“THIS IS FOR FLATS,” BECKY told a middle-schooler, yanking away the bin before the girl could dump in an armload of buckled low-heel loafers that someone should have purged from her closet a decade ago. “Don’t you know what flats are?”
“They’re like party shoes?”
“They are not ‘like’ party shoes, you mean they are a type of party shoe. But flat! These have a heel.” Becky took away one of the girl’s horrible old-lady loafers to show her. “And they’re not party shoes. Put them in women’s casual.” She pointed with her elbow to a table across the room.
Ingrid looked up from a mountain of tangled dirty sneakers. “Pretty sure we don’t have to subdivide by kingdom, phylum, species.”
“If we do this, we’re doing it right.” It was a gloomy October Saturday, their second year organizing the Sole2Sole shoe donation drive, and both Becky and Ingrid only now remembered why last year they’d sworn not to do this event again. A low-level smell filled the church basement, made worse by the humid rain smacking at the few and ancient windows. Ingrid had brought muffins, but even the kids turned them down. Senior citizens and PTA moms grimly dumped out box after box of used shoes into a growing hill in the middle of the room.
TJ whirled from bin to bin, carrying one light-up sneaker protectively. As he came close to Becky she fished around in the sneaker bin, found the matching shoe and held it out to him. TJ took it with a grin that made Becky reflexively smile back.
Becky felt uncharacteristically lighthearted. Last year’s Christie’s money was long gone. Had flown away with startling rapidity. Still, after taking care of the expenses she couldn’t put off, she’d had 75K to slip into the pension fund to make her feel, if not clean or absolved, at least a little bit better. Now she was back to basics on a smaller scale: take some, buy and sell some, plug some back in where she could. Keeping it tight to the line.
Which reminded her, all day yesterday she’d meant to drive into Chicago, pick up a check that would cover what was a pretty ugly hole in the town’s Operations account. An oversight. She wasn’t usually sloppy. But with the shoe drive, one thing and then another kept popping up at the office and she hadn’t been able to sneak away. It would have to be next week. She could drive up Monday, get the check deposited before Tuesday’s finance meeting.
“Five o’clock, okay?” Ingrid said, more cheerful than the host of a nine-year-old girl’s surprise sleepover should be. “You promise? Neil’ll be wrangling the grill and what are the odds this sketchy magician shows up shit-faced. Oops.” She glanced at a nearby retiree. “I really need help with the food. And the favor bags. And the games.”
“Isn’t Rachel too old for a magician?”
Ingrid yanked one Velcroed tennis shoe unstuck from its mate. “I don’t think some rent-a-clown is going to knock her socks off, but it’s the best I could do. With all that’s going on, I want to make her feel special.”
“Makes sense.” Becky snapped a plastic lid onto a box filled with sorted shoes, hoping Ingrid wouldn’t trip into the latest in the school funding saga. Most of the other families Ingrid had joined up with this time weren’t even from Pierson! Ingrid had a knack for borrowing other people’s troubles.
“Wait a minute. You brought these, didn’t you?” Ingrid held up a pair of high heels and waved them at her. She had recently taken up knitting—it’s supposed to be soothing, she said, for fuck’s sake—and now went everywhere festooned in an acrylic scarf, no matter that it hadn’t dropped below fifty degrees yet and most people still had potted plants outside. Today’s scarf was extra-long, brown and cream, made with a loose sort of weave, so that the whole thing resembled a fisherman’s net tossed over her friend’s soft rounded body.
“These aren’t even worn, you dummy,” Ingrid said, examining the slingback Manolos. “They must have cost, what, two hundred?”
“Hardly,” Becky said, walking around the echoing gym to flip on the hulking fluorescents. She’d paid four hundred ninety, retail. “They’re duds, they pinch.”
“Take them to the consignment place!”
“Should we have people start on the—” But when she turned around Ingrid had put the shoes on and was stepping around in circles to show off, arms outstretched, chinos pulled up over her knees. She danced up close to Becky, swinging the end of her scarf around in circles, and started singing the intro to Madonna’s “Vogue.”
