Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  The dealer—my dad—turned over his hole card to reveal a Five: Fifteen. Then he dealt himself a Two and had to stand on Seventeen. The other players at the table, even if they were imaginary, had all either busted, lost or pushed with the dealer.

  I was the only winner.

  My original one-hundred-dollar stake? It was now worth a cool six hundred. Of course, I’d had to nerve-rackingly risk another two hundred to get myself there, but still.

  “Does that feel good or what?” Black Jack asked.

  “It feels…great!” I had to admit. I was still tingling. Then I thought about it too much and I deflated a bit. “But that’d never happen in real life,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Stuff like that happens in casinos all the time. Believe me, it’ll happen to you. In fact, you can bet on it.”

  He seemed so sure of himself, but it was impossible for me to believe I’d ever get dealt a classic textbook case like that.

  “It’s almost time for the kickoff,” he said, grabbing the remote control. “I think Jerry Rice might retire this year, but who knows.”

  “Dad, what you were saying before…”

  “Which part?” He was already clicking through the channels.

  “About thinking you were invincible when you were younger. Does that mean you no longer believe that? Does that mean you think you can be beat?”

  Of course, the evidence that he could be beat was right there in the shabbiness of our surroundings. My dad could be beat, had been beat.

  “God, no,” he said, clearly offended. Then his expression softened. “If I believed that, ever really believed that, I’d have to quit, wouldn’t I?”

  I surprised my dad, and myself, by staying through the first half.

  “You’re still here?” he said, surprised, as the cheerleaders took the field for the half-game show.

  “Didn’t you notice me exchanging your empty wineglass for a beer sometime around when that guy tried to kick the ball through those post thingies?”

  He looked at the beer, now empty, in his hand. “Huh.” He got up out of his chair, went to the fridge to get another. “So, what do you think of the game?”

  “I think I still don’t understand it. Or why anyone would do it. Or why anyone would watch it.”

  “Just like your mother.” He held the bottle of Jake’s Fault out. “Another?”

  I shook my head. “I still have to drive.”

  He popped the top on his beer.

  “So,” he said, “Atlantic City, huh?”

  I swung my arms back and forth. “Yup.”

  “You know, there are only two real meccas for true gamblers—Atlantic City and—” he paused for the kind of respectful moment of silence normally reserved only for those times when he mentioned my mother’s passing “—Vegas.”

  “What about all those casinos that have sprung up on riverboats and tribal land all over the country?”

  “Pale imitators. Just looking for a way to bump their economies. They might as well stick to Lotto.”

  “What about Foxwoods?”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  “But you go there.”

  “Only because it’s in Connecticut. If I had to cross state lines to get there, I wouldn’t bother.”

  I felt curiously miffed on Foxwoods’s behalf. It had certainly seemed nice enough to me. They had Billy Charisma there and Furthest Guy. I’d won decent money there.

  In defense of casinos everywhere, then, I tried one last time.

  “What about Monte Carlo?” I asked, rather belligerently, I must admit. “Doesn’t Monte Carlo rate?”

  “Well,” he said, getting his own belligerent jones on, “if you want to go all foreign on me…”

  “Go…foreign…what?”

  “It’s just that if you have to hop on a plane—”

  “But don’t you have to hop on a plane for Vegas?”

  “—and go to some foreign country where people wear crowns, then you might as well be in a James Bond movie and who wants to be in a James Bond movie?”

  “Roger Moore? Sean Connery? Timothy Dalton? Pierce Brosnan? That new guy?”

  “You remember Dalton?” He swigged from his beer. “I’m impressed.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “I guess it’s just my way of saying I’m proud of you, Baby. One night at Foxwoods and you’re off to Atlantic City. You don’t mess around. Next thing you know, you’ll be cleaning up in Vegas.”

  10

  “All I’m saying,” Conchita said, “is that Atlantic City is no Vegas.”

  “Atlantic City ain’t even no Foxwoods,” said Rivera.

