Secrets of a Shoe Addict

by Harbison, Beth

  He looked at his watch. “It’s seven thirty.”

  “You’re kidding.” It felt like midnight. “I must be coming down with something.”

  Robert looked concerned. “Could be stress.”

  She gave a dry laugh. “That’s for sure.”

  “Want me to stay and put Jacob to bed?”

  She did. But she couldn’t. “I’ll do it,” she said. “But thanks.”

  He came to her and bent to kiss her cheek. He smelled of the same aftershave he always had. And soap. Robert always smelled clean.

  He left, and Loreen went back to the sofa to sit down for a minute and rest.

  She woke hours later. The room was dark, she was disoriented, and the only light in the house seemed to come from Jacob’s room, along with the very loud and extremely annoying sounds of LEGO Star Wars II on the PlayStation.

  Loreen went upstairs and pushed Jacob’s door open. She shielded her eyes from the light. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Jacob glanced at her then turned back to his game and shrugged. “Is Dad still here?”

  “Dad left.” Loreen’s eyes fell on the clock. “Two hours ago. It’s ten, Jacob, what are you doing up still?”

  He shrugged. “No one put me to bed.”

  “Well, you’re ten years old. Can’t you put yourself to bed when it gets late?”

  “I just figured you’d come up like usual.”

  “Okay, I’m up now. Turn the game off, get your teeth brushed, and get yourself in bed.”

  “But—”

  “Now!” It was way too late to argue about it.

  Jacob put the game on hold, didn’t turn off the TV, and stalked off to the bathroom, where Loreen suspected he held the electric toothbrush up toward the door for a minute or two in the ON position before coming back out.

  “Okay?” he asked, splaying his arms sarcastically.

  He was at least three years too young for that kind of sarcasm. She hadn’t even attempted it until she was thirteen, and it had taken another three years to truly perfect it.

  “Bed,” she commanded. “Right this minute.”

  “Just lemme finish this game!”

  “Jacob Henry Murphy, you have been up hours past your bedtime. Do you really think you should beg to stay up even longer to play a video game?”

  Put that way, he seemed to get it. He hung his head. “No. I guess not.”

  “Sleep. Got it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Good.” Loreen headed for her bedroom, knowing she’d have to get up in a few minutes to check and make sure Jacob hadn’t turned the game on again.

  Fortunately the nap had done her good, and she had some energy to do a little administrative work she needed to catch up on. They now had five outside workers—or “actresses”—on the roster, and when she went to the site to check their statistics, she saw they were logging a lot of hours.

  She went to the spreadsheet she’d created and made note of what they were owed. Loreen had arranged to pay weekly, on Fridays, via a PayPal account she’d created just for that purpose.

  Taking calls was hard, but it was amazing how easy it was to be a virtual madam to other phone actresses.

  And how lucrative.

  She switched screens and checked the Gregslist listing. She had been planning to take it down, to keep the operation small, but she decided that she could handle a staff of maybe five more workers. The money was certainly persuasive.

  She’d keep the ad up.

  And she’d be a madam for just a little bit longer. After all, it was the best contribution she could make to the group.

  Chapter

  17

  Abbey had done a lot of soul searching in the weeks since they’d gotten back from Las Vegas, but she couldn’t decide if she thought running into Damon was a coincidence or punishment for her long-past sins.

  Not that it mattered. In the end, the result was the same: She had to pay him his money or run the risk of having him expose her past. Getting indignant at the injustice of it wasn’t going to chance the facts, and all her fantasies about telling Damon to go to hell were just that: fantasies.

  If he went to hell, he’d made it clear he was taking her with him.

  Fortunately, Loreen had just told them all that the business was going even better than they’d thought. They’d done some advertising with their limited funds, and by advertising to students in the local college newspapers, Loreen had managed to add more part-time operators to the coffers. Still, they paid their employees half the earnings, so it was still more lucrative for Loreen, Abbey, and Tiffany to do their own work.

  In fact, that was what she was doing this evening since Brian said he wouldn’t be home until eight. It was now seven fifteen, Abbey had given Parker a healthy dinner and plunked him down in front of the TV, and then she had come upstairs to the master bedroom, where she could close the door to the hall and the door to the bedroom.

  With that double layer of protection and a quiet voice that would hopefully be read as sultry, she was set.

  And she was in the middle of her third call of the night when the house phone rang. How could she have forgotten to turn the ringer off in her room?

  “Hey, is that a phone ringing?” her caller asked, obviously drawn out of the matador moment he’d been having.

  “Well, of course, honey,” Abbey said, thinking fast as she ran downstairs to the basement where he wouldn’t be able to hear the phone anymore. “I’m a real person at a real house and someone’s calling. You didn’t want to talk to some impersonal operator in a big room somewhere, did you?”

  Her ploy worked. “No. I like that. You’re at home?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Near the University of Maryland’s Baltimore campus,” she lied quickly.

  “Oooh, are you a student?” He sounded like he wanted the answer to be yes.

  So it was. “Yes,” she said. “But please don’t tell anyone I told you so. We’re supposed to be older than that.”

