If the Shoe Fits

by Sandra D. Bricker

  Will wiped the corner of his mouth and set down his fork. “You’re not about to suggest that I date Mrs. Bartlett, are you?”

  Davis guffawed at the thought. “No, Son. I think she might be too much woman for you…. I was just thinkin’ I might sit it out tonight, let you young folks go to the shindig without me. Maybe you can introduce Mandy to a judge or an older lawyer acquaintance you might have.”

  “Pop, are you serious? Amanda’s excited about going with you.”

  “Nah, I know. But she’s in her prime. She doesn’t need to think about me and if I’ve had enough to eat or if I’m getting overtired. She might cut loose and have some fun if I’m not there to distract her.”

  “Pop—”

  “Just make my excuses, will you, Son?”

  Will shrugged. “Sure. If you don’t want to go.”

  “I’ve got a Grisham novel to finish anyway.”

  “I saw that. Don’t donate it when you’re finished, okay? I’d like to give it a read before you do.”

  “Ohh, it’s a good one, too,” Davis said, and he followed it with a short whistle. “Keeps you thinkin’.”

  “Interesting novels,” Dr. Donnelly had suggested. “If he likes to read, it will help keep his mind sharp.” He made a mental note to order that e-reader for his dad.

  “So what’s the final verdict, Son?” Davis asked, wrangling Will’s wagon train of thought. “Who’s goin’ with whom to the big shindig? Are you taking Julianne?”

  “No,” he answered, shaking his head. “She’s still going with the ditch digger.”

  “And you? Alison, is it?”

  “No, Pop,” he said, tilting his chair back on two legs. “Alison and I broke up last night.”

  “Well, that one’s over before it got revved up, isn’t it? Who decided? You or her?”

  “She did,” Will admitted. “Over pizza at LaRosa’s. She sang a very familiar old tune.”

  “Don’t tell me. Julianne?”

  “Ding-ding-ding. You win the prize, Pop.”

  Davis shook his head and clucked, “Mm, mm, mm. Well, you aren’t winnin’ any of them, are you, Son?”

  “Not lately.”

  “You think there’s anything to this argument? Are you still pining for her, boy? Because if you are, it’s simple enough to—”

  “I have to go, Pop. I’ve got to pick up my dry cleaning, run a couple of errands. Do you want to come along?”

  “Nah,” he answered, waving a quick dismissal.

  Will planted a peck on his father’s cheek as he headed across the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at him.

  “Hey, Pop. I’ve heard they have some pretty great Parkinson’s research studies going on down at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know, I was offered a pretty decent job down there recently. Do you have any interest in pulling up stakes and running away from home, just us Hanes boys?”

  Davis pondered that for a moment. “You need that, Son? You need to put some miles between you and Cincinnati?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you figure that out. If it’s what you need, we’ll talk about it again. Fair enough?”

  Will nodded. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Later.”

  “Oh,” he said, stopping in his tracks. “Don’t mention this to Amanda or anyone, okay?”

  “Mention what?” he replied without looking up from his eggs.

  “All right,” Will said over a chuckle. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  “Suzi Q didn’t tell me a thing about how gorgeous you are,” Neil told Julianne’s reflection as he tossed a cape around her neck. “She just said you’re about to win a big award, and you have to be the belle of the ball.”

  “That sounds just like her,” Julianne said on a giggle as she admired her subtle—but flawless—makeup. She almost recognized the bright-eyed girl in the mirror as an airbrushed version of herself.

  “Now that I’m looking at you,” he observed, “I’m thinking curls. Lots and lots of curls.”

  She shrugged one shoulder and nibbled the corner of her lip. “I always wear my hair straight. It might be nice to switch things up tonight.”

  “And switch them up, we shall!” he exclaimed with flair. “You just put yourself into Neil’s hands, and let me do the magic.”

  Julianne needed a little magic in her life that night. No reason not to start early.

  Neil produced a cone-shaped ceramic iron, and he plugged it in to warm up while he combed out Julianne’s hair. When he tossed the comb to the blue enamel counter of his station, he tugged a black knit glove out of the drawer and put it on.