“Come on,” Becky said, but Ingrid lassoed her with the scarf and now they were bumping together in a silly grinding way, Ingrid laughing each time she toppled off a heel. Others were watching with smiles. Becky looked down and saw her friend’s sturdy calves, carefully shaved below her rolled-up khakis, a faint green line roping down behind a knee. Varicose veins, brought on by Ingrid’s new double shifts at the horrible giant Polish place out on 52, where one table of cheap old biddies could keep her running for ice, butter, lemons, and then tip less than ten percent. Becky could murder every one. But Ingrid was sweet to them, helping one lady to her car, chasing after another with her forgotten pierogis.
This big dummy. Becky’s eyes filled, and in horror she gave Ingrid a hard hug. Ingrid, surprised, hugged her back, and then when Becky released her Ingrid took off the heels and rolled down her pants, and soon they were back to sorting piles.
After a while another volunteer mom strolled over, coffee in hand, to lean a hip against Ingrid’s table and chat. While she and Ingrid talked about a school event or maybe a party Becky hadn’t been invited to, not that she would have wanted to go, Becky pretended to be absorbed in her mound of shoes while subtly studying Ingrid.
“And then with the long weekend, we were going to drive up to Kevin’s parents’ place in Waukegan, but Sarah has a fever, so—”
Becky hoisted the box of shoes. “What long weekend?”
The other mom, whose lips were lined two shades too dark for her lipstick, glanced over with visible distaste. “Columbus Day,” she said flatly. “Just when they get into a routine at school, the holidays start.”
Ingrid nodded sympathetically.
“Columbus Day?” Becky’s brain and speech couldn’t catch up.
“Monday,” the mom said. “Aren’t you all closed, at Town Hall?”
“No. Yes.” How had she not known? It all clicked into place, the half-heard comments she hadn’t bothered to pay attention to: Ken’s annual fishing trip with a childhood friend; Mrs. Fletcher’s “see you in a few” instead of her customary grumbling about Monday coming soon enough. Sheena asking what plans Ms. Farwell had for the weekend. “Shoe drive,” she’d muttered, thinking it was a bit much how underlings wanted to know everyone’s plans. When she’d started at Town Hall you didn’t even let on you knew your superiors had weekends, let alone breezily chat about what they were doing with them.
But Monday couldn’t be Columbus Day, because that meant a bank holiday. And if Monday was a bank holiday, the check she had planned to deposit first thing—the check she wouldn’t have until late tomorrow—wouldn’t transfer through the accounts to hit the city’s Operations fund before Ken carefully reviewed it for their 10 am finances meeting. She needed Monday. She’d counted on Monday!
It was 8:51 am.
Becky started sorting shoes in double time. She heard nothing from the moving lips of Ingrid and the other mom, she didn’t even hear herself explain the sorting system to the new volunteers. She counted shoes, stacked boxes, fixed a broken packing tape dispenser one of the kids handed her, but all the while a calm and desperate reckoning took place behind her eyes. Hours, mileage, dollars; what she’d say, do, wear. The instant all of that slotted into place, a plan with a hair-thin margin of success, she began to move.
“I got to be somewhere,” she called, running past a stunned Ingrid, slowing only to grab up the pair of Manolos, her Manolos, for her wild flight to the car.
“What? What?”
“I’ll call you!”
It was 8:59 when she hit the gas in the church parking lot.
10:42. Becky’s face against the glass door of the Stemen Gallery in River North, Chicago. OPEN AT 11 read the sign, but surely someone must be in there somewhere, in the back office? She’d never had to pee worse in her life.
10:43. Caught sight of a police officer writing her a ticket across the street. Ran back to the car, disagreed vehemently about whether four inches of bumper sticking out into a tow zone really mattered—her damn flashers were on!—but ended up with a ticket for $140 and a stern order to move the vehicle, now.
10:56. Circled the block three times before finding a spot on Randolph around the corner. Ran back to Stemen, Manolos on cobblestones, to find the gallery girl balancing a giant mocha latte while unlocking the door.
11:14. Argued with the gallery girl—after politely requesting the employee restroom—about the status of her account, her need for a check today—now—and whether it was possible to call the owner, yes, at this very moment, which was definitely not “the crack of dawn.”
