There was only one thing she could do to feel better. It would cost her, of course, but sometimes you couldn’t put a price tag on mental health.
Or, actually, you could, and if you considered that it was $150 per hour and maybe once a week, a little shopping trip was nothing.
So she went to Sephora.
It was like taking a short trip to paradise; a place where everything was pretty, everything smelled good, everything was tempting, and all of it promised to ease life’s little problems.
Immediately upon walking into the overlit, glistening black-white-and-red that was her personal heaven, Allie felt better.
Not that she came here that often. To the contrary, she usually settled for the drugstore brands, but every once in a while she just couldn’t resist going.
Now was one of those times.
Because not only had she just ended a relationship—one of the top three reasons to go straight to Sephora—but she had her twentieth class reunion coming up. Come to think of it, that had to be in the top three, too. In fact, she’d stand her ground in saying either of those were a better reason to splurge than a wedding.
Anyway, here she was.
“Can I help you find something?” a girl who was almost half her age and half her size asked Allie.
“Yes.” Allie was prepared. She had a wallet full of credit cards. “Show me all of your favorite things.”
The girl looked confused. “What exactly are you looking for? Like, mascara, or”—she looked Allie over—“microdermabrasion?”
Under any other circumstances, Allie might have been insulted, but she’d been as low as she could go this week, self-esteemwise, so she was willing to admit she needed help.
“I want to know about anything you have that will make me look better,” she said. “Show it all to me.”
The girl was like an obedient dog, tentatively moving toward the hamburger that had been dropped on the kitchen floor. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Cool. Because we just got this moisturizer that everyone is saying gets rid of fine lines in, like, days. . . .”
For the next hour, Allie followed the waif through the store, trying mascaras, foundations, creams, lotions, perfumes, even tooth whiteners. There was Dior, Lancôme, Fresh, Urban Decay, bare-Minerals, LORAC, and a hundred other brands Allie wouldn’t normally have even considered because their prices were so high.
She wasn’t able to get it all—a hundred and twenty-five bucks for an ounce of skin potion was still too much, no matter how desperately unhappy she was—but she got enough to make for a very satisfying walk back to the car and drive home.
She’d realized, as she’d shopped, that her anguish wasn’t really all about Kevin. In fact, very little of it probably had to do with Kevin. Every time she tried to fit him into the puzzle piece of her heart that felt missing, he didn’t quite fit.
Yes, he’d cheated on her, he’d betrayed her, he’d made her feel like a loser and a fool, but maybe she understood why. At least a little bit.
She and Kevin had a very companionable relationship. They went on nice dates together, liked the same restaurants and the same wine. But at night when they came home, more often than not Kevin would stay in the living room, watching the Biography Channel or Discovery or something while Allie went into the bedroom and watched Sex and the City, or Six Feet Under, or Big Brother. Something that Kevin would regard as far too lowbrow for his tastes.
And while they did have sex regularly, it was just that: It was just regular and, frankly, it was just sex.
There were no fireworks.
There weren’t even pathetic little sparklers.
Secrets of a Shoe Addict Page 29