  “What’s that for?” Julianne questioned him.

  Neil chuckled as he snapped the wrist of the glove. “So I don’t burn the skin right off my fingers in the name of glamour.”

  He wrapped a section of golden hair around the cone of the iron and held it into place with his gloved fingers. A few seconds later, a beautiful spiral curl bounced into place, and he did the same with the next section.

  “Your hair is like spun silk,” he told her. “Not like our Suzi’s. It takes monthly gloss treatments to tame that mop of hers.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Oh, no, giiirl,” he sang, an animated smirk on his handsome African-American face. “But she’s a stunner when I’m through with her. Can I get an amen on that?”

  Julianne giggled, shrugged one shoulder and said, “Amen.”

  She smiled at Neil in the reflection of the mirror as he continued to turn her sleek tresses into spirited, exuberant curls.

  “You wouldn’t believe what I can take and turn into something,” he told her as he worked. “Not for you, though. You were a head-turner when you walked in here. But some of my clients, child. A lesser artist would turn them away with a screech!”

  Julianne tumbled into a fit of muffled laughter. “Mister Neil,” as her friend called him, had turned out to be everything Suzanne had depicted over the years. “A drama queen with an attitude,” she’d once told Julianne over lunch. “But a DaVinci with a blow-dryer.”

  “Girl, I’ve got a client coming in here in thirty minutes that any other artist would have turned away on the second visit. Every time she comes back to me, she’s turned my work into a helmet of hair spray.”

  “So why do you keep doing her hair then?” Julianne asked him. “I would think that would be frustrating.”

  “Ooooh, girl, you have no idea.” A moment later, he leaned over her shoulder and whispered, “Rumpelstiltskin! You get to see for yourself. Look what she’s done to my body wave!”

  Julianne glanced into the mirror to catch the reflection of the front door.

  “Hi-dee hi-dee, Mistah Neil!”

  Her heart thudded downward as she caught a glimpse of Lacey James standing at the front desk.

  “Julie?!”

  “Ooh-ooh,” Neil hummed. “How could I ever have known you would be friends with her?”

  “You couldn’t. And I’m not. There’s a hundred bucks in it for you if you give her a bad perm.”

  Neil cackled like a hen. Julianne could see that he loved a good catfight, and she sensed that he wasn’t above starting one himself, a suspicion set in stone when he seated her elbow-to-elbow with Lacey for their pedicures a short while later.

  “I can just hardly believe you’re a client of Mister Neil’s!” Lacey exclaimed after several minutes of ignoring each other. “I mean, I can usually tell, you know? With that plain-Jane hair of yours, it just wasn’t even in the realm, Julie.”

  “Well, your record stands. I am not a client. In fact, this is my first visit.”

  “Oh, well, that explains it, doesn’t it then?”

  “Yeah,” Julianne said with a sigh as she closed her eyes and leaned back to enjoy a relaxing foot massage—to pretend at least. “Normally, I just cut it myself with the chicken scissors from the kitc
hen, rub a little Crisco through it for shine, and call it a day.”

  Lacey’s total silence indicated that Julianne’s mother had, as suspected, been one hundred percent wrong all those years when she declared that “sarcasm accomplishes no good purpose.”

  “Color choice?” the manicurist asked her, and she opened her eyes with regret.

  “Very pale pink,” she replied. “Or clear.”

  “Nothing so provincial for me,” Lacey told the woman at her feet. “I’d like Pink Hottie for my toes, and Tickle Me Pink for my fingernails. They’ll go perfectly with my evening gown. Tonight’s going to be my night.”

  Lacey looked over at Julianne and sighed when she didn’t get a reaction.

  “You’re going somewhere special?” the woman asked her, and Lacey fell into her most Southern explanation of the Person of the Year nomination process, the award’s ties to the Bar Association, and her supposed ambivalence about winning.

