Secrets of a Shoe Addict

by Harbison, Beth

  “N-no. Not really. Just a willingness to . . . put yourself out there.”

  There was a pause. “Sandra, you’re starting to make me nervous. What is it?”

  “Keep an open mind.”

  “Sandra—”

  “I mean it. I don’t want you throwing this back in my face later. It’s a perfectly legit way to earn money, and I even did it myself for a while.”

  “Do not tell me you were a prostitute.”

  Funny how quickly she’d come to that conclusion. “No!”

  “Thank God.”

  Sandra took a short breath then continued. “Have you ever thought about the possibility of being a phone sex operator?”

  Chapter

  6

  Phone sex?” Loreen repeated. She couldn’t believe Tiffany was suggesting this! Apart from the irony of Loreen having to turn virtual tricks to pay for the trick she’d accidentally become, this was not the sort of thing Tiffany Dreyer ever even talked about, much less suggested as a PTA fund-raiser.

  They were sitting on Loreen Murphy’s sofa, trying to sort out the details of the nightmare that remained from their trip to Las Vegas

  “Look,” Tiffany said with a sigh. “It’s not just the PTA card that got racked up. I got into a little financial trouble in Vegas myself.”

  Loreen looked at her. “How little?”

  Tiffany swallowed. “Five thousand.”

  “So we’re up to ten thousand,” Loreen said, and almost laughed at how ludicrous it was. They needed ten thousand bucks in, like, a month. Fat chance.

  Abbey, who had been watching silently—and, Loreen thought, judgmentally—spoke then. “If we’re looking to come up with a quick fund-raiser, I could use some cash myself.”

  For the church, Loreen thought. If Abbey was going to help pay the cost of their sins, she was going to want them to tithe.

  Like they could afford that.

  Tiffany, however, didn’t make the same assumption. “Did you lose money gambling?” she asked Abbey in disbelief.

  Abbey shook her head. “No, it’s something else. I . . .”She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “No, no,” Tiffany said. “We’re putting it all out there. We’re going to help each other out of this mess. So how much do you need?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  Tiffany and Loreen exchanged looks. This didn’t sound like tithing for the church. Abbey was in some serious trouble of some sort.

  “What happened?” Loreen asked.

  “It’s a long story. It has to do with a charitable donation I made that went wrong.” Abbey shook her head. “Not all that interesting.”

  So in a way Loreen had been right. But who was she to judge? If Abbey would help pay off her mistake, she’d help Abbey pay off hers.

  Tiffany took a sip of General Foods International Coffee. “Obviously a bake sale isn’t going to cut it.” If they were at Tiffany’s house, it would have been freshly ground and brewed coffee, but at Loreen’s if it wasn’t instant, it wasn’t happening. “Neither is a car wash.”

  New panic surged in Loreen’s breast. “Please, let’s not make the kids do anything to help with this. I just . . . I can’t bear the idea.” Good Lord, the children working to pay of her prostitution debt? It was worse than third-world sweatshops, by far. “I’ll sell my kidney first.”

  How much did kidneys get on the black market anyway?

  Andy toddled in, stopping in front of Tiffany and raising his arms. “Looks like Kate got tired of babysitting,” Tiffany said, lifting the child into her lap and cupping her hand over the soft hair at the crown of his head. “Poor sleepy baby,” she said quietly, rocking him gently. “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said to everyone else.

  “We must. How much do you think we could earn doing temporary secretarial work or something?” Abbey asked, tapping the table idly with her fingernails. “Theoretically, two of us could take a job every day, and the other one could take care of the kids.”

  “I can shift my real estate work schedule around,” Loreen said, “in order to take as much solid work as I could get.”

  Tiffany shook her head. “But that’s still just one paycheck at a time. You can’t make the kind of money we need working as a temp.” She lifted her coffee cup, but didn’t take a sip before setting it down again. “I’m telling you, we need to be much more aggressive about this.”

  “That is not the only answer,” Abbey said. “If I did it and anyone found out, it could ruin Brian.”

  It figured, Loreen thought, that of the three people willing to work on this, one had to be married to a pastor. “If I did it and got found out, it could jeopardize my custody case.”

  “And I risk my marriage by doing it,” Tiffany agreed, holding her sleeping child closer. “But I don’t have a better answer.”

  “Me neither,” Loreen said.

  “I don’t either,” Abbey added.

  Loreen, for her part, was beginning to see the appeal. “Well . . . it’s just acting, I guess. Just pretending.”

  “Exactly!” Tiffany agreed.

  Abbey looked dubious.

  “Look, my sister can come over to my house on Thursday when Charlie’s at his poker game. She’ll tell us how to do it. If you want to come, come at seven thirty. If you don’t—” She looked pointedly at Abbey, then at Loreen. “—then don’t. It’s up to you. But I’m going to do it.”

  Abbey spent the next few days worrying over the increasing pile of stresses that was being heaped in front of her.

  How could she work as a phone sex operator and still hope to keep her own past from being scrutinized by Brian or his congregation? If they didn’t find out about her from her own misstep, she knew Damon well enough to know he was probably ready to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to expose her if she didn’t acquiesce.