  What? Did everyone in my life have an opinion on the hierarchical ranking of casinos?

  “Does this mean you’re not coming?” I sort of whined.

  It was now Thursday. We were on our way to the first job of the day and all week long, I’d been putting off asking them about the upcoming weekend. Maybe I’d sensed they wouldn’t be as enthusiastic as they’d been the first time.

  “Look, chica,” Rivera said, “Foxwoods was a lot of fun. I’m not saying no different. But spending a whole day on a bus driving to New Jersey…”

  “What about the limo from last time?” I asked. I’d kind of envisioned us hitting the boardwalk in style, kind of like the Rat Pack, only with prettier hair. My dad always had stories about Sinatra and Company in Atlantic City.

  “Remember when I told you, you don’t want to know where I got the limo from?” Conchita asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, you still don’t and it was a one-off so we can’t go there no more.”

  “What about you?” I turned to Stella.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “If it’s not good enough for The Girls From Brazil, I’m taking a pass on this one.”

  “Great.” I sulked. “One minute I’ve got a posse. The next minute I’ve got bupkes.”

  “You thought we were your posse?” Rivera could barely contain her laughter.

  “What about your best friend and, might I add, very pretty roommate, Hillary?” Conchita asked. “Isn’t she going?”

  “Oh, she’s going all right.”

  “Well, then,” Conchita said, “I don’t think she’d like to be compared to bupkes.”

  “Do you even know what bupkes is?”

  “Stop with the language squabbles,” Stella said. “I need to keep my eyes on the road.” She turned to me. “If you need a posse so bad, why don’t you call Elizabeth Hepburn again?”

  “I guess,” I muttered. “I’ll give her a try on my lunch hour.” I’d actually been planning on inviting her, anyway. I’d just been so busy lately with things like practicing blackjack with Black Jack as well as other stuff like, you know, dreaming about Billy Charisma.

  I’d also been busy with Sudoku, the nine-by-nine Japanese form of crossword puzzle that uses numbers instead of letters, which was, I might add, ruining my life. Degree of difficulty ranged from “easy” to “fiendish.”

  I blamed Hillary for this newfound addiction, an addiction that had me working the puzzles at breakfast, in the bathroom, in the van on the way to work; it was even getting in the way of my reading. I blamed Hillary because it was Hillary who had, oh so innocently, opened up her copy of the New York Post one day and, oh so innocently, observed, “Oh, look! In addition to the jumble puzzle, they now daily carry these little Japanese number puzzles. It says here that Sudoku is ‘the Official Utterly Addictive Number-Placing Puzzle.’”

  Hadn’t she realized what was inevitable even as she said that? She might as well have found a heroin addict and donated a truckload of syringes and a lifetime supply. Those innocent-looking yet evil numbers were now raising my blood pressure on a daily basis.

  “Should that be a one in the center of the third grid or a nine?” I muttered. “Crap, I should probably do this in pencil.”

  “Put the puzzle away,” Stella said. “You can have your little nervous
breakdown on your lunch break. It’s almost time to go to work.”

  We pulled up into the driveway of the first job of the day, but I was still in mutter mode.

  “It was just so much nicer when we were a group.”

  So what if we hadn’t really hung out as a group—to me it’d felt like we were one.

  As Conchita got our equipment out of the back of the van, Rivera stood off to one side, arms folded.

  “I just got a bad feeling about this place,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Stella said. “We’ve never even been here before.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Rivera said. “How often do we have to tell you, boss? Read my lips. No. New. Jobs.”

  “You two are crazy,” Stella said. “How do you expect me to make enough money to pay you if we don’t take on new customers occasionally? Sure, our base is strong—” there were times when Stella sounded more like a candidate for the presidency of the United States than like the proprietor of Squeaky Qlean “—but if we don’t keep adding new constituents, we’ll just crumble.”

  “Maybe.” Rivera sulked. “But I don’t like this new constituent. I’m telling you, boss, I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

  Rivera’s prophetic bad feeling proved true in record time.

