Shoe Addicts Anonymous (6 page)

She clicked through to her most recent order—not an easy task, considering there were about twenty-five orders listed—and looked for the
CANCEL ORDER
button.

It was there. It was small, too. Like they knew their customers well enough to know they’d be reluctant to hit that button.

Lorna hit the hyperlink that opened her order. Pink Ferragamo slingbacks with a bow. She could already picture herself wearing them to some wonderful outdoor summer party, where the men cooked at the grill wearing
KISS THE COOK
aprons, and the women sipped wine spritzers and laughed at their macho counterparts while children raced around the perimeters of the party, shrieking with laughter as they ran through the sprinkler or wiped out on the Slip ’N Slide.

It wasn’t glamorous; it was real life. Real good life.

Somewhere in her past Lorna must have been one of those happy kids, because the idea that this was what being a grown-up meant was so deeply ingrained that she couldn’t shake it.

The shoes—suddenly more important than ever—were originally $380, but now they were just $75. For these timeless beautifully made works of wearable art! They defined a time, a place, in history. Without them, she felt the irrational certainty that she would actually
lose
something. Canceling the order was like giving up a great investment. Like telling a 1970s Bill Gates his ideas seemed too risky.

Maybe she needed to rethink this. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to actually
cancel
these orders, considering what a great deal they were. Instead, maybe she should just vow to not keep looking.

Leaving the cursor flickering on her screen, she got up and paced the floor for a moment, considering the possibilities. There was no doubt about it: that seventy-five dollars would be money well spent. In fact, she could, theoretically, just keep the shoes in their box and sell them as vintage in mint condition someday. That could actually make a lot of sense.

She decided what she’d do was check her mail and see if there was anything pressing that would prevent her from this one tiny indulgence. The electric bill was paid. She was pretty sure the gas bill was, too. And, given the fact that West Bethesda Credit Union had let her charge go through with the power company earlier, presumably her credit cards—or at least that one—were current.

She went to the small pile of mail and started sifting through it.

One return address caught her eye:
CAPITAL AUTO LOANS.

Her stomach dropped.

It
had
been a month or two since she’d made her car payment. Capital Auto was always so lax about it that it was one of the payments she’d let slide. At an interest rate of just under 6 percent, it didn’t quite make sense to pay it off.

She tore the envelope open, bracing herself for two months’ worth of payments at the worst. Two hundred and seventy-eight times two. Five hundred and fifty-six bucks. She’d have that…soon.

But when she took the letter out, words in bold font leapt out at her like something in a movie.
SERIOUSLY DELINQUENT. THIRD NOTICE.

REPOSSESS.

JULY 22.

Today was July 22.

They were going to repossess her car.

Lorna crumpled the paper and hurled it at the wall, shouting words that would have gotten her detention for a month in Catholic school.

How the hell had this happened? Heart pounding, she paced more rapidly now, trying to figure out where to put herself. Finally, she flopped down on the couch—the very one that would probably be repossessed next month, if this month was any indication—and put her head in her hands.

What was she going to
do
?

There was no way she could go to her stepmother again. Lucille had made it absolutely clear that the ten-thousand-dollar loan she’d given Lorna after her father’s death was
it
. It was all Lorna would ever get in the way of an inheritance. And it was probably fair, given that at least some of the life insurance money had gone to pay off the mortgage on her father’s house.

That ten thousand dollars had felt like a lifesaver seven years ago, and, though Lorna hated to use it on her own frivolous debt, she’d vowed then never to make another credit card purchase in her life.

How she’d managed to do it again, and again, and again, she couldn’t say for sure. But there were some valid reasons interspersed in there—a medical bill here, food there—just enough to get her hooked again. Just enough to get her stuck in the “another few bucks won’t make a difference” mentality.

It was financial death by dollars.

Lorna tapped her fingertips together, thinking. Thinking. She had to come up with something. Anything. Jewelry she could sell, extra jobs she could take on, convenience stores she could rob….

She was going to
lose
her
car
!

How the hell was she going to get around?

The answer came to her so swiftly and clearly, it was frightening: she was going to need a damn good pair of walking shoes.

Silence followed that thought for a moment; then horrible self-realization fell over her.

This was fucked-up.

She had a problem.

Without giving herself the luxury of reconsidering, she signed on to one site after another, canceling orders and crying like a child who was watching her Christmas gifts being taken away.

