smiled, revealing perfectly even white teeth. “I just lost a little weight.”

“Mike.” If anyone could avoid the bullshit about weight, it should have been these two. “You lost a lot of weight.
How?
”

He shrugged. “Weight Watchers.”

“Really?” She thought of her own Weight Watchers membership and wondered if a little more attention to it could result in as amazing a change as his.

“Every Thursday afternoon.” He smiled. “But look at
you!
Look at
your hair!
”

How she’d forgotten for a few moments, she couldn’t imagine, but the embarrassment was back. “Oh, it’s—”

“It’s
green!
” He reached over and fluffed it.

“Yes, that’s because—”

“That is so bold,” he went on, looking at her with what seemed like admiration. “Honey, I thought you’d never come out of your shell.”

She frowned. Had she had a shell for that long?

Who was she kidding? She’d been born in a shell. She was practically Botticelli’s
Venus
only without the curvaceous body or angelic Renaissance face.

“Good for you for expressing yourself that way. And it makes your eyes look so blue!”

“Really?” She needed this. She really needed this.

“Totally.”

Sandra decided to go ahead and be the girl who had dyed her hair green out of confidence instead of the kind of insecurity that’s drawn to boxes of blond hair coloring on a bad day. “Thanks, Mike. So,” she continued on in the role of the kind of woman who would purposely dye her hair green to make some sort of bold and confident statement. “What are you doing in this part of town? Visiting? Or do you live here?”

“I’ve got a place right over in Dupont Circle,” he said, smiling that glorious smile again. Had he had work done on that, too, or did it change that much with the diminished body weight? “But I come over here to Stetson’s a lot. My pal tends bar there.”

“Oh. I’ve heard great things about that place.” She’d never been there. It had a reputation as a gay bar, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Either way, it was supposed to be nice.

Mike pursed his lips and looked her over. “I’m on my way there right now—why don’t you come with me?”

Her heart leapt. Was this gorgeous guy actually asking her to go out for drinks with him? Maybe this green hair was the luckiest thing to happen to her this year.

Then again, it
was
green. And it was on her head. And no matter how much she might
want
to be at ease with that, she really wasn’t. “Gosh, Mike, I don’t want to intrude on your evening.”

“Are you kidding? I’d love it. Besides, there are some interesting people there. You might meet someone. Unless—” He looked like he’d just stepped in something. “—you’re already involved with someone?…I can’t believe I didn’t already ask.”

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “And I’m not. So—sure, yeah, it looks like we’re a go.”

“Great! You are going to
love
Stetson’s. And I can’t wait for you to meet my friend Debbie. I think you guys will really hit it off.”

Friend
Debbie. Okay. If she was his girlfriend, he wouldn’t be asking Sandra out. “I can’t wait to hear everything you’ve been up to for the past—” She calculated. “—thirteen years. Jeez, has it really been that long?”

“Seems like a lifetime to me,” Mike said breezily, putting his arm around Sandra’s back. “I’ll tell you what, my mother would have loved it if we’d hooked up a long time ago. She hates my lifestyle now, of course.”

Sandra wished she were a little Twiggy-ish waif, so he could put his arm all the way around her and draw her close, the way the hero always did at the end of a romantic movie, but she wasn’t going to quibble with that kind of detail right now. “Swinging bachelor?” she asked, hoping his response would help her gauge his current romantic situation.

“Right.” He gave a laugh, then stopped and looked at Sandra again. “It is just so good to see you. I’ve thought about you so much over the years.”

“You have?” She wished she could say the same, but the truth was, she’d tried pretty hard to block high school out of her mind entirely. “That’s so nice of you to say.”

“It’s the truth.” They began walking again. “From now on, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, I just know it.”

Sandra beamed. This was, officially, a
great
night. She’d remember this the next time things seemed to be going badly. You just never knew what was right around the corner.

Come to think of it, maybe you never really knew what was in your past. She’d definitely never seen this gorgeous hunk of man in Mike Lemmington.

She hadn’t even seen the potential.

Maybe it was like that with life, too. Sometimes you just didn’t see the potential in an ugly day.

Three hours ago, she’d been despondent, sure she was such a neurotic fat mess that she’d never really be thin or happy. Hell, she’d been afraid she might never leave the apartment again, becoming instead one of those weird stories that shows up in the
Post
every now and then about someone who was found two weeks after death when the neighbors finally realized the smell
wasn’t
the awful Hunan restaurant down the street.