  Damon, once the stuff of dreams, was now a thing of nightmares. And if Abbey wasn’t careful, he would open her Pandora’s box for all the world to see.

  He could ruin her life and Brian’s and, worst of all, Parker’s.

  She should have known this was coming. Someday she was bound to run into someone who knew her before she met Brian and changed her life. There were plenty of people within a fifty-mile radius who knew the person she used to be.

  The difference was, most of those people didn’t care. They wouldn’t have found it interesting to try to blackmail her.

  It was just pure bad luck that she’d run into Damon.

  Did it mean, after more than a decade, her bad luck was returning?

  She hated to think that way. Hated it. She didn’t want to be superstitious, but how could she not? Fifteen years ago she’d been a wild child, partying every day, every night, ingesting nearly every mood-altering substance she could get her hands on, without regard to her safety or—she would have laughed then to think about it—her soul.

  She’d even created a distraction with a hotel maid in New York so that Damon could slip into an elderly woman’s room and steal her jewelry, including the necklace he hadn’t had time to fence before getting caught.

  Then Abbey had died.

  And everything she thought she knew turned out to be wrong.

  It was a temporary death, of course. On the operating table. So, really, it was just a technicality, but for two entire minutes—she was told later—she had been dead. Yet one miracle, a thing she wouldn’t have believed possible, had given her a second chance at life, and she’d made a deal with God. She’d be good. She’d be good no matter what. If only he’d give her a second chance.

  Or had he?

  Maybe it was just a stay of execution.

  If so, was there any harm in disregarding the spiritual implications and helping herself, her family, and her friends by doing a little phone sex?

  She scrubbed the kitchen sink, pondering the question, even though she was pretty sure she already knew the answer.

  “Mom?”

  She was so
lost in thought that at first her son’s call didn’t even register.

  The sound of him throwing up, however, did.

  She ran to him, stepping gingerly around the vomit on the old Berber carpet. It had probably seen worse. “Honey, what happened? Did you eat something that made you feel sick?”

  He shook his little head. “I started to feel yucky after school at soccer practice.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “ ’Cause.” He shrugged. “Everyone’d make fun of me.” His eyes widened at the very instant his face turned a blotchy combination of pasty and green. “I think I’m gonna—” He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. He threw up on Abbey, a projectile spew of foamy yellow bile. The mess dripped down over the buckle of her jeans and (she really didn’t want to confirm this) inside the waistband.

  “Come on, honey, let’s get you to the bathroom.” She looked at him and thought it looked like he might go again. “Quick.” She grasped his arm and rushed him to the powder room, throwing back the door just in time for him to get sick again, this time near the toilet but, unfortunately, on the plumbing fixtures.

  They were hard enough to clean when it was just dirt.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” His lip trembled. “I tried to hold it, but I couldn’t.”

  “Shhh.” She drew him close, making sure she didn’t hold him against the damp patch on the front of her pants. “It’s okay. Nothing to be sorry about. When you need to get sick, you need to get sick. It’s actually a good thing. You’re getting rid of whatever it is that’s making you feel so bad.”

  He nodded, but it looked like he didn’t believe her.

  “Now, listen. Take off your clothes and put them in a pile here on the floor, okay? I’ll clean it up in a few minutes. For now, I’m going to run upstairs and change my clothes and bring you something more comfortable to put on, okay?”

  “ ’Kay.” Slowly he sat down in front of the toilet.

  Lord, she felt sorry for him. There was no worse feeling than becoming intimately acquainted with the cold, hard, and usually dirty porcelain of the toilet bowl.

  The laundry room was a few steps away, and she hurried in to get a clean towel to wrap around him.

  “Here you go.” She put the towel around his narrow shoulders and gave him another squeeze. “I’ll be right back, okay? Will you be all right if I go for a minute or two?”

  He nodded and pulled the terry cloth closer around him.

  He looked so small and helpless that she wanted to just gather him into her arms as she had when he was a baby, but doing that would only get them both messier.

  “I’ll be back before you can count to twenty.” She winked at him and ran to her room, taking the stairs two at a time. She pulled off her pants and tossed them, inside out, into the clothes hamper, then took off her top and threw it in with the jeans. “Are you counting?” she called, pulling on her old gray sweats as she sprinted across the hall to his bedroom.

  There was a soft reply, probably in the affirmative.

  “I’ll be right there.” She pulled open his pajama drawer, and grabbed the pants from his Batman pj’s and an old Thomas the Tank Engine pajama top. It was small; she’d probably only kept it to use as a dust rag, but it looked clean and she didn’t want to waste a lot of time looking for a matching set when Parker needed her.

  “Here I am!” she sang, arriving breathlessly in the downstairs hall, where Parker was still hunched on the floor in front of the powder room.

  He’d gotten sick again, poor thing.

  He looked at her like a guilty puppy.

  “Okay, let’s get you out of those clothes.” She was good at this. She’d had experience. Despite the fact that he’d gotten quite sick without a lot of control over where, she managed to get him out of his clothes without making him any more soiled. She folded them in on themselves and then helped him into the pajamas, which were way too small on top and big enough to drop off him on the bottom.

  She was pretty tired of not having enough money.

