Secrets of a Shoe Addict

by Harbison, Beth

  “No, I just don’t want six hundred and forty ones.”

  “Do you know what some people would give for six hundred and forty one-dollar bills?”

  He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “But you have a choice here, and you can get hundreds. And save paper,” he added, like it was a trump card.

  “I don’t think Deirdre is actually manufacturing the money to my specifications, so that argument doesn’t hold water.”

  “Here,” Deirdre said, pushing over what must have been twenty-five bundles of ones.

  “Oh, my,” Loreen said, a small laugh in her voice despite the horror of the situation. That was a lot of bundles. They’d probably be heavy. Lord, she hoped so. “Hold your hands out, Rod. I’ll pile them on.”

  “This is ridiculous,” he intoned.

  She looked him dead in the eye. “I could not agree more.”

  “Is it my turn?” he asked Deirdre.

  Loreen looked to her for the answer, and Deirdre shook her head. “I was about to take my break . . . but I guess . . .”

  It was hard not to smile when Loreen turned back to Rod. “You’re in luck.”

  He shot her a hostile gaze. Something told her she wouldn’t be a repeat customer, even if she wanted to be.

  Then again, something told her he knew she wasn’t going to be a repeat customer.

  The tan was fake, Loreen decided, watching him step up to the counter.

  And no one was that muscular and ripped without spending hours every day in the gym. And frankly that kind of vanity just didn’t strike her as all that attractive.

  So, good riddance to Rod.

  She turned to leave.

  “Couple months ago, someone asked for pennies,” an older, nondescript woman said as Loreen passed.

  Loreen stopped. The woman was wearing a name tag like Deirdre’s—one that said WILHELMINA—and was obviously employed by the same cash counter. “What?”

  The woman’s dull features formed something like sympathy. “Seems like a lot of women don’t know Rod has a price. Sometimes they get mad, like you. One got a thousand dollars in pennies. It took ages to get it all, and even then I had to give her two hundred in bills because we didn’t have enough.”

  Pennies. Loreen only wished she’d thought of it. “He seemed nice,” she said wistfully, without really even meaning to say it out loud.

  “That’s his job,” Wilhelmina said without inflection.

  Loreen looked at her. “Well, I think it stinks.”

  Wilhelmina’s expression softened. “Everybody’s got to make a living. But sometimes it ain’t fair to everyone else.”

  Loreen nodded her agreement. “You said it.”

  Loreen walked away, thinking she had to get back to the hotel, and Jacob, and put the pieces of her self-esteem back together somehow. But she couldn’t shake the notion that she was now a thousand dollars poorer than when she’d come to Las Vegas, and she just wasn’t able to get by that way.

  It was when she was passing the roulette tables that the answer occurred to her. She could earn the money back, bit by small bit, at the roulette table. After all, you could bet on red or black. It was a fifty–fifty chance of winning. Where else in the casino was she going to find those kind of odds?

  Nowhere, that’s where. She’d majored in statistics in college, and her professor had gone on and on about a statistical strategy on the roulette table called the “triple martingale.” She remembered it well—you just bet red or black and doubled your bet every time it was the opposite. Though each go-round was technically a Bernoulli trial, and had equal odds independently, Professor Jellama had contended that there were more mystical, universal laws of mathematics, and roulette was a prime example of how, in fact, the odds build from trial to trial.

  It had made sense when he explained it, even though he’d given disclaimers about its scientific veracity in order to keep his job.

  But Professor Jellama had been a smart guy, one of her favorite teachers, and she was going to trust him now, when it mattered most.

  She went to get chips and discovered she had only fifteen dollars on her, so she went back over to Deirdre’s window—now that they’d formed this tenuous bond of sorts—and asked, “Can I get another hundred, or did I reach my limit?”

  Deirdre took the card from her. “Until the credit card company says you’ve reached your limit, you haven’t reached your limit.” She dragged the card through the magnetic reader and punched in some number. Then she handed Loreen a paper to sign again. “Went through.”