  “It’s such an honor to be nominated,” she declared, and she took in a sharp breath before adding, “Isn’t that so, Julie?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said with a smile and a nod before turning away again and closing her eyes.

  After several minutes, Lacey spoke so quietly that she almost missed it. “Why do you hate me so much?” Julianne’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked at Lacey curiously. With an unexpected amount of emotion, she repeated the inquiry. “Please just tell me, Julie. I really want to know.”

  Julianne sighed, and she locked eyes for a quick flash of a moment with the woman painting Lacey’s toenails a shocking shade of neon pink.

  “I don’t hate you.”

  Lacey clicked her tongue and puffed out a sigh of exasperation. “We both know that isn’t true, so can’t you just do me the courtesy of telling me what it is about me that screeches on you like unmanicured fingernails on a classroom blackboard?”

  The sudden prick to her conscience surprised Julianne. She hadn’t counted a single cell in her entire body or spirit that cared one iota what Lacey thought. And yet in that moment, sitting next to the woman who rubbed her the wrongest way of anyone she’d ever met, she felt an unexpected apology bubbling up inside her.

  “If we’re going to have this conversation,” Julianne said, “you’re going to have to tell me something, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why are you so mean to me all the time?”

  The wheels turned behind Lacey’s dewy eyes, and then she groaned. “When am I mean to you?” she asked. She sniffed before adding, “When it’s not provoked, I mean.”

  “Every chance you get, you make side jabs about my hair, my clothes, my love life.”

  Lacey’s lips parted for only an instant before she clamped them shut.

  “See!” Julianne exclaimed. “You were just about to say something, weren’t you? You were going to say, ‘What love life?’”

  Lacey’s eyes lowered and she smiled. “You’re right. I was.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “That’s why you hate me so much?”

  “I don’t hate you,” Julianne repeated. “You just … bother me. It’s like something out of my control. I try to tolerate you, Lacey, I really do. But it’s like a chemical reaction. I just can’t help myself.”

  Lacey looked up at Julianne with a serious expression and asked, “Could you try?”

  “Can you try to stop insulting me all the time?”

  “I can try.”

  “And stop taking every possible opportunity to embarrass me in front of other people? Especially Will?”

  “I can do that.”

  Julianne didn’t know what to say to that. She hadn’t expected Lacey to make any concessions whatsoever.

  “And you’ll try to stop insulting me?” Lacey asked her. “Stop taking every opportunity to embarrass me in front of others? Especially Will?”

  Julianne laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you call him Will. It almost sounded strange.”

  “Tonight means a lot to me. I know you think it’s the most ridiculous idea since colored nail polish, but the fact is … I really like him, and I’d like to see if there’s any chance of a future with him, Julie.” She glared at Lacey until she recanted. “Julianne.”

  She smiled. “Was that so hard? It’s my name.”

  “Truce?”

  Lacey extended her hand, and Julianne stared at it for a moment before she took it. “Fine. Truce.”

  Grinning from one ear to the other, Lacey shook her hand with vigor.

  “But don’t make me regret it.” And Lord, please help me!

  Thirty minutes later, Julianne drove home wondering if she’d fallen asleep under the lull of a gentle foot massage and dreamed the most outrageous dream where lions lay down with lambs, dogs and cats played together, where she and Lacey James had come to an understanding.

  “Hi, Paul,” she stated after dialing his number at the stoplight on Winton and Sharon Roads. “Just wanted to leave a little reminder about tonight. Arrive at my place by seven?” She swallowed and inhaled sharply before adding, “Please, please don’t cancel, Paul. Okay. I’ll see you then.”

  The moment she walked through the front door, Phoebe gasped and hopped up from the sofa wearing the formal black dress she’d found at the vintage shop Julianne had pointed her toward. Her hair didn’t match the sight at all, pushed into several directions with clips, her face devoid of even a speck of makeup.

  “Julianne?”

  Laughing, she replied, “Yes, Phoebe. It’s me.”

  “Your makeup! You look … Can you do that on me?”

  “Probably not. It took a village.”

