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.Chapter5Helene showered for almost an hour that evening when she got home, trying to wash away the memory—and the smell—of her afternoon in a security office in the back of Ormond's.It had reeked of cheap coffee, hot Styrofoam, drywall paste, and something vaguely like urine.She had sat, stock-still, as the pimpled and greasy young security guard had typed up a report, the words shoplifting and arrest leaping at her from his computer screen.There were a lot of things she could have said.That she was flustered from the credit card debacle and had replaced the wrong shoes, that she was going to her car to get another card and hadn't thought to take off the shoes first; she could even have said that she was feeling flushed and needed a bit of fresh air, and that she'd purposely left her other pair of shoes there to indicate she'd be right back.But Helene didn't want to give herself those excuses.Maybe later she would, but at that moment she simply sat still, neither accepting nor denying the charges.Later, she'd wonder why, but at the time she'd felt so beaten down that she hadn't been able to do anything more than wait.It wasn't until the store manager came in and recognized her that she was able to move.Knowing who her husband was, and that this could be a public embarrassment to him and possibly to the store, the manager had let her go, muttering that he was sure this was just a misunderstanding of some sort.They both knew—along with the security guard, the creepy salesman, a handful of other shoppers, and whoever was going to hear the story second- and thirdhand—that it wasn't really a misunderstanding at all.Home was hardly a safe refuge.Jim wasn't there, and Teresa, the maid, was coolly courteous, as usual, when Helene came through the front door.She'd gone upstairs to her bedroom.Jim called it her boudoir, but they both knew it was her space and he had his.She'd taken off her clothes, put them away, gotten into a hot shower, shampooed, conditioned, shaved her legs and armpits, and rinsed thoroughly, allowing herself the brief luxury of hot water pounding down her back.Afterwards, she put on her robe, combed and dried her hair, changed into a nightgown, brushed and flossed her teeth, put La Mer moisturizer on her face, and put everything away before finally allowing herself to sit on the edge of her bed.And cry.She allowed herself a good ten minutes to let it all out, to feel everything as deeply as she needed to before pulling the reins in on herself.When ten minutes passed, she straightened herself up, splashed her face with cold water, reapplied her moisturizer, and went back to her business as if nothing had ever happened.Hopefully, the news wouldn't have gotten out.She brought her laptop computer to the bed, booted it up, and sat down in front of it.She typed in all the local news sites, Washingtonpost.com, Gazette.net, UptownCityPaper.net, and so on, entering her name in each search bar and waiting to see if there were any recent stories.Fortunately, there were not.Not in any of the venues she could think of, even the obscure ones.With considerable relief, she signed on to Gregslist.biz and pursued one of her other favorite online pastimes: looking up apartments in her favorite areas.She often fantasized about getting a little place all her own, where she could escape from Jim and her duties as “wife of.” And maybe, somehow, someday it would happen.Perhaps if she could do something innovative by herself, something that could gain her money without compromising Jim's station in society.She typed in “Adams Morgan,” one of her favorite D.C.neighborhoods; then “Tenleytown”; “Woodley Park”; and finally “Bethesda.”The usual apartment and town house offerings showed up in all the areas, and she'd seen a good percentage of them before, but this time when she typed in “Bethesda,” something came up that she'd never seen before.Shoe Addicts Anonymous.The irony of it struck her immediately, and her first impulse was to go back and recheck the news sources to make sure they hadn't picked up the story of her shoplifting.But that was silly.This had nothing to do with that.It was just a coincidence.Helene was a skeptic when it came to voodoo and fortune-telling and omens, but this time it was hard to deny: this had to be a sign.And the fact that the ad had given her her first honest laugh in about as long as she could remember made her think she should at least write the information down before it disappeared forever into the dark recesses of Gregslist's archives.It wasn't that she was going to join.Helene had always been a loner.But she would keep the information handy.Just in case. Maybe Helene was jaded, but she felt White House functions were always a bore.But they were nothing compared with the tedium of the post-White House Function parties she and Jim always had to make the rounds of.They were on their way to Mimi Lindhofer's soirée in the heart of Georgetown when Helene's glass slipper flew off and left her flat on her ass on her karmic sidewalk.“Got an interesting call today,” Jim said, as if he were going to tell her his broker thought he should invest in pork bellies.“Oh?” she asked absently, watching the quaint landscape of Georgetown pass by outside the window.She often wondered what it would be like to live in one of those cozy gingerbread town houses.Then again, one couldn't live in one of those houses without a lot of money, and if there was one thing Helene had learned over the past decade, it was that people with money weren't always that great to live with.“Were you going to tell me about your incident at the store?” Jim asked, still so casual, she had to wonder what he really knew.Helene's heart pounded its panic in rapid Morse code.“Oh, good God, I'd forgotten about that,” she lied.“Would you believe those people actually thought I was trying to steal a pair of shoes?”He gave her a sidelong glance that made her blood run cold [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]