  Loreen signed, and Deirdre handed over the cash.

  “Thanks,” Loreen said, meaning it a lot more this time than she had last time.

  She meant it just as much the next five times she went, too, each time taking a greater amount to make up for her losses, until eventually she hit the limit on the card and found, from her receipts, that she was down five thousand dollars.

  That was counting Rod’s fee, of course, but still. Five thousand dollars.

  She couldn’t afford one thousand dollars!

  But she also couldn’t afford to throw more good money after bad, and, despite four thousand evidences to the contrary, Loreen did know when to call it quits. Professor Jellama was an idiot. She hoped he’d been fired for planting such crazy ideas in his students’ heads.

  What was she going to do?

  She’d get a night job, that’s what. Real estate wasn’t all that steady, and until school let out in a month, things were still sluggish, so she’d supplement her income with a steady salary, even if it was at a retail store in the mall. Or maybe waitressing. If she could get a job waitressing at one of the high-end restaurants in Bethesda or Northwest, she could pay this off in no time. It would mean leaving Jacob at home while she worked, though. But Tiffany lived three houses away. Maybe Loreen could get a baby monitor system and put them around the house, and leave the receiver with Tiffany, so she could “babysit” while Loreen went to work.

  It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was better than nothing.

  And the alternative was nothing.

  Chapter

  4

  The next morning Tiffany got up before Loreen and Abbey to return the clothes to Finola Pims. When she was about to leave the room with her bags, she noticed Jacob Murphy and Parker Walsh trying to get the window open, while Kate sat nearby watching TV.

  “What are you guys doing?” Tiffany asked, knowing the answer wasn’t going to be something easy.

  Both boys turned to her, faces pale with surprise. “Nothing,” one of them said. It didn’t matter which one, the truth of something was written all over their faces.

  “Jacob bet Parker he could hit someone square on the head with a water balloon,” Kate said.

  “Kate!” Jacob objected.

  “Are you kidding me?” Tiffany asked. “Where did you even get a balloon?”

  “We don’t have a balloon,” Jacob said.

  Parker looked like he’d just eaten something unpleasant.

  This made Kate turn away from the TV. “Yes, you do. Don’t lie to my mom.” She turned back to Tiffany. “The lady that was here last night gave us balloons and chocolates.”

  Wow. She really should have cleared that with the parents first, Tiffany thought. What if one of the kids was allergic to chocolate? Or latex? “Give me the balloon,” she said, holding her hand out.

  Both Parker and Jacob produced flat little balloons and handed them over.

  “Thank you.” Tiffany stuffed them in her bag. “Now, I have to go downstairs for a minute—” She stopped. There was no way she could trust these guys alone while Loreen and Abbey were asleep. God knew what they’d get into next. “And you guys are coming with me.”

  “Are we going to the casino?” Jacob asked eagerly.

  “No. A store.”

  “Aw, man!”

  “Come on.” She rustled them up, jotted a note for the others that she had the kids, and headed downstairs to Finola Pims. />
  It was only three kids, but trying to keep track of them in the chaos of the hotel proved harder than Tiffany had anticipated. The lights and noise seemed to hypnotize them into all sorts of wild behavior.

  It was “Jacob! Kate! Stop playing tag, you’re running into people!”

  Or “Where’s Parker?”

  And “Jacob and Parker, that is not funny. Stop it now!”

  The five minutes down the elevator and out to the storefront seemed to last a lifetime. When they got to the Finola Pims shop, Tiffany rounded the children up outside the store entrance.

  “Listen to me,” she said in a harsh whisper, bending down before them. “You guys have to be silent in here, do you understand? Stand like statues, don’t make a single peep. If you do, I swear to you, I will go to the board of education meeting and suggest they abolish summer vacations completely.” She looked at the blank faces for signs of terror and acquiescence.

  “What’s abolish?” Jacob asked.

  “It means they’d end it,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “School would go year-round with no summer vacation.” She gave a nod to emphasize her point.

