LITMIR.BIZ

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so much, the Parson Flat that Hillary coveted, my own beloved Ghost.

      “Huh?” was all I could say, as the sticker shock of fourteen hundred dollars before tax sank in. Really, the tax probably came to more than I’d ever spent on a single pair of shoes before.

      I suppose I must have realized in advance that the shoes would be expensive, but it had never occurred to me that for a few straps of leather and some fake jewels…

      Elizabeth Hepburn and Hillary already had their credit cards out.

      “Sure, it’s a lot of money—” Elizabeth Hepburn shrugged “—but I’ve got it. What else am I going to spend it on?”

      “I’ll never find shoes that are more perfect for me,” Hillary agreed.

      Easy to say, since the shoes they coveted cost less than mine. Hell, the ones Hillary wanted rang in at a measly six hundred and thirty dollars in comparison.

      Reluctantly, I undid the straps and gave up the Ghost, handing them back to the salesgirl, who looked shocked.

      “But you must buy these shoes,” she said, trying to hand them back to me.

      “But I can’t buy those shoes,” I said, taking a defensive step back, hands up as though to ward off a vampire.

      “Why ever not?” Elizabeth Hepburn asked. “Don’t you have a credit card?”

      “Oh, she has a credit card,” Hillary said. Apparently, I was back to being “she” again. “But she never lets herself use it. I guess she must realize, with her obsessive nature, she’d charge herself into bankruptcy if she ever got started.”

      “So what are you going to do,” Elizabeth Hepburn asked, “come back another day with cash? But what if they’re sold out?”

      “You don’t happen to have layaway, do you?” Hillary turned to the salesgirl who sadly shook her head.

      “I don’t have that kind of money saved anyway,” I said.

      “How is that possible?” Elizabeth Hepburn asked.

      “Hey, you met me when I was washing your windows, remember?” I said. “Hand-to-mouth is my way of life.”

      Elizabeth Hepburn didn’t even need to think about that for a second.

      “Oh, hell, Delilah,” she said, sympathy crinkling her blue eyes, “I’ll buy you the shoes.”

      “No,” I said.

      “Why ‘no’? I already said, I have all this money. What else am I going to use it for—monthly window washing? Leave it all to my housekeeper, Lottie, who awaits her inheritance upon my death like John Carradine playing Dracula waiting for an unbitten neck?”

      “No,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “I can’t accept charity. I won’t. If I want the shoes badly enough, and I do, I’ll find a way to earn the money on my own.”

      “But what if they’re not here in your size when you get back?”

      “I’ll just have to take that chance.”

      She must have seen that the window washer meant business because she stopped arguing.

      And then she put her Jimmy Choos back.

      And so did Hillary.

      “Wait a second,” I protested. “Just because I can’t afford mine, doesn’t mean you have to put—”

      “Oh, yes, we do,” Elizabeth Hepburn spoke with her own brand of firmness. “If you can’t get what you came for, none of us can. One for all and all for one and all that other crap Errol Flynn used to say to me.”

      “Exactly,” Hillary said.

      “But what if the shoes you love aren’t here in your sizes by the time I can afford to come back?” I asked.

      “That’s just the chance we’ll have to take,” Elizabeth Hepburn said.

      “Exactly,” Hillary said.

      Lord, what fools these mortals be.

      “But, Delilah?” Hillary added.

      “Hmm?”

      “Try to come up with a way to make the money quickly. I want those damn shoes.”

      5

      “No.”

      “But, Dad.”

      “I said no, Baby. I’m pretty sure you’re still smart enough to understand both sides of no. There’s the n and there’s the o. What’s so difficult here?”

      My dad had always called me Baby, for as long back as I could remember. It was my mother, whose own name was Lila, who’d named me.

      “I’m Lila,” she’d say, “you’re Delilah. It’s like Spanish. It means ‘of Lila.’”

      “There’s just one problem,” I’d say right back. “We’re not Spanish. Okay, two problems. There’s that extra h at the end, which your name doesn’t have, so technically speaking—”

      “Just eat your Cocoa Krispies.” She’d always cut me off right there.

      My dad always claimed he called me Baby because he couldn’t stand the name Delilah. Of course, totally besotted with my mother and therefore never wanting to hurt her, despite the numerous times he’d hurt her, he only claimed that outside of my mother’s hearing.

      “Do you know whom she named you after, Baby?” he’d ask, as if he hadn’t asked me the same question at least a hundred times. “She named you after the girl in that Tom Jones song! Your mother was a huge Tom Jones fan! I swear, if I hadn’t been sitting right there beside her at his concerts, she’d have thrown up her panties right there on the stage. What, I ask you, kind of name is that to give to a baby? Delilah in the song drives her man crazy, then she cheats on him, and then she gets killed for it.”

      “But, Dad,” I tried again now.

      “No, Baby. If I taught you how to play blackjack, Lila would roll over in her grave, and then where would I be?”

      “Where you are right now,” I could have answered, “alone.”

      Where my dad was right now, physically speaking, was a one-bedroom apartment in a section of Danbury just a cut above where Conchita and Rivera lived. As a professional gambler, Black Jack Sampson had enjoyed his good years (we’d once lived in a five-bedroom house even though we’d only needed two of them) and his bad years (like the last one). And, if we’re being totally honest here, he was right: my mother wouldn’t approve of his teaching me how to play blackjack. But, oh, did I want those Jimmy Choos…

      “Your mother might even come back to life just to kill me if I taught you how to play blackjack,” he said.

      He was probably right about that, too.

      I studied my dad, a man whose personality was too big to be contained by his present tiny circumstances.

      Black Jack Sampson had just turned seventy but had only just begun to look even close to sixty, his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, tall frame and lean body, combined with the fact that he always wore a suit even in summer, making him look more like he belonged on a riverboat in the middle of an Elvis Presley movie rather than with the polyester bus crew going off to play the slots at Atlantic City. Black Jack had met my mother, a schoolteacher who loved her work almost as much as she loved him, at a voting rights rally back in 1965—Lila was rallying while Black Jack made book on the side on whether the act would pass—and it had been love at first sight. He was thirty at the time and she was twenty-eight, but it had been twelve long infertile years before they’d been able to conceive a baby, me, hence the huge age difference between me and my parents, and there had been no more babies afterward, try as they might. True, these

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