  “That’s okay, baby.” He was into this. No surprise there. “You don’t have to be a housewife at home cooking me a pot roast. As long as you know what to do with a hot dog, we’ll get along just fine.”

  The phone rang again; she could hear the distant trill upstairs.

  Abbey paused. Maybe it was an emergency.

  If it was, though, it was for Brian, and she couldn’t help, except to take a message, and the machine was already doing that.

  “I do just fine with hot dogs,” she said, and finished the call while she organized the winter clothes in the storage room.

  When the call was over, she had clocked an impressive thirty-five minutes. Usually the guys didn’t last that long. They were either too excited to keep it up, or too cheap to let it last that long. Now and then she’d heard the telltale beep of the call being taped and she knew her caller would be replaying it later instead of calling back.

  What could she do? She wasn’t going to reprimand guys for being frugal. After all, this was supposed to be Happy Housewives not Mean Mommies.

  Speaking of which, she hadn’t checked on Parker in more than half an hour. It was probably time to unglue him from the Star Wars video game Brian had just gotten him and put him to bed, where his agitated brain wave activity would probably keep him up for hours.

  “Why’d the phone keep ringing?” he asked, making the red guy on screen crash a sword into the brown guy.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t get to it. I was straightening up downstairs. I’ll check the messages.” She took the game controller from his hand and turned off the TV. “You go get ready for bed.”

  “I’m not tired! It’s only eight thirty!”

  Eight thirty. She looked at the clock with an odd knot in her stomach. But why? What was wrong with eight thirty?

  “The rule is,” she said, though she’d said it a hundred times already, “that you’re supposed to start getting ready for bed and
winding down between eight fifteen and eight thirty. You need to be in bed, in the dark by nine. By my calculations, the timing should work out just about right.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, honestly, Parker, do you have to argue about everything? Just get ready for bed, would you?” She went to the kitchen, took a grape from the fruit bowl on the counter, popped it into her mouth, and called the voice mail center.

  “This is Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, could you please call us back at 301-279-32 . . .”

  Abbey swallowed the half-chewed grape and jotted the number down with a shaking hand.

  Oh, God.

  She called the number back.

  “ER.”

  Abbey tripped over her words. “I’m calling for—I need—patient services,”

  “Name, please.”

  “My name is Abbey Walsh.” She didn’t want to say the next part, didn’t want to somehow make it true in between giving her name and his. “My husband is Brian Walsh. He was supposed to be home half an hour ago and he’s not home yet, so I hope everything’s okay.” She was rambling, her voice growing higher and higher, like a helium balloon. “But he’s not home yet.” She dropped her head in her free hand and waited for the woman on the other end of the line to speak.

  “One moment, please.”

  The subsequent wait seemed interminable. There was no hold music. Presumably they didn’t want next-of-kin to have to listen to “Love Will Keep Us Together” while waiting to find out if their loved ones were alive or dead.

  “Mrs. Walsh?” It was a man’s voice.

  “Yes?” She didn’t know whose voice she was using. It certainly didn’t sound like hers.

  “Mrs. Walsh, this is Dr. Fram. I’m your husband’s attending physician.”

  “My husband’s attending physician?” She gripped the phone hard enough to squeeze juice out of it. “Why? What’s happened? I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Okay, calm down—”

  “Tell me what’s going on!” She’d ignored the phone calls from the hospital because she was doing phone sex with some creepy stranger, while her husband was in the hospital, maybe dying.

  Maybe dead.

  “Your husband was in a car accident—”

  She leaned against the wall behind her and slid down. “Oh, God.” Damon. She should have known he wasn’t going to give her a break.

  “—He was brought in at eight ten. We need to do surgery, Mrs. Walsh, do you understand? We need your permission to do the surgery.”

  “What kind of surgery?” Not that she was qualified to give an educated yes or no either way.

  “He has internal bleeding. His spleen is ruptured. We need to remove it as soon as possible.”

  She’d have to be a fool, or a Scientologist, to say no to any surgery an ER doctor deemed necessary. “Do it.”

  “Can you come in, Mrs. Walsh?”

  She batted tears from her eyes and cheeks. “Yes, of course. Do you need my signature?”

  “Yes, but there isn’t time. I’m going to have to go with your oral consent.”

  She nodded convulsively.

  “Mrs. Walsh?”

  “Do it,” she said again, trying to swallow the hard lump in her throat. “Do whatever you need to do. I’ll be right there.” She didn’t wait for an answer, or a rebuttal. Maybe she should have, but she was running on pure adrenaline and perhaps flawed instinct now.

  “Parker!” She ran into the bathroom, where he was brushing his teeth in micro-motion. Other nights she would have corrected him.

  Tonight, she took the toothbrush out of his hand and tossed it onto the counter.

  “We have an emergency,” she said, then tried to soften it. “I have something I have to do very quickly, so you’re going over to Mrs. Dreyer’s house, okay?” She hadn’t asked Tiffany’s permission yet, of course. That potentially faulty instinct she was applying told her to take Parker to Tiffany’s and ask questions later.

  She bundled him up, grabbing clothes for tomorrow, just in case, and his Game Boy to keep his mind off the fact that his mother and father were missing in action, and got into the car.