Now here she was, arm in arm with a man so gorgeous that heads were turning—both men’s and women’s—as they walked down the street together. She was on a date, though admittedly it was to what might well be a gay bar, with a great-looking guy. A guy who knew her from her past and accepted her anyway.

Things were definitely looking up.

“I need another panic bar,” Sandra said to Dr. Lee. “In my left ear this time.”

“Miss Vanderslice, it does not work that way. There is only one spot for that anxiety, and we are utilizing it. I assure you one is sufficient.”

“I think I
am
noticing a difference,” she agreed eagerly. “That’s why I want another one. Because I’m not quite
there
yet, you know? But maybe another one would tip me over the edge.”
Make me normal again,
she thought, but she couldn’t voice something quite so pathetic.

Dr. Lee looked her over doubtfully, and she remembered her green hair. Did she need to explain? Nah. He probably saw weirder things than that on a daily basis.

“Miss Vanderslice, we can do another acupuncture therapy, since you’re here, but your auricular therapy is perfectly set.”

She nodded. “Okay, I understand. I was just so excited about the way this was working that I wanted more.”

He nodded, and smiled kindly. “It will continue to get better.”

He proceeded to perform another acupuncture treatment on her, and she left feeling like a million bucks. She couldn’t wait to tell Dr. Ratner. It had been a long, long time since she’d had anything good to report in the way of progress.

Finally she did.

F
ortunately, when Joss found the torn top of a condom wrapper on the floor, under the lip of the kitchen cabinetry, she was alone.

Now, what
she
was doing under there made sense—Deena Oliver had, as usual, left her dishes in the sink with detailed and painstaking instructions on how to wash each piece by hand so when she’d dropped a small sterling silver mustard spoon, she
had
to retrieve it—but what any kind of contraceptive evidence was there for, it was hard to imagine.

The idea that it had anything to do with the Merry Maids who came twice a week was absurd, so Joss dismissed that thought as soon as it occurred to her. And the boys had revealed that Kurt Oliver had had a vasectomy. Which left her with only one conclusion, since she knew it wasn’t herself: Deena Oliver was having an affair.

And when she’d gotten careless and left the evidence of it under her bed—or her safari vehicle, if the thong had been indicative of a theme—her first defense had been a pretty decent offense: blame the nanny. Right to her face.

Just in case push came to shove.

Heaven knew if Kurt Oliver had found them, but if he had, the elusive yet vaguely intimidating man of the house thought Joss was screwing around with some guy when the family wasn’t home.

He might have thought they were Joss’s, too.

The potential was humiliating.

But, like so many other humiliating aspects of this job, it didn’t allow for an easy way out of her contract. Getting fired would have getting sued tagged on, Deena had made that clear, so Joss could only guess that displeasing Deena by breaking the contract in any way would end in the same result.

She was stuck.

And everything Deena Oliver did made her even more aware of that uncomfortable fact.

“I don’t want you talking to my friends. It’s a bother for them to have to take the time to be polite and chat with the help,” she’d chastised one day after one of the mothers at Colin’s overly elaborate birthday party had asked Joss where the bathroom was.

“Would you go pick up Kurt’s dry cleaning? I can’t find the ticket, but don’t worry, they always know which stuff is his.” It had turned out they
didn’t
always know which stuff was his, or even who he was, so, after six calls back to Deena, they had finally found the brown Armani suit…only it wasn’t a brown Armani suit but a gray Prada jacket.

“Merry Maids had to cancel today because of the weather or some other nonsense. When you’re finished cooking dinner, would you please go clean the bathrooms? With this flu that’s been going around, they’re a mess.”

And then there was Joss’s most reviled interruption:

“Are you almost finished in there?” Deena had asked from outside the bathroom door one day when Joss was changing a tampon. “The boys are waiting for you.”

It was a living hell.

So Joss returned, over and over, to the quest to find Something Else To Do on her time off, and of the offerings she had found for Tuesdays, Shoe Addicts Anonymous had seemed like her best bet.

Which meant she had to get out there and get her first real look at designer footwear.

Joss wandered slowly through Something Old, a used and vintage clothing shop in Georgetown. The bus ride down had taken almost an hour, so she was going to take her time. After all, she had the whole day to kill until seven thirty, when she was going to Bethesda to the Shoe Addicts Anonymous meeting. She figured as long as she made it out of there by ten, she’d be able to catch a bus back to Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase, and walk the rest of the way to the Olivers’ house.