  That did it. There was the white-faced fear she’d been looking for: the straight backs, the closed mouths. That was more like it.

  “Good.” She stood up. “Now, let’s go.”

  They marched into the store like the von Trapp children, in a quiet line, straight to the sales counter. Tiffany waited behind a mature woman who was dripping with jewels so big, she couldn’t imagine they were real. Then again, the total of her sale indicated she might actually be able to afford the real thing.

  Of course, someone might have said the same thing about Tiffany’s purchase.

  “Can I help you?” asked the salesgirl, a slip of a thing who looked about nineteen. She glanced at the bags Tiffany was holding and the unmistakable hope of large sales commissions glinted in her eye.

  “Yes.” Tiffany hefted the bags onto the counter. “I need to return these.”

  For a moment it looked like the salesgirl, whose name tag announced her as RAYANNE, thought Tiffany was speaking another language.

  “They’re beautiful,” Tiffany hastened to add, in case she had somehow insulted the girl. “But”—she wasn’t going to admit she couldn’t afford them—“they just don’t quite suit me.”

  “Wow, that’s too bad.” Rayanne nodded.

  Tiffany smiled. “Well, with all the kids”—she gestured—“I figured it would be more merciful to the other shoppers for me to try them on in my room and see what works.” She took the receipt out and held it out to the girl, who just looked at it with vague sympathy.

  “And they don’t fit?” she asked, making no move to take the receipt from Tiffany.

  “They’re just not quite right for me.” Tiffany set the receipt on the counter and pushed it toward Rayanne, like it was a silent bid auction. “So, if you could just . . . do the return.”

  “I wish I could.” She shook her head and let the words plunk down without further explanation.

  “Okay, well, can you get someone who can?” Tiffany asked, losing patience. The kids were starting to shuffle their feet and get antsy. She shot them a warning look and mouthed the words summer vacation.

  “No one can.” Rayanne pointed to a sign Tiffany had managed to overlook when making the purchase. It said, in the kind of thin, elaborate script that was harder to notice than to miss: ALL SALES FINAL. NO RETURNS OR EXCHANGES. NO EXCEPTIONS.

  “I didn’t see that before,” Tiffany murmured, as if it would make a difference.

  “It’s the store policy.”

  “But . . . why? I mean, Nordstrom doesn’t do that.”

  Rayanne shrugged. “This isn’t Nordstrom.”

  It was undeniable. “Is there a manager I could speak with? Not that I’m saying you’re not competent.”

  “He won’t let you return the stuff.”

  “Why don’t you let me speak to him myself?”

  Rayanne didn’t move. “He won’t. People have tried before.”

  Which led Tiffany to wonder for a moment if they actually removed that sign during a transaction, and put it back when the poor suckers came back to return things. Or maybe it was sort of the Brigadoon of signs, appearing once every so often, and Tiffany was just out of luck this time. “Would you please ask him to come over so I can talk to him?”

  “Mom.” There was a tugging on the back of her shirt.

  “Shhh!” She tossed over her shoulder.

  A few moments passed, then another tug. “But Mom.”

  “Kate, honestly, you have to just wait a minute, okay?” Tiffany rasped, hoping not to call attention to herself. “I need to talk to one more person, then we’ll go back to our hotel room.”

  “But Mom—”

  “Quiet!”

  “Jacob peed in his pants!”

  Tiffany kept her focus straight ahead. Maybe she’d heard wrong. Maybe she’d misunderstood. Surely a nine-year-old hadn’t just wet himself in the middle of a high-end store.

  She looked back as wincingly as if she were looking at a car wreck. And she was. The front of Jacob’s khaki pants was soaking wet, and there was a puddle on the white marble floor of the shop.

  Tiffany had to swallow a curse. Several of them, actually.

  Jacob shrugged.

  Well, at least he wasn’t emotionally traumatized by it. Like Tiffany was about to be. “Jacob, what happened?”