She finished with the shoe sites and took out the card Boomer had given her earlier. The one she thought she’d never actually use.

Phil Carson, credit counselor.

Using the sensible caution she employed everywhere in her life but in shoe shopping, she looked his name up on the Internet, checking for signs of credibility as well as signs of fraud.

His company was listed as a member of the Better Business Bureau. That was good. Better still, his name didn’t show up on any of the complaint sites, like epinions.com, scam.com, badbusiness.com, and so on. He was on the up and up, it appeared, and she was going to call him first thing in the morning.

Well, right after she called Capital Auto about her car loan. She paid with her credit card over the phone.

Then, in the dark of night, feeling as miserable as she’d ever felt without someone actually dying, Lorna got an idea.

She signed on to the local Gregslist.biz, the community bulletin board for everything from personals to babysitting and maid services to used mattress sales. It ran the gamut from sales of bizarre artifacts like shrunken heads to support groups for people with an addiction to Twinkies. Not Ho Hos. Not Ding Dongs. Forget Little Debbies. And mallow bar addicts were shit out of luck as well. Just Twinkies.

Lorna had no doubt that, somewhere on Gregslist, there was probably a special support group for people who ate only the orange part of candy corn.

Which made Gregslist the perfect place for Lorna to place the ad that would, if she was lucky, set at least one small part of her life on the right track again.

H
elene showered for almost an hour that evening when she got home, trying to wash away the memory—and the smell—of her afternoon in a security office in the back of Ormond’s. It had reeked of cheap coffee, hot Styrofoam, drywall paste, and something vaguely like urine.

She had sat, stock-still, as the pimpled and greasy young security guard had typed up a report, the words
shoplifting
and
arrest
leaping at her from his computer screen.

There were a lot of things she could have said. That she was flustered from the credit card debacle and had replaced the wrong shoes, that she was going to her car to get another card and hadn’t thought to take off the shoes first; she could even have said that she was feeling flushed and needed a bit of fresh air, and that she’d purposely left her other pair of shoes there to indicate she’d be right back.

But Helene didn’t want to give herself those excuses. Maybe later she would, but at that moment she simply sat still, neither accepting nor denying the charges. Later, she’d wonder why, but at the time she’d felt so beaten down that she hadn’t been able to do anything more than wait.

It wasn’t until the store manager came in and recognized her that she was able to move. Knowing who her husband was, and that this could be a public embarrassment to him and possibly to the store, the manager had let her go, muttering that he was sure this was just a misunderstanding of some sort.

They both knew—along with the security guard, the creepy salesman, a handful of other shoppers, and whoever was going to hear the story second- and thirdhand—that it wasn’t really a misunderstanding at all.

Home was hardly a safe refuge. Jim wasn’t there, and Teresa, the maid, was coolly courteous, as usual, when Helene came through the front door.

She’d gone upstairs to her bedroom. Jim called it her
boudoir,
but they both knew it was her space and he had his.

She’d taken off her clothes, put them away, gotten into a hot shower, shampooed, conditioned, shaved her legs and armpits, and rinsed thoroughly, allowing herself the brief luxury of hot water pounding down her back.

Afterwards, she put on her robe, combed and dried her hair, changed into a nightgown, brushed and flossed her teeth, put La Mer moisturizer on her face, and put everything away before finally allowing herself to sit on the edge of her bed.

And cry.

She allowed herself a good ten minutes to let it all out, to feel everything as deeply as she needed to before pulling the reins in on herself. When ten minutes passed, she straightened herself up, splashed her face with cold water, reapplied her moisturizer, and went back to her business as if nothing had ever happened.

Hopefully, the news wouldn’t have gotten out. She brought her laptop computer to the bed, booted it up, and sat down in front of it. She typed in all the local news sites, Washingtonpost.com, Gazette.net, UptownCityPaper.net, and so on, entering her name in each search bar and waiting to see if there were any recent stories.

Fortunately, there were not. Not in any of the venues she could think of, even the obscure ones.

With considerable relief, she signed on to Gregslist.biz and pursued one of her other favorite online pastimes: looking up apartments in her favorite areas. She often fantasized about getting a little place all her own, where she could escape from Jim and her duties as “wife of.” And maybe, somehow, someday it would happen.

Perhaps if she could do something innovative by herself, something that could gain her money without compromising Jim’s station in society.