11:36. Finalized negotiations with the owner, trading a painful and outrageous fifteen percent cut on what she was owed for the ability to take a check now. Gallery girl took revenge by pausing midway to give detailed directions to a lost delivery guy who poked his head in, looking for a furniture store that used to share the building.
11:41. Ripped another ticket from the windshield, this one for not feeding the meter, $65, and drove ten blocks in the wrong direction trying to find the entrance to 209 West.
12:07. Inched up to seventy-five miles per hour, eyes locked on the roadway. One cop going the opposite direction near DeKalb sent her back down to sixty-nine. Fingers of sweat formed under her hair and collar and there was a tightening cinch around her middle rib cage imagining Ken’s puzzled smile, Tuesday before the financials meeting, when he was unable to square the account’s discrepancy.
12:51. She did it! Sauk Valley Credit Union, a majestically squat beige standalone, with all the free parking one could want in the mall’s lot behind. But inside, check in hand, Becky got flattened. “Oh no, I’m sorry,” the teller said. “The branch manager already left for the day and we’re just finishing up the—”
Where. When. Where did he—
“Well, he usually picks up lunch on Saturdays, doesn’t he, Jo? Panda Express.”
12:52. Becky ran across the grass divider, up onto the macadam, swerved around pissed-off cars and grocery-cart moms who yelled take it easy. She hit the glass door of Panda Express with so much force that the paper-hatted workers all looked up in unison. She pegged the branch manager at first sight and immediately did two things: pointed out the time, 12:54, and laser-beamed into his young fleshy face every iota of Farwell magnetism she possessed. Also she’d buy him lunch. Back they went to the bank for her deposit.
1:14. Becky sat in the stuffy driver’s seat of her car and cried. Half-cried, half-whooped. To think that broccoli beef and an order of cream cheese rangoon was all that stood between her and discovery—how could anyone not laugh to the point of nausea? That baby-faced manager in the poly-blend suit, short-sleeved dress shirt—he saved the day, saved the two Rothkos, her one Klimt, and several Bonnards, the Miró sketches and . . . Had he ever seen a piece of art, real art, Branch Manager Mike Dobbin? Because he may have single-handedly preserved the integrity of a collection worth $300 million. By processing the deposit of a $1,700 check.
Later in the day—she didn’t know how much later, sunk in the Art Barn with a bottle of Château Latour—one of the many sucking-up gifts regularly arriving at her P.O. box—Becky regained her calm. Ingrid would be pissed at her, but when she got home the first thing she’d done was send over one of the girls from the office temp pool with the promise of twenty dollars per hour for as long as Ingrid needed her. Tacking up crepe paper and icing cupcakes weren’t Becky’s forte, even Ingrid would agree. And Becky was too exhausted to take on another project.
When hunger forced her aboveground again the sky had darkened. She sang along to Tanya Tucker while microwaving some broccoli cheddar soup, then curled up on the couch with a stack of personnel reports: it was annual review season. Before bed, she’d have half a sleeve of SnackWell Vanilla Cremes and play the next section of Rosetta Stone’s conversational Italian.
But she couldn’t shake a keyed-up mood, an uneasiness. Why hadn’t Ingrid called back? Not once, not on Becky’s cell or her answering machine. She gave up on the SnackWells and got in the car. “It’s the perfect time for me to show up,” she argued aloud. The kids would be watching their movie, and the bottle of Cab she had on the passenger seat would soothe Ingrid by the time the cork was pulled.
The Yeskos’ house was quiet and dark when she pulled into the driveway. No balloons tied to the metal porch railing. No shrieking pack of kids thundered to the sound of the doorbell. Becky waited, then went around back and let herself in through the mudroom. In the kitchen the lights were off, dishwasher thrumming. An open can of Pringles on the counter.
Becky followed the muffled noise of the TV down carpeted steps to the basement, where Neil Yesko was on the couch watching the game, one leg thrown sideways, beer in hand.
“Hi, Becky. What a super surprise.”