  “That better?” she asked, touching her knuckle to his cheek.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Want some ginger ale?”

  “ ’Kay.”

  She tossed his clothes at the washer, and went to the kitchen, where she always had at least one small bottle of Schweppes ginger ale on hand for just this kind of emergency. Likewise the red box of graham crackers, which she grabbed along with the soda.

  “Here you go.” She sat down on the floor with him and twisted the top off the ginger ale. “It’s warm, but it works better that way.”

  He took the bottle she held out to him and took a small sip, then another.

  “Think you can choke down a graham cracker?” she asked gently, pushing his hair back from his clammy, cold forehead.

  He shook his head.

  “That’s okay, I’ll have them here just in case you change your mind.” She set the box down. “Why don’t you lie with your head in my lap now. Give your tummy a chance to settle down. If you need the toilet, it’s right there.”

  “ ’Kay.” He shuffled around and lay down in front of her, his head on her legs.

  She put her palm on his clammy forehead—good, no fever—then again her hand along his head over and over again. Ever since he was a baby, that had been the most soothing thing she could do.

  “Forty,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “You said you’d be back before I got to twenty. I got to forty.”

  She gave a small laugh. “In Spanish?”

  “No.”

  “Hm. I should have been more specific. I meant I’d be back before you counted to twenty in Spanish.”

  “Very funny.” His voice was weak, but she took it as a good sign that he was able to joke at all.

  She continued to smooth his hair. Eventually, he rolled over onto his side, and his eyes began to blink longer and slower. It wasn’t long before he was asleep.

  “Sleep it off, little man,” she whispered, taking the towel he’d shaken off and folding it into a little pillow to replace her lap when she got up. “You’ll feel better when you wake up. I love you. Soooo much.”

  Some things were more important than her own soul.

  She went upstairs and got the laundry out of the machine. There were the remains of dandelions in the washer. At first she’d freaked out, thinking it was some sort of huge spider, but then she realized it was the washed and mushy remains of a dandelion green, undoubtedly “flowers” that Parker had kept in his pocket to give his mother—as he often did—but had forgotten.

  She took the greens out of the washer, hesitated a moment, then put them into the small trash can full of dryer lint next to the dryer. There would be more dandelions. She couldn’t afford to keep the tattered green stems of every moment of Parker’s childhood, or else she’d end up so surrounded by keepsakes, she wouldn’t see what was really happening.

  So she chucked the dandelion stems and started a new load of laundry, washed her hands with antibacterial soap, put the graham crackers away, and heated some water for chamomile tea.

  Which, on second thought, wasn’t nearly strong enough. She ignored the beeping microwave, and the cup of hot water inside it, and took out the bottle of red wine they kept on hand for guests and special occasions.

  She’d just finished pouring when the phone rang. She grabbed for it before it rang again and woke Parker, and knocked over her wine in the process.

  “Hello?” She cradled the phone on her shoulder and reached for a dishrag to clean up the mess. “Hello?”

  Click.

  She frowned and looked at the phone, as if the receiver itself would give some kind of clue as to who the caller had been. And in most houses it probably would, but Abbey and Brian didn’t have caller ID on any of their phones. The hardware was all too old, though the service was probably on the line with the monthly bill they paid.

  Immediately she pressed *69. She wasn’t c
ompletely without modern resources. But not surprisingly, the recorded voice said the last number could not be traced.

  He’d blocked it.

  She knew, without any shadow of doubt, it had been Damon. He was doing it to rattle her, and it was working.

  The phone rang again, in her hand, and she pushed the TALK button immediately. “Hello?”

  No response.

  “Not man enough to say anything, huh?” she taunted, then worried that it might be one of Brian’s parishioners. But whoever it was, they didn’t respond, and she held on to the line until she heard the click of him hanging up.

  That left little doubt whether the silence was deliberate or merely the confusion of an elderly congregation member.

  By the time the phone rang again, she was out of patience. “What do you want?” she demanded impatiently.

  Again, there was no response.

  “Listen, you evil son of a bitch,” she hissed into the phone, one eye on the sleeping child several yards away. “You can call here all you want, but it’s not going to get you one thin dime from me, do you understand?”

  “Abbey? Is that you?”

  No.

  Oh, no.

  It wasn’t Damon. It was Tiffany Dreyer. Abbey had just cussed out Tiffany Dreyer and, in the process, given up a small corner of the secret she hoped would never get out.

  “Um . . .” Abbey stalled, wondering if she could hang up the phone and get away with pretending it had been a wrong number.

  But she couldn’t. Tiffany could just look at the LED readout on her phone and see she’d called the right number. Touch REDIAL once, and she’d have Abbey or the answering machine. Unless, of course, Abbey picked up the phone every time it rang and then hung it up again.

  Which was obviously too ridiculous a thing to even consider doing.

  She was going to have to face the music. “Tiffany?” she asked, deciding to feel her out to see if she’d really heard everything Abbey had said.

  “Who on earth did you think it was?” Tiffany asked.

  Okay, so she’d heard it all.

  “Um . . . I was . . .” Abbey paused. She wasn’t good at this. “I thought it might be a crank caller.”