Rules of the Road

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  “For long-distance running?”

  “For any kind of running.”

  “Thank you.”

  I walked away, not saying that I knew that cross-trainers were okay for short distances but not for long ones.

  Mrs. Gladstone motioned me to the door with her cane. I walked slowly past the displays that did not show off the shoes in the best light. The work boots were right across from slippers, which you don’t want together, no matter how small the store is. Work and leisure have to be on opposite walls. I looked at the fake leather pumps, felt the plastic soles on the children’s oxfords. I strolled out the double glass door to the parking lot.

  Jenna Boller, shoe spy.

  I walked to the Cadillac, feeling the moist, hot air of freedom. I stared at the double glass door of Gladstone’s Shoes/Peoria Branch, stared at the Gladstone’s slogan, WE’RE NOT JUST SELLING SHOES, WE’RE SELLING QUALITY.

  Could have fooled me.

  Finally, Mrs. Gladstone limped out.

  She was walking stiffly, every step seemed an effort. Her cane made clicking noises on the asphalt. I opened the back door and held it open like a palace guard.

  She looked at me. “What did you see in there?”

  I bit my lip because I’d seen a lot, but I wasn’t sure if I should say it.

  “Jenna Boller,” she said, “what did you see?”

  I took a fat breath and told her as she got into the car. I was getting worked up right there in the parking lot and I got very heated when I came to the work boot part because I am very good at doing shoe displays and know how to bring out the character in any brand. Put them in their natural environment is my secret. Display them so they look tough. Work boots always go on brick. Then I mentioned the part about being ignored because of my age and put in a word for teenagers everywhere.

  “It happens a lot, Mrs. Gladstone. Our money is just as good as an adult’s, sometimes we’ve had to work longer and harder for it. Kids deserve respect when they go into a store.”

  I didn’t mention the shoddy merchandise.

  “And what would you do with that store?” she asked.

  I thought about that. “Well, I guess first I’d change the traffic flow, move the Nikes to the window, get the slippers in the back by the purses. It doesn’t matter if purses and slippers are together, Mrs. Gladstone—most customers don’t head for the back of the store first. I’d get the good, fast-moving stuff up front, retrain the salespeople so they understand what the shoes can do, and if they couldn’t be retrained, well . . .”

  “You’d hire new ones.”

  I coughed. “Yes, I would.”

  Mrs. Gladstone adjusted her pillow under her thigh. “My son hired Miles.”

  Good one, Boller.

  “I didn’t mean anything by that, ma’am. Mr. Gladstone knows a lot more about the shoe business than me.”

  Mrs. Gladstone grunted.

  I got in the front seat, strapped on my seat belt. “I don’t know what came over me in the store, Mrs. Gladstone. I’ve got this weird way of doing things. I guess I was being deceitful. It won’t happen again.”

  “It better happen again!” She cracked her cane on the back door. “Drive!”

  CHAPTER 8

  I rammed it.

  We were on the 474 connector heading toward 155 South, which would intersect with 55 South and take us to Springfield, Illinois, land of Abraham Lincoln.

  Mrs. Gladstone shifted uncomfortably in the back. “That store makes me want to lose my lunch.” Her cane whacked the door. “How long do you think it’s going to take before our customers figure out our quality is slipping?”

  “I . . .I don’t know, Mrs. Gladstone.”

  “Not too long, I can assure you!”

  Another whack.

  “My son is pushing me out.”

  I shifted. “I didn’t know that, ma’am.”

  “Now you do.”

  It didn’t surprise me, though. Murray called Elden the vice president in charge of tack at Gladstone’s Shoes. He said Elden didn’t have a shoe person’s heart. All he cared about was money, not sole.

  “He’s decided I’m too old and he’s taking over the business.”

  I looked at Mrs. Gladstone in the rearview mirror. Elden might be a bum, but he was right about one thing. She was old.

  “He says I should relax, enjoy life, get a condo in Florida.” She winced.

  “You don’t want to retire?”

  “Somewhere long ago in this country it was determined that after sixty-five a person’s brain is no longer capable of making business decisions. I think that is rot. I have more business ability at seventy-three than I had at sixty-three, and I resent the implication that I am over the hill and can no longer oversee the company my husband and I built from scratch.”

  I was about to say “Oh,” but didn’t get the chance.

  A speeding truck was tailgating me, coming up close and personal to the back fender, getting so close I could see the fire of delight in the truck driver’s eyes as he blared his horn at me and inched closer, closer.

  “For heaven’s sake, let that bully by!” Mrs. Gladstone shouted.

  I swerved to the far right lane, screeched onto the shoulder as the truck rumbled by shaking the pavement.

  “Stop the car!”

  I did. Mrs. Gladstone was quiet for a long time.

  “Take off your shoe,” she said finally.

  “What?”

  “Hand me your shoe.”

  This was distinctly weird. I took off my right shoe, handed it to her, hoping it didn’t stink.

  She examined the stacked heel, pulled gently at the sides, felt the cushioning inside.

  “This,” she declared, “is a well-made shoe. Not too much pull on the leather, fine stitching, good sole.”

  “No plastic,” I said.