“Where is everyone?” Becky tried to avoid addressing Neil’s crotch in its green sweatpants. “The kids, the party . . .” She gestured to the darkened house. “Your wife?”
“Huh.” Neil glanced to the TV and back. “Well, my kids are upstairs asleep, Jesus Christ God willing, and my wife is at a hotel in Iowa City, and as for a party . . . you’re looking at it.”
Becky sat on the basement stairs. “But she—I was supposed to—” Did he say Iowa City?
“Yes, you were, Becky Farwell.” Neil muted the TV in one stabbing gesture. “You were supposed to come over here middle of the day, and pop the champagne that’s upstairs in my fridge, and get in our car where you’d be driven two hours just in time for the opening acts at the Country Bash Fall Festival. Which is on my credit card as we speak, two all-weekend passes and a non-refundable hotel.”
Becky couldn’t catch up. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how surprises usually work.” Neil put the volume back up and turned back to the screen.
Then Becky saw her own suitcase, set against the wall near the garage door. Ingrid must have used her keys, and she knew where to find all Becky’s clothes, her cosmetics. The image of Ingrid’s thrill at sneaking in to pack a surprise overnight bag flooded Becky with such wretchedness that she shut up her mind and made herself review, instead, if she’d left anything suspicious out at home (a receipt, a piece of packing material). But Ingrid—Becky knew this utterly, with a throb—would have been too excited about her own plan to care or snoop.
“How was she?” she asked the grubby beanbag chairs, unable to look at Neil.
“Before your little hired help showed up, you mean? Or after?”
Fuck. “Why didn’t she call me?” Becky burst out. “Or you could have!”
Neil said nothing for a long moment. “She didn’t want to go, but I made her. I tried to get her to ask someone else, anyone, of all those hundred goddamned girlfriends, but she wouldn’t. So she went by herself—”
Becky squeezed her hands over her ears. “Which hotel.”
Neil raised his voice. “—And god knows I hope she’s living it up with Garth Brooks, my wife who hasn’t taken a day for herself in over three years, who sits up at night each time TJ can’t sleep, which is every night, and who wanted a couple of days to party and sleep in, have a good time, maybe order late-night room service with the person she calls her best friend—”
“Neil, just tell me where!”
“But let’s be real, she’s not going to any concert tonight, is she?” He got quiet, forcing Becky to look up. “She’s watching the same crappy TV we always do. Alone in the double queen room that cost extra so you two wouldn’t look out onto a parking lot.”
“I’ll drive there. Right now.”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“Please,” Becky said.
Neil studied her for a long time. “The Hilton Garden downtown.”
Becky took the stairs two at a time, bumping her suitcase against the wall. From the car she called the hotel, got through to Ingrid, who was, as Neil predicted, watching TV in a sulk. It took nearly an hour, Becky flooring it along I-88, to cajole her out of her funk, but she did it.
Late that night, sweaty dancing and drunk with relief, Becky marveled at how close she’d come. How it had all almost unraveled for real, for good. Instead of handcuffs and a jail cell, here she was in a dive bar at 1 am with a happy Ingrid waving her up onto the karaoke stage for the Dixie Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces.” They could do the harmony by heart.
Rachel’s tenth birthday was in June. When it came time for her party, Becky was there early to tack up streamers and keep TJ away from popping balloons, and help Ingrid pour out pop and slice cake.
Becky struggled mightily not to go overboard for a present but ended up giving the girl a framed poster of her favorite band, five prepubescent boys, signed by each one—“Rachel, you’re the reason we make music! XOXOXO, Robbie.” “Rachel Y, all my love, Miguel.” “HUGS, R!” Getting this done—those stupid teens had shark managers—had taken as much effort and money as procuring a Philip Guston, but Rachel’s literal tears upon unwrapping the poster made it worth it.
While Rachel read out each inscription, shaking with delight, Becky thought about QT Pets. Rachel’s once-prized specimens were now gathering dust on a dresser and would eventually end up in a box, in a closet. But Becky remembered the avid hunt to gain a full set, the feeling of completeness when the panda had been placed on the shelf beside the fox and the dog. Maybe she should try something new with her own collection. One last play.