Surely by then Deena would be asleep and unlikely to request any additional work. Unless, of course, she walked in her sleep. Which, given the volume of her requests, didn’t seem out of the question.

“Can I help you find something?”

Joss turned to see a slight girl with long straight hair and the kind of billowy, flowing shirt and skirt that Joss used to call “gypsy clothes” when she was playing dress-up or getting ready to go out on Halloween.

“Thanks,” Joss said. “I was just browsing, but I was hoping to find some shoes. Like, designer shoes? Size seven and a half?”

“Designer?” The girl looked as blank as Joss felt. “I don’t know what
kind
of shoes we have, but they’re all over here.”

Joss followed the girl, catching a faint whiff of pot trailing behind her.

She stopped in front of a wall of shelves with shoes arranged on them like books. “This is what we have.”

“Thanks,” Joss said, spotting a price tag that read seventy-five dollars on what looked like a pair of her grandmother’s old cast-offs.

“Sure,” the girl answered faintly, and drifted back where they came from.

As soon as she was gone, Joss began digging through the shoes for something cheaper—she had to find the right price first,
then
she could look at the make—but there wasn’t one pair under fifty dollars. She recognized the names on some of them from her Internet research: Chanel, Gucci, Lindor. Finally she settled on a pair of slightly scuffed Salvatore Ferragamos—a name that had come up repeatedly in her research—and handed over the fifty dollars plus tax.

It was an expensive initiation into this club, but she didn’t have time to look around more. She’d figured it would be easy to find cheap designer shoes. Her mistake had been in going to a vintage shop in the most expensive part of D.C. Next time she’d go farther out, maybe to West Virginia, and find a true thrift store.

She was getting on the bus when her cell phone rang.

“Where the hell are you?” Deena snapped at her, so loudly the woman next to Joss turned and looked at her.

“I’m on a bus in Georgetown,” Joss said quietly, trying to counterbalance Deena’s volume.

It didn’t work.
“What?”

“I’m in Georgetown,” Joss said, a little louder.

“
Georgetown!
What about your
job
?”

The people around Joss weren’t looking at her, but she felt like they could all hear Deena, which was embarrassing in the extreme. “The boys are in school,” she said.

“Does that mean you get the day off?”

Joss was confused. What did Deena want her to do? Sit in on their classrooms? And, if so, both? At the same time? “No, I’m going to get Bart in an hour and a half, then—”

“Get back here
immediately!
”

Joss’s face burned hot. The bus pulled to a stop outside one of the fussy little shops on Wisconsin Avenue, and Joss made her way off, too humiliated to continue this conversation in front of everyone. “I don’t understand,” Joss said, wincing inwardly because she knew she’d get a lashing for it. “The boys aren’t there, so—”

“So their laundry is! It’s piled halfway to the ceiling in Colin’s room.”

A lie. Joss had done the boys’ laundry yesterday and, as of last night, each of them had had only one day’s outfit in the hamper in the bathroom. “He must have taken clothes out of his drawers and put it on the floor instead of putting it away.” And he’d probably done it on purpose.

There was a seering silence; then Deena said, “You’re skating on thin ice, you know that?”

Why?
Joss wanted to scream, but she knew there was no point. Logic didn’t work with Deena Oliver. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Oliver. I’ll be right there.”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

That wasn’t possible, even given the cab Joss was already hailing. But she said, “I’ll be there.”

The driver pulled over to the curb, and Joss was opening the door when her phone rang again. She was tempted not to answer it, but it could have been anyone.

It could have been an emergency.

But it wasn’t. “Stop at the Safeway,” Deena barked before Joss even said a word. “Pick up milk and those Lean Cuisine dinners I like. That way your little excursion won’t be too big a waste of time.”

As she settled into the torn cloth seat in the back of the cab and looked at the meter, it occurred to Joss that this hour she’d spent out of the Oliver house would, when all was said, done, and paid for, have cost her about seventy-five bucks.

It was a pretty big investment in a group she wasn’t actually interested in. She could only hope it would be worth it.

Shoeho927
.

It had a certain ring to it. Lorna entered a brand-new password into ebay to go with her new user name, waited for a confirmation e-mail, clicked the hyperlink and got the message,
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND?

Could it be this easy?

She typed in the words
Marc Jacobs
.