  Phoebe giggled. “Well, you look so beautiful. I love the hair.”

  “You don’t think it’s a little too … electric shock?”

  She belted out another laugh. “No. It’s lovely, really.” Then she added, “I made some snacks. Want to join me? It’s a big night for you. The protein will do you good.”

  Julianne lifted her shoulder and one hand. “Duh. Whatcha got?”

  “Ham and cheese roll-ups,” she said as she stepped out of the dress to reveal a tank top and jeans underneath. “Some strawberries, a little hummus.”

  “Did you raid someone else’s refrigerator?” she asked as she followed Phoebe into the kitchen and climbed up on one of the stools. “The neighbors don’t like that.”

  “I went shopping,” she replied as she slid several plates to the counter. “It’s really a miracle you’re not malnourished the way you eat.”

  “I think that’s why my mom and Davis insist on us coming to dinner over there once or twice a week. Just to make sure I’m not eating moldy cheese and outdated peanut butter from the jar.”

  “Now that I’ve gotten to know you better, I understand.”

  Julianne’s phone jingled, and she dug it out of her purse as she stuffed a small strawberry into her mouth and quickly swallowed it.

  She looked at the caller ID and told Phoebe, “It’s Veronica Caswell.” Wondering about a phone call from a client so late on a Saturday afternoon, she answered quickly. “Veronica. How are you?”

  “I’m terrible, Julianne. I’m sorry to call you on a Saturday, but I need your help.”

  She wondered if she might be asleep and dreaming as a beautiful glass carriage appeared, drawn by four magnificent white horses. “How can this be?” she exclaimed.

  “You can’t very well go to the ball on foot,” her fairy friend said with a twinkle.

  Julianne stood in the open doorway, willing her mouth to close. She couldn’t seem to help it. Paul looked so exquisite in his tuxedo that her jaw had dropped open when she saw him, and it took a few seconds before she could manage to crank it shut.

  “You came!” she exclaimed.

  “I said I would.”

  “Do you want to come in, or just … be on our way?”

  “You didn’t tell me there would be wheels,” he stated, nodding toward the street where a long white
limousine hugged the curb. “I don’t think we should keep the driver waiting.”

  “Oh,” she said, craning her neck to get a better look. “Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t think that’s for us.”

  “Yeah, it is. The driver told me so. Your friend Suzanne arranged it.”

  “What! Phoebe, there’s a limo out front,” she called. “Do you want to ride with us?”

  “A limo?” she said, poking her head around the corner. “Really?”

  “Suzanne sent it.”

  “She really is your fairy godmother, isn’t she?” Julianne chuckled. “I guess she is.”

  “Your mom called and asked me to be her date,” Phoebe said. “I’m picking her up in half an hour. Hey, do you have the paperwork?”

  Julianne grabbed it from the table by the door. “Got it. Did you arrange for the messenger to meet me at the hotel?”

  “They’ll be there at eight o’clock.”

  “Excellent.”

  Paul grimaced as Julianne tucked the paperwork under her arm, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door.

  “You’re doing business at this thing?” he inquired.

  “I have a client in some trouble. I’m just trying to help without missing the gala.”

  The driver appeared out of nowhere and opened the limousine door, standing next to it like a uniformed sentry.

  “You look enchanting,” he told Julianne, and she thanked him, wondering why Paul hadn’t been the one to compliment her.

  Once they settled on the long bench seat, Paul turned to her and smiled. “Speaking of doing business at the gala,” he said, and he raised his eyebrows. When she didn’t grasp the meaning, he finished the thought. “Are you going to pay me up front, or afterward?”

  Julianne’s heart thudded at the question.

  “I thought I could write you a check when we get back home. Is that all right?”

  “I guess so,” he conceded. “Okay.”

  She started to ask if he wanted her to get cash from the ATM instead, but she lassoed the sarcasm before it popped out. A good thing, too, because she feared he might have taken her up on it.

  Despite the fact that she made him think of a plantation owner’s daughter heading for the cotillion, Will had to admit that Lacey looked rather beautiful.