  It was deep twilight, the most beautiful time of a summer day, Abbey thought. Or at least she usually thought. At the moment, she wished it were dark, to cover everything—all the things around her that held memories—she could see only the ten feet in front of her headlights.

  She had to get to Brian.

  Tiffany lived only a few blocks away, and the drive had lasted only minutes, but to Abbey it felt like hours. When she finally got to the house, she jerked the car to a halt in the driveway.

  The lights were on inside, making a beacon of light in the lowering cloak of dusk.

  Abbey knocked on the door, a staccato punctuation to the still twilight.

  Tiffany answered, and her expression went from blank curiosity to grave concern in a split second.

  For the first time since she’d gotten the call, Abbey felt her strength buckle. “There’s an emergency.” Her voice faltered. “The hospital called.” She whispered it. “Brian had an accident.”

  Tiffany didn’t need more explanation. She stepped back, opening the door as she did so, effectively ushering Parker in. “Hey, Parker. Can you stay awhile?”

  “What’s going on?” Parker asked. He’d been asking it over and over since Abbey had put him in the car.

  “I . . .” Abbey’s chest tightened. There was nothing to say. What on earth could she say that would be the truth? That she was scared witless? That his father was hurt and might not live through the night? Might not, in fact, live long enough for Abbey to get there?

  That would hardly make Parker feel better.

  Tiffany must have seen the panic on her face, because she said, smoothly and easily, “Your mom asked if you could come over while she ran some errands. I’ve been wondering where you two were.”

  Parker looked to Abbey for confirmation.

  “You stay here and play with Kate, all right?” She flashed a grateful look at Tiffany, who, with the slightest of nods, made Abbey feel like everything was going to be all right.

  “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “I’ll wait,” Tiffany said quietly. “Take your time. No matter how long.”

  Tears burned in Abbey’s eyes. She’d never had a friend like this in her life. Even when she was way younger, and had friends she’d go out with and party with every weekend, she’d never in her life had the kind of friend who would wait for her through the night without even knowing why or how long.

  But she needed it tonight. “Thank you,” she mouthed, then kissed Parker on top of the head and said, “You be good for Mrs. Dreyer, all right? Because she’ll tell me if you’re bad.”

  “I’ll be good,” Parker assured her. Then asked Tiffany, “Where’s Kate?”

  At this moment, Abbey really could have used the comfort of his small embrace, but she wasn’t about to exact it from him and make him panic about what was really going on.

  Why should he worry before everyone was sure there was something to worry about?

  With Tiffany’s reassurance that she would put the kids to bed and plan to keep Parker until she heard otherwise, Abbey drove to the hospital. Though it was really about a fifteen-minute drive, it seemed like hours, and every time she approached a red light, her leg shook so much that she almost couldn’t depress the brake.

  When she finally got to the traffic light from Shady Grove Road into the hospital driveway, the light seemed to stay red forever. There was no traffic coming for at least the quarter mile or so Abbey could see in the distance.

  Finally, heedless of the law, she gunned the engine and blew right through the light.

  To hell with anyone who tried to stop her.

  But no one did, and she parked in a daze and hurried into the emergency room.

  “I g-got a call,” she stammered, laying her clammy palms on the cold desktop. “My husband is here. Is this the right p
lace to check in?”

  Probably not. The elderly gentleman sitting there looked very kind but utterly clueless.

  “What’s your husband’s name?” he asked, pushing his half glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  “Brian Walsh.” She tapped her fingers on the countertop, faster, faster, faster.

  The man clicked something onto the keyboard and looked at the screen in front of him. “One moment.” The man looked at her with sympathetic, watery blue eyes. “I need to call someone.”

  “Call someone?” she repeated, her voice sailing into near hysteria. “What do you mean you need to call someone? Is he dead? Are you not allowed to tell me he’s dead?”

  “Um.” He pushed his glasses up again, only this time it was with a hand that shook. “I’m just a volunteer.”

  The beige cardigan should have told her that. People who worked in an atmosphere as stressful as this full-time didn’t have the optimism to wear something like a beige Mr. Rogers sweater.

  She waited for what seemed like hours, trying to keep from throwing up, while he picked up the phone and spoke in lowered tones for a moment. She caught the words Brian Walsh and wife and very upset.

  Then he replaced the receiver and said to Abbey, “Mrs. Duncan will be right with you.”

  Abbey swallowed a sarcastic retort about how quickly Mrs. Duncan might move, because the poor man didn’t deserve it. No one here did. She was just lashing out because it was the only thing she could do, apart from cry.

  And she couldn’t afford to do that right now, because if she started, she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Another eternity passed before a dark-haired woman in a trim, tailored blue suit came around the corner. “Mrs. Walsh?”

  Abbey nodded, mute.

  The woman extended her hand. “I’m Ida Duncan, the patient services representative here. If you’ll follow me, we can speak privately in my office.”

  Abbey followed. She was numb. Were they going to some sort of soundproof office where Ida could deliver the bad news?

  What would Abbey tell Parker? How was she going to explain he didn’t have a father anymore? How was she going to raise him without a father?