  “I really really had to go.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  This started them all jabbering at once about how you told us not to talk and no summer vacation ever again.

  “I didn’t mean . . .” What could she say? More to the point, what could she do? There was only one option: to sneak out of the store with the kids and come back before they left for the airport in the morning when someone else could watch the children. “Okay, guys, quick—”

  “How may I help you?”

  Startled, Tiffany whipped around to see a small man with a pencil-thin mustache who looked like he was doing his best impression of William Powell, only in miniature.

  And without the little sparkle of humor in his eye.

  “Rayanne said you wished to see a manager.”

  She glanced uncertainly back at Jacob, then scooted Kate in front of him to, hopefully, block the mess. “Yes, I just had a few returns to make, and Rayanne pointed out that you have a no-return policy.” She tried to give a trill of a laugh, like I’m so rich and silly I didn’t even realize it! “Now, the problem is, I’m going back home this morning, and I was really hoping to get this done right away.” She paused, and he continued to look at her in a detached manner. “If you look, you’ll see that everything still has the tags on and everything.” She lifted the would-be Kentucky Derby hat and pointed out the tag.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “Oh, thank goodness.” Tiffany smiled. “I was afraid you were going to stick to your policy, which would be understandable, of course, but—”

  “No, no, the hat is good. Exquisite. I’m sure it’s quite fetching on you.”

  “Well . . . not so much. That’s why I’m returning it.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I cannot overturn the store policy.” He clasped his hands in front of him and shook his head. “Would that I could.”

  “You’re the manager. I’m sure you can. In fact, I bought them only a few hours ago, so could you just look in the drawer for the receipt and void it out?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I would be so grateful.”

  He took a long, deliberate breath. “Perhaps, I could—” He interrupted himself to make a noise like Scooby-Doo encountering a ghost, and clapped his hand to his mouth.

  “Mr.—?” Tiffany realized he hadn’t introduced himself. “Are you okay?”

  He pointed a shaking finger behind her. “Are they with you?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment before turning to look behind her
and make sure he was referring to the children and not, say, a pack of wild dogs that had gotten into the store.

  It was the kids, all right. And Kate had stepped aside, so Jacob was there in all his damp glory.

  “They’re . . . here.” That didn’t make sense. She couldn’t come up with an answer that would both make sense and make things better, so she tried the truth. “They’re not all mine, of course, but I brought them down rather than leaving them alone in the hotel room.”

  He wasn’t listening. “Excuse me.” He turned away in horror and clapped his hands in front of his face, walking briskly across the store, calling, “Clean up at register one! Quickly! Spit-spot!”

  “Hey, Mary Poppins said that!” one of the kids said.

  “Mom, are you finished?”

  “I think so,” Tiffany said, turning dejectedly to take the kids out. She stepped over the puddle and kept walking, not even bothering to admonish the kids to keep quiet. She had spent five thousand dollars on clothes when every penny she and Charlie had was budgeted into carefully constructed categories and needs.

  She’d probably just spent a big chunk of Kate’s first semester of college on a ridiculous Kentucky Derby outfit she’d never, ever be able to use.

  An hour later, Tiffany, Abbey, and Loreen went to the airport with the kids. The kid mood was wild, happy, excited; the adult mood was decidedly morose.

  For one thing, Tiffany was wearing the stupid, ostentatious hat she’d bought when, drunk, she’d thought it looked fun. There was no room for it in her suitcase. She’d thought about leaving it behind for the maid, but all she could envision was some tired old cynic of a maid coming in, trying on the crazy $230 hat, then shoving it into the trash bag. Tiffany would rather keep it than that. Even if she had to wear it for gardening.

  And take up gardening to wear it.

  “I’m hungry, Mom,” Kate whined as she trailed behind Tiffany on the way to the gate.

  “Me, too!” Jacob chimed in immediately.

  “Can we get something to eat?” Parker asked.

  “Oh! I want pizza!” Kate started running toward a Sbarro counter.