Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes. Lauren Baratz-Logsted

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СКАЧАТЬ just one second,” I said. “You’re all coming with me, with me and Hillary to Foxwoods—is that what I’m hearing?”

      “Pretty much,” Stella said.

      “Then one other person is coming, too,” I said, “Elizabeth Hepburn.”

      “My customer?” Stella said.

      I nodded firmly.

      “You’ve been talking to my customer?” Stella said.

      I nodded meekly.

      “She won’t want to go,” she scorned.

      “Oh, yes, she will.” I nodded enthusiastically, knowing the answer instinctively. “She’ll be the balls of the operation.”

      “The…?” Stella could barely mouth the words.

      “Wait just one more second,” I said. “You, me, Hillary, Conchita, Rivera, Elizabeth Hepburn—” I did the math in my head “—there’ll be six of us. How will we all fit into something to get us there?” I eyed the Squeaky Qlean van, the only vehicle any of us owned that would be big enough. “I’m not going off to win my fortune in that thing.”

      “Thanks a lot,” Stella said. “I’ll have you know—”

      “Don’t worry about it, chicas,” Rivera said, putting one arm around Stella and the other around me. “Me and Conchita will work all of that stuff out. Delilah, you just be up early Saturday morning. Really, we’ve got all your bases covered.”

      Which was how I found myself, up brighter and earlier than usual on Saturday morning, surrounded by my helpful elves.

      Of course, my elves were all taller than me and their help was probably going to wind up killing me, so there was that, too.

      “If they just shape them so that they actually have some shape, it’ll be an improvement,” Hillary said when we got to Nail Euphorium. “Maybe a little clear polish for gloss.”

      “She should get a full set of acrylics,” Conchita said, “painted red.”

      “Who do you want her to look like, you?” Rivera demanded.

      It was nice at least to hear someone else get asked that question for a change.

      “She should get the acrylics,” Rivera said, “but then she should get a French mani, pedi, too.”

      “She’ll look like Jackie Kennedy Onassis,” Conchita objected.

      “And this is bad?” Rivera said. “May she wind up with a mansion and a yacht.”

      “Wait a second,” I said, which had apparently become my new favorite thing to say. “I can’t afford this. If I get a French manicure and…and…and a…pedi—” the word was so foreign to me “—half my stake money will be gone…and that’s if I don’t leave a tip!”

      “I’ve got you covered on this one,” Hillary said, waving her Amex gold card in the air.

      All I had was a regular Amex card, no gold for me, and as I’d shown when we went to Manhattan, I never used the damn thing, not even to buy something I wanted as much as the Ghost. For an addictive personality like me, that way, the credit card way, madness lay.

      “I already told you when we were in New York,” I told her. “I won’t accept charity.”

      “It’s not charity,” she said. “It’s my birthday present to you.”

      “My birthday’s not for another five months. It’s in January, remember?”

      “So? Just don’t expect anything else on January 10.”

      It was the same at Now We’re Styling!, the salon where Conchita and Rivera regularly got their hair done. Hillary had suggested The Queen’s Coif, where she got her own hair done, but had been outvoted. Still, she paid.

      “Christmas present,” she said, surrendering her Amex card again.

      “Christmas isn’t for another four months,” I pointed out.

      “So?” she said. “Don’t expect anything on December 25.”

      “She looks sooo…not like her,” Stella said when the hairdresser was done and we were all admiring the new me in the mirror.

      It was weird because my hair didn’t look radically different than it usually did. It was the same short, dark hair, kind of spiky. But whatever magic the stylist had performed on it, using paste artfully as well as a razor to create tiny little jagged wisps all around my face, well, it made me look like I was styling.

      “You’ll need to get your makeup done, too, of course,” Stella said. “You can’t have hair like that with no makeup.” Sighing, she extracted her own Amex gold card from her purse.

      “What are you doing?” I asked.

      “It’s your early Halloween bonus,” she muttered. “You can get it done here. They do makeup, too.”

      “Boss has got a he-art! Boss has got a he-art!” Conchita and Rivera singsonged.

      “Ohh…shut up,” Stella said.

      “She still needs the right clothes,” Rivera said.

      “We still need to get a car big enough,” Conchita said.

      “I’ll get the clothes,” Rivera said.

      “I’ll get the car,” Conchita said.

      The clothes turned out to be items from Rivera’s own closet.

      “I wore these black slacks the night Flavia fell in love with me,” she said, holding up a pair of black capris.

      “Flavia?” I asked.

      “Long gone.” She shrugged. “And don’t worry about the length. I’ve got Hollywood tape in my bag, works like a charm.”

      She pulled a silver lamé tank top out of her bag.

      “And I wore this,” she said, “the night Emmanuella fell in love with me.”

      “Emmanuella?” I asked.

      She shrugged again. “I think she’s with Flavia now. We can use the Hollywood tape to tuck up the hem of the tank, too.”

      As I put on the clothes, I tried not to think about the fact that I was being clothed wholly in garments that had loved and lost a lot of girl-on-girl love.

      In the beginning I’d felt resistant to their efforts. Why, I felt, bother trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse? But, and here was the strange thing, as the day wore on, a feeling welled in me, the same Cinderella feeling I’d had when I’d slipped the Ghosts on at Jimmy Choo’s in New York. Here were all these women—Hillary, Stella, Conchita, Rivera—doing СКАЧАТЬ