Bingo, 450 hits in women’s shoes! She scanned the page for size 7.5 and immediately saw
Bone Leather Boots NYC Marc Jacobs
. She clicked the link and read the description:

Oh, my.

The starting bid had been $8.99, and for a moment Lorna felt like she couldn’t breathe—$8.99 for
genuine
Marc Jacobs boots? They had to be fakes, or—Oh, there it was. Bidding had escalated the price considerably. It was now at $99.35. But that was still a savings of, what, five hundred bucks or so.

Worth it. So worth it. Good lord, if she needed to, she could sell them back, maybe even at a profit. She could certainly sell something else she had, if she absolutely needed to.

This was bargain shopping. The shoe-shopper’s equivalent of Sav-A-Lot Foods. She eagerly typed in $101.99 as her top bid and beamed as the screen changed and said,
YOU ARE NOW THE HIGH BIDDER
.

If things didn’t change, in one day, two hours, and forty-six minutes, the boots would be hers. At an
amazing
price. It was practically stealing, but it was legal.

Phil Carson would be proud of her.

Well, okay, Phil Carson wouldn’t exactly be
proud
of her. He’d probably think this was another extravagance, but he just didn’t understand. It was cheaper than therapy.

She’d maintain that to her dying day.

EBay was awesome. If she’d discovered it years ago, she probably wouldn’t have gotten into that financial mess at all.

For the rest of the afternoon, Lorna kept finding herself drawn back to the computer, clicking the
REFRESH
button over and over to see if she was still the high bidder. Every time she did, there she was:
High bidder, Shoeho927 (0)
. And the time clock kept ticking down.

She couldn’t wait to tell the other shoe addicts tonight.

But just after five o’clock—with twenty-three hours and eighteen minutes left in the auction—the message on her refreshed page switched to,
YOU HAVE BEEN OUTBID
.

For one ugly moment, Lorna sat there, feeling like Snow White’s stepmother being told, “You’re okay, Your Highness, but frankly someone better has come along.”

Who had outbid her?

Lorna scanned the page—she was quickly becoming an eBay expert—and saw that the new high bidder was
Shoegarpie (0).
The zero in parentheses, Lorna had learned, was for new users who didn’t yet have feedback from other users.

So she’d been outbid by a newbie! Never mind that she was a newbie herself, the sight of
Shoegarpie (0)
really ticked her off. Especially since the bid that trumped her was $104.49.

A piddly two dollars and fifty cents higher than her own bid.

Without thinking too much about it, she raised her bid. $104.56. A nice, weird number. If her anonymous opponent had bid $104.50—as most people would—she’d beat her by six cents. Ha! Take that
Shoegarpie!
And take your
(0),
too!

But instead of the blue
YOU ARE NOW THE HIGH BIDDER
message she’d been hoping for, Lorna got a dirt brown
YOU HAVE BEEN OUTBID
.

Shoegarpie!

A competitiveness she didn’t know she possessed took over Lorna, and she put in her maximum bid at $153.37, still feeling like odd numbers would work for her.

And they did. She immediately got the
YOU ARE THE HIGH BIDDER
message and, with a satisfied nod, left the computer—on—to get ready for her guests.

As before, Helene was the first to arrive, dressed impeccably in an olive green linen suit that made her look positively vibrant. Her shoes were leather strappy sandals, in a green so deep, it was almost black.

“Prada,” Helene said, in answer to Lorna’s unasked question.

“Amazing.”

“New.” Helene smiled. “You may see them on the table in a few weeks.”

Lorna laughed. “I certainly hope so.”

Carrying on the green theme, Sandra arrived next, with startling green hair. Not that it was neon or anything—it was enough that it was green. And absolutely fried.

“I know,” she said, before Helene or Lorna could comment. Not that they would. “I had a little mishap with some home hair coloring.”

“My girl Denise could fix that right up,” Helene volunteered immediately. “She’s at Bogies, right on the northern end of Georgetown. I can give you her number….”

“Thanks,” Sandra said. “But this,” she gestured at her head, “is apparently how I have to look for a month if I don’t want to be bald. And, believe me, I’ve weighed the options. Green for a month versus growing out for two years…unless you can point out something I’m not seeing, I’m going with green.”

“I guess there is a danger of your hair breaking if you process it too much,” Helene said, nodding. “But when you’re ready, make sure you give Denise a buzz. She works miracles.”