She typed in “Adams Morgan,” one of her favorite D.C. neighborhoods; then “Tenleytown”; “Woodley Park”; and finally “Bethesda.”

The usual apartment and town house offerings showed up in all the areas, and she’d seen a good percentage of them before, but this time when she typed in “Bethesda,” something came up that she’d never seen before.

Shoe Addicts Anonymous
.

The irony of it struck her immediately, and her first impulse was to go back and recheck the news sources to make sure they hadn’t picked up the story of her shoplifting. But that was silly. This had nothing to do with that. It was just a coincidence.

Helene was a skeptic when it came to voodoo and fortune-telling and omens, but this time it was hard to deny: this had to be a sign.

And the fact that the ad had given her her first honest laugh in about as long as she could remember made her think she should at least write the information down before it disappeared forever into the dark recesses of Gregslist’s archives.

It wasn’t that she was going to join. Helene had always been a loner. But she
would
keep the information handy.

Just in case.

Maybe Helene was jaded, but she felt White House functions were always a bore. But they were nothing compared with the tedium of the post–White House Function parties she and Jim always had to make the rounds of.

They were on their way to Mimi Lindhofer’s soirée in the heart of Georgetown when Helene’s glass slipper flew off and left her flat on her ass on her karmic sidewalk.

“Got an interesting call today,” Jim said, as if he were going to tell her his broker thought he should invest in pork bellies.

“Oh?” she asked absently, watching the quaint landscape of Georgetown pass by outside the window. She often wondered what it would be like to live in one of those cozy gingerbread town houses.

Then again, one couldn’t live in one of those houses without a lot of money, and if there was one thing Helene had learned over the past decade, it was that people with money weren’t always that great to live with.

“Were you going to tell me about your incident at the store?” Jim asked, still so casual, she had to wonder what he really knew.

Helene’s heart pounded its panic in rapid Morse code. “Oh, good God, I’d forgotten about that,” she lied. “Would you believe those people actually thought I was trying to
steal
a pair of shoes?”

He gave her a sidelong glance that made her blood run cold. “Was this before or after we spoke about your credit cards?”

“Oh, it was after,” she said, matching his cold look with a frigid tone. “That’s why I was going to the car to get some cash. I guess I was just so distracted by my husband’s power play with me that I left the shoes on.” Her face burned as hot as it had when that alarm had first gone off. She was grateful that it was dark in the car. “The stupid thing is that I left a
more expensive
pair of shoes behind, so
obviously
I was coming right back.” She hated to call the store personnel stupid for catching her, but in this life, it was kill or be killed. “Moron,” she muttered contemptuously.

“I thought there had to be a logical explanation,” Jim said, sounding relieved. “I’ll be sure my press secretary has the facts, just in case.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “But I have to say, when I first heard about it, I was afraid your past…Well, you know…”

Son of a bitch. Yeah, she knew.

He was afraid everyone else would figure out what he already knew: that she wasn’t good enough for him.

Helene noticed that a photographer—there were always at least a few around these events—who had been outside the Rossi party also showed up at the Lindhofers’. Which was odd, because these parties made news only if there was no other big news to be made. Usually one or two photos were stuffed into the “Style Watch” section of
The Washington Post,
and occasionally, if a party was good enough or if a movie star showed up to promote some cause or other, the photos would appear in
Vanity Fair
.

Likewise, if an intern turned up dead in the C&O canal or ended up with a politician’s DNA on her dress, the archives of these party shots were sometimes used, but generally they went the route of all E-level celebrity photos and ended up in the trash.

So to see the same photographer at two events on the same night was odd. Stranger still was the fact that he was fairly good-looking in a bland, blond sort of way, something that couldn’t be said with a straight face about most of them.

Therefore when he approached Helene after a couple of hours of boredom and a couple more glasses of chardonnay, she felt momentarily flattered.

“Mrs. Zaharis,” he said, nodding.

She raised an eyebrow. “You are—?”

“Gerald Parks.”

“Mr. Parks.” She extended her hand, knowing she was approaching drunk but allowing herself to enjoy just a moment of light flirtation. “You’re a photographer.”

“Yes, I am.” He held up his camera and pushed the button, sending a quick flash her way.

She blinked, and his silhouette floated eerily in front of her for a moment. Had he meant that to be obnoxious or flattering? Given the miserable week she’d had, she opted to believe it was the latter. “Can’t you find something more interesting to photograph than me?”

