Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (5 page)

“How much?” I blurted out.

“Yes,” Elizabeth Hepburn piped up. “How much for all of these? It looks like you'll be making at least three sales today.”

The salesgirl very coolly named prices for the Fayre that Elizabeth Hepburn had loved 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.”

“N
o.”

“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 days having first-time parents in their forties wasn't a rarity, but, when I was little, my mother looked more like a grandmother by comparison to my friends' mothers.

Not that I'd minded.

Growing up, I thought my mother was the greatest lady who ever lived, a belief I'd maintained until the day she'd died ten years ago. And my mother, in turn, had thought my dad was the greatest man who'd ever lived…except for his gambling.

“Blackjack killed your mother,” he said.

We'd had this conversation enough times over the years for me to know he wasn't referring to himself when he said, “Blackjack killed your mother;” he was referring to the card game.

“Blackjack did not kill Mom,” I said.

How I missed my mother! She was the steady parent, the one who didn't suffer obsessions that worked against her. In her absence, I'd become Daddy's Girl. But what a daddy! From my dad, I'd learned to be the kind of woman who could sit with men while they watched sporting events but nothing about what it was like to be the kind of woman men would want to do more romantic things with. I'm not complaining here, by the way, just stating.

“Blackjack did not kill Mom,” I said again. “Mom died of cancer.”

“Same difference,” he sniffed.

“Not really.”

“There was a time, when you were just a little baby, Baby, that I dreamed of you growing up to one day follow in my footsteps.”

I had a mental flash of a younger version of my dad, holding baby me in his arms and crooning,
“Lullaby, and good night, when the dealer has busted…”

“We would have made quite a team,” I said. “And we still could,” I added, thinking about what becoming great at blackjack could achieve for me: a pair of Jimmy Choos.

“You don't understand,” he said. “I promised your mom right before she died that I'd make sure you lived a better life than we'd lived, one free of the addictions that had destroyed the two of us.”

Clearly, the man didn't know his own daughter. Me, free of addictions? Some days, I thought I'd never be free of them.

“Mom was an addict, too?” I was shocked. “What was Mom addicted to?”

He studied his wing tips, his cheeks coloring a bit.

“Me,” he answered. “Lila was addicted to me.”

“That's not true, Dad. She wasn't addicted. She just plain loved you.”

“Same difference.” He straightened his shoulders. “And she'd hate it if I passed the blackjack compulsion on to you.”

I thought he was making too much of this. My parents had had a happy marriage. I
knew
they'd been happy.

“C'mon, Dad,” I wheedled. “Wouldn't it be great to have someone really follow in your footsteps.
‘Lullabye, and good night, when the dealer has busted'
—”

“Who taught you that song?” he demanded.

“I don't know.” I shrugged. “I thought I just made it up.”

“It just sounded so familiar there for a second.”

“But wouldn't it be great to have me follow in your footsteps?” I tried again.

“What about poker?” he said suddenly. “Everyone's playing poker these days. At least if you started to gamble at poker, your mother might get confused when she comes back to haunt me since poker's not blackjack.”

I considered what he was suggesting.

Even I was aware that poker was the current “in” game and it was a game that I had some familiarity with. Back in my junior-high days, my best girlfriend and I had started a poker ring while serving an in-school suspension for getting our classmates drunk during the science fair. We'd charged a dollar a game to play and even a couple of teachers, miffed that my best girlfriend and I had taken the fall when so many others had been involved, had stopped by to play a few hands while on their coffee breaks. I think we were all vaguely aware that they could have been fired for their complicit behavior, but it was a private school—this had been one of Black Jack Sampson's better years for winning—and we were thrilled to take their money. Besides, once the weeklong in-house suspension had ended, life at school had gone back to normal and we'd folded up the gaming table with my best girlfriend and I each about fifty dollars richer. Of course, I'd never told my parents any of this because Lila would have been too mortified while Black Jack would have been too proud, thereby increasing Lila's mortification.

“Nah,” I finally concluded. “Sure, poker's a trend right now, but any trend can end at any minute. Blackjack, on the other hand, is a classic. It's eternal. And, hey, I'm
Black Jack
Sampson's daughter, aren't I? I'm certainly not
Poker
Sampson's daughter. C'mon, Dad. It'll be great. It'll be like having the son you always dreamed of.”

It was a cheap shot to take, and I knew it even as I said it. Black Jack had always wanted a son; anyone could see that every time he tried to teach me how to hit a baseball only to have the bat twirl me around in such a big circle that I wound up dizzy on the lawn or every time he tried to teach me how football was played, keeping in mind the importance of covering the spread, only to have me yawn myself to sleep. But it was the one card I had to play, the only card that would get me what I wanted.

“C'mon, Dad. It'll be fun.”

He ran one hand through his hair.

“You have to promise not to tell your mother about this,” he warned.

I raised my right hand. “Scout's honor.”

“‘O, I am fortune's fool.'”

See where I got it from? Black Jack and Lila were always quoting Shakespeare at me.

He walked out to the kitchen and I heard a drawer slide open and shut. When he returned, he had a fresh deck of red-and-white Bicycle cards in his hand. He tore off the cellophane wrapper and as he did so, he looked me dead in the eye, giving me the answer I'd come there for in a single word.

“Yes.”