  Not five minutes into the job, Mrs. Josephine Cornwall, owner of the McMansion we were doing in Weston, was trailing my every move.

  One problem with being the Inside Girl is that all of the wackos follow you around. After all, they’re not about to get up on a ladder with wheels to trail the Outside Girls. The Outside Girls typically only had to listen to complaints when the job was done.

  “I think you missed a spot on this window,” Mrs. Cornwall said.

  “Aren’t you going to clean out the tracks and the window wells better?” Mrs. Cornwall said. “Stella said you would clean those things.”

  I went back to the first window and cleaned a spot that wasn’t there. I recleaned tracks and window wells that were already as clean as they would ever get.

  “I think you missed a spot on this window,” Mrs. Cornwall said.

  She was talking about the first window again.

  “Have you ever tried Clorox for the tracks and window wells?” Mrs. Cornwall said. “Here, let me go get you a bottle of Clorox.”

  If I used Clorox on every track and window well, I’d wind up with the skin peeling off my fingers, plus I’d die of asphyxiation. But she was the paying customer…

  “Here, I brought you a new toothbrush. You can clean out the cracks with that.”

  While I got busy with the toothbrush, Mrs. Cornwall got busy persecuting the Outside Girls. But, instead of using the ladder on wheels I’d always envisioned—you know, like the kind they have in bookstores and fancy private libraries—she just opened the next window over from me and screeched.

  “I think you missed a spot on the window!” Mrs. Cornwall screeched at Rivera.

  “I think you missed a spot on the window!” Mrs. Cornwall screeched at Conchita.

  “I think you missed a spot on the window!” Mrs. Cornwall screeched at Stella.

  It’s never a good idea to screech at Stella.

  Then Mrs. Cornwall started in on me again.

  “I think you—”

  God, she didn’t have to screech; I was standing right there. And, anyway, as I said, it’s never a good idea to screech at Stella.

  “That’s it!” Even from the inside, Stella’s words were louder than Mrs. Cornwall’s as she threw down her squeegee from the extension ladder and started to descend. But by the time Stella was in the front door, she had mastered her temper and her voice was calm as she called up the stairs to me, “C’mon, Delilah, we’re moving it out.”

  I dropped my own squeegee in my bucket, gathered up my paper towels.

  “What’s going on?” Mrs. Cornwall asked, perplexed.

  “We’re leaving,” I said, passing her on my way out the bedroom door.

  “But why?” she asked, following me down the circular grand staircase.

  Well, I couldn’t very well tell her it was because she was a colossal neurotic bitch, could I?

  “I’m not sure,” I said, going out through the main door. “You’ll have to talk to Stella about that.”

  At the van, Rivera and Conchita were already packing away the equipment. I tossed my bucket in behind theirs as Stella strapped the extension ladder down on the roof.

  “Where are you going?” Mrs. Cornwall wanted to know.

  “I’m afraid we have to go now,” Stella said and I could tell that suddenly there was no anger left in her at all. “Thank you for the opportunity to do your windows, but we’re leaving.”

  “But how can you leave me like this? You didn’t finish the job!”

  “You have forty windows on your house, Mrs. Cornwall. It just took us two hours to clean four windows. That’s about eight times slower than our usual rate.”

  “You usually clean at a rate of sixteen windows an hour?” Mrs. Cornwall was stunned. “But what human being can clean that fast?”

  Stella nodded at me and I saluted with two fingers proudly. I was, after all, The Golden Squeegee.

  “If we continue on like this,” Stella explained with the painstaking care Hillary might use when talking to one of her more unstable clients, “it will take my crew two and a half days to complete a job that shouldn’t even take a full morning. I’m sorry, but I just can’t have that.”

  “But how can you leave me like this? You didn’t finish the job!”

  “But you’re ahead of where you were when we got here. Just look,” Stella said, pointing to the four windows on the top floor. They sparkled like a South African diamond mine magically turned inside out to let in the sun. “You’ve got four windows that are cleaner than any four windows in the world…and you got them for free!”