“Actually, Mrs. Zaharis, I find you
very
interesting.”

She plucked a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waitress. “Then perhaps you don’t get out enough.”

Whatever Gerald Parks was going to say in response to that was interrupted by the appearance of Jim.

He hooked his arm around Helene, bringing to mind a vise. “Sweetheart.” He kissed her cheek, scratching her with the beginnings of a beard. In public now, they were the picture of marital bliss. “Who’s your friend?”

She wanted to ask him if he was drawn over by the fact that she was talking to another man or the fact that the other man had a camera with which he could, potentially, record Jim’s ascension to higher office, but instead she just gave what she thought of as her Political Wife Smile and said, “This is Gerald Parks. He’s a photographer.”

“So I gathered.” Jim nodded at the camera and tightened his grip on Helene’s waist. “Covering the power brokers or the wives?”

“Some of the power brokers
are
wives,” Helene pointed out, wishing she had another glass of champagne since somehow the one she’d just taken was empty.

Jim chuckled. “You’re right, you got me.” He gave Gerald Parks an old boy nod of the head and added, “And nurses and stewardesses can be men.”

“Stewards.”

Jim’s smile froze. “What?”

“If men are stewardesses,” Helene said, “they’re stewards.” She heard the awkward sentence structure, but once it was out, she wasn’t sure how to correct it.

It was time to go home and go to bed.

Jim gave a big laugh. “Touché, hon. You’re hot tonight. Do me a favor, would you? Could you get me a Scotch?”

She was being dismissed. She’d gone one or two glasses of wine over the embarrassment line, and Jim wanted to get her away from anyone who could identify her with anything that wasn’t perfectly middle-of-the-road acceptable.

Unfortunately, she knew he was right. She was two glasses past politely ignoring farts and about one away from karaoke singing. Since there was no way for her to sober up instantly, she agreed that she should remove herself from the situation.

“Of course,” she said, removing his arm from her waist with a fraction more force than she needed to. She turned her smile to Gerald and met his eyes, feeling almost as if they’d just shared a tryst she didn’t want her husband to know about. “Excuse me, Mr. Parks.”

He nodded, and Helene noticed his finger twitched on the shutter of his camera, but he didn’t take a picture.

She took that as a secret gesture between the two of them.

God, she was drunk.

She made her way to the bar and asked for a glass of wine, a chaser to the champagne she’d just downed. Jim didn’t want a Scotch. Hell, he didn’t even drink when he was at these functions. He just liked to
look
like he had a drink, so no one could accuse him of being a recovering alcoholic or, worse, not masculine enough. The John Wayne act had worked great for Ronald Reagan, and by God, it was going to work for Jim Zaharis as well.

She took a sip of her wine and looked around for someone bearable to talk to. Right off the bat she saw about ten people she’d like to avoid, so when Jim’s young administrative assistant, Pam Corder, walked by, Helene snagged her.

“Pam!”

Pam stopped, turned to Helene, and seemed to go a shade pale. “Mrs. Zaharis.”

Helene took Pam by the arm and said, “You’ve
got
to save me from these people. I mean, I know you work for my husband, but if you could get me out of another conversation with Carter Tarleton about fishing in Maine, I would be forever grateful.”

Pam looked around uncertainly. “Um. Okay.”

The girl was completely devoid of personality. Sure, she was cute, but she didn’t seem to have much intelligence. Helene often wondered why Jim kept her on board instead of hiring someone more capable, more of a Betty Currie instead of Betty Boop.

“So.” Helene took another sip of wine. Actually, talking to Pam might be
more
difficult than listening to an exaggerated catch-of-the-day story from Carter. “How’s everything going?”

Pam took a barely perceptible step backwards. Barely perceptible, that was, unless you were a political wife hoping people didn’t notice you were drunk. Helene’s first thought was that Pam was recoiling from her alcohol-lit breath.

That was followed quickly by her second thought, though, which was that Pam had something caught between her teeth.

“You have something….” Helene pointed at her teeth.

“Excuse me?” Pam looked at her blankly.

Helene narrowed her eyes and bent toward Pam, looking more closely and saying, “You have something caught between your front teeth.”

It was during the infinitesimal fraction of a second in the middle of the word
teeth
that Helene realized exactly what it was stuck between Pam’s front teeth.