  “But how can you—?”

  At last, Stella just had to drive away, with Mrs. Cornwall still shouting after us from the driveway. I was scared to turn around in my seat, scared I’d see her chasing after us, shouting like that boy at the end of Shane.

  “Window washers! Come baaack!”

  “Some customers are just crazier than others,” Conchita said.

  “What makes someone get like that?” Rivera said.

  “The nice thing about being the boss,” Stella said, “is that I can just decide to bag the money if the job isn’t worth it.”

  “It must be great having that kind of authority.” I sucked up. “Maybe we could bag—”

  “We’re not bagging Mr. Johnson as a client,” Stella cut me off. How did she know I was going to suggest that? I guess she, like everyone, knew how much I hated doing Mr. Johnson’s house. The rest of the crew called him Mr. Clean, but they said it kindly. That’s because they never had to be Inside Girl for Mr. Clean.

  “I just hope I never get as crazy as Mrs. Cornwall or Mr. Johnson,” I said.

  “Ha!” Stella laughed. “You already are.”

  During the unanticipated downtime between the job we had walked out on and the next job, I pushed my Sudoku puzzle aside just long enough to give Elizabeth Hepburn a ring.

  “Let me see if she can come to the phone,” Lottie said.

  I knew from what Elizabeth Hepburn had said previously that Lottie was her housekeeper. She didn’t sound as awful as her boss had said, maybe a little bit abrupt. Could she really be rubbing her hands together in anticipation of her boss’s death?

  “Delilah!” Elizabeth Hepburn said. Despite the enthusiasm of her greeting, her voice sounded weak, thinner than I remembered. “I told Lottie I wasn’t in to anyone this week, but that if you called, I’d want to talk to you.”

  Why wouldn’t she be in to anyone but me? I knew she was lonely a lot of the time. Surely, if Lauren Bacall decided to give her a ring…

  “I’m calling about the trip to Atlantic City this weekend,” I said. “I figured we should coordinate what time—”
<
br />   “I was just telling Lottie this morning that I was sure you’d call about that today. I knew you wouldn’t forget about me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

  “Bad news?”

  “My heart’s been going pitter-patter lately and it’s not the good kind of pitter-patter, like I used to get with Danny Kaye. My physician says I should just take it easy for a few days while he monitors the situation.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. Do you want me to come over?” Stella would probably kill me, or at least fire me, if I asked her to drop me off on the way to the next job, but so what? “Can I bring you anything?”

  “Oh, no, dear, you’re very sweet. But I’ve got everything I need right here. Lottie takes very good care of me. Well, sort of. There’s just one thing I need for you to do for me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Win this weekend!”

  “I can do that!” I tried to match her enthusiasm.

  “Oh, and maybe just one other thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Kiss Frank for me.”

  “Frank?”

  “Sinatra. You are going to Atlantic City, aren’t you?”

  But wasn’t Frank…

  Then I remembered my promise to her that night in the limo after Foxwoods, my promise to keep her secret, implicit in which was my promise to go along with the game.

  “Of course,” I said brightly. “As soon as I see Ol’ Blue Eyes, I’ll pucker right up.”

  11

  The bus to Atlantic City was like, well, a bus to Atlantic City.

  “Don’t scuff the Choos on the metal steps!” Hillary admonished as she boarded behind me. Great. Most people had a backseat driver. Me, I had a backseat boarder. Her admonition, the third of its kind in as many minutes, made me regret her largesse.

  Earlier in the week, after I’d given her the money for the Momo Flats, she’d immediately phoned the Manhattan store, ordered the shoes and had them express mailed. When the package had arrived, I’d thought she’d want to try them on right away (that’s what I would have done) and that she would have then modeled them for me with pride right away (that’s what I would have done). But, being the annoyingly atypical human being she could sometimes be, instead she’d merely snatched the package from the UPS man and scurried off with it to her room, slamming the door behind her. What was she going to do in there all alone with them, some kind of satanic rite?