  “Ah, yes, plastic.” Mrs. Gladstone’s ancient face got tight. “My son is quite taken with that.”

  I looked down at my bare foot. “I’ve noticed.”

  “Do you know what built Gladstone’s Shoes, Jenna?”

  I gripped the steering wheel. There were several ways to go here. Sweat. Honesty. Good old American know-how.

  She raised my shoe in the air. “An unmovable insistence on quality and fair pricing. An insistence on the finest, most shoe-educated salesforce in the business.”

  I nodded, remembering my one-week training course where I had to remember everything that could possibly go wrong with a shoe fitting. I learned how many bones there were in the human foot (twenty-six) including nineteen muscles, thirty-three joints, and one hundred seven ligaments. I learned that bones of the feet make up approximately one fourth of all the bones in the body, that the feet are one of the most frequently injured parts of the body. I understood that the average individual will walk about 115,000 miles in their lifetime, which is more than four times the earth’s circumference, and came to the rapid conclusion that selling well-made comfortable shoes is a noble profession, providing immeasurable benefit for people the world over. Then I got my own personal shoehorn, and after my one-year anniversary, I got a shoehorn with my initials.

  “Elden has cancelled the training courses for new employees,” she said. “He just fired two of my top store managers who refused to sell his shoddy merchandise. One of them ran the Peoria store.” Her lips went tight.

  I got nervous for Murray. “Can he do that?”

  “He has done it.”

  “But why?”

  Mrs. Gladstone was staring at my shoe like it was a dead pet. “I don’t think I want to be around to witness what Elden will do to my business.”

  “Boy, Mrs. Gladstone, that’s pretty rough.”

  “It’s a sad day, Jenna, when profits and greed alone influence quality. It’s an even sadder day when honor in business is close to becoming a thing of the past.”

  The Cadillac purred across the highway, which is what you expect from a 32-va
lve, 300-horsepower V8 engine. Mrs. Gladstone was stirring around in the back, rattling papers, keeping busy to manage the hurt. She seemed to trust I’d get her to Springfield, and I would. Good, loyal Jenna. Loyal like a dog. A person you can count on. Just give her a Milk Bone and she’ll go out of her way to help. I turned south onto 55. In an hour we’d be in Springfield.

  I was getting the hang of maneuvering this big white moose after 184 miles. There’s something about holding onto a steering wheel and feeling the miles drift away from you as you push farther and farther away from what you once knew.

  One of the last things Mom said to me before we left the house was that even though I’d be driving a long way from home, I wouldn’t be driving away from my problems. I knew this was true the way I knew that clouds weren’t made of cotton, but sometimes those white clumpy clouds hanging in a gray blue sky made me wonder if God hadn’t stuck some cotton balls up there when the scientists weren’t looking.

  I knew one thing for sure: I was glad to be away from the mess with Dad.

  I didn’t miss it one bit.

  I let a hot red Mustang convertible pass me, catching the license plate as the car whizzed by: ITSORED.

  I sighed.

  Someday.

  There was good news and bad news in Springfield, Illinois.

  The good news was that we got there.

  The bad news was that the hotel was overbooked with the Markoy Electronics annual sales meeting and we had to share a room.

  “This,” said Mrs. Gladstone to the bellman, “is not a room, it is a closet.”

  The bellman, who was old and deaf, said he was glad we liked it and hoped we had a nice stay. He tottered out, waving happily. I checked out the room. One twin bed; one rollaway bed approximately five feet in length for all five feet eleven inches of me.

  Mrs. Gladstone lowered herself slowly onto the real bed.

  “Gee, Mrs. Gladstone, it isn’t so bad. You should have seen the room my mother and sister and I shared last summer in the Dells. Bugs in the mattress, seedy furniture. We’re talking Les Miserables. But you know, we had an okay time.”

  Mrs. Gladstone glared at the Springfield, Illinois, Visitor’s Guide: The City Lincoln Loved, and said absolutely nothing.

  The hotel restaurant, El Pollo Loco, was packed with electronics salespeople who were discussing their products loudly while pouring margaritas from pitchers into huge glasses that were big enough to raise goldfish in. There could have been goldfish in them, actually, but I don’t think the Markoy Electronics salesforce would have noticed. I knew about margaritas because my father went through a Latin American drinking phase and made margaritas at home. He did this while singing “La Bamba.” He’d sing the “la la la la la la la bamba” part extra high and squeeze the lime around the glass and sprinkle on plenty of salt and pour the liquor combination into the blender. Dad was very exact when he made drinks, even when he was bombed. He always reminded me of a pharmacist, measuring just the right amount of cough syrup into the bottle. Of course, unlike a pharmacist, toward the end of the evening, Dad would be measuring his concoctions on the floor.

  Mrs. Gladstone chewed her jalapeños without breaking a sweat. For an old person, she has grit. Three Markoy employees began an enchilada eating contest (not a pretty sight), but she wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes got far away.

  “I grew up along the Guadalope River,” Mrs. Gladstone said quietly, gazing out the window. “I just lived to be in water when I was a girl, couldn’t stand wearing shoes. I’d kick them off every chance I’d get and stick my feet in the water, summer and winter. And now I own one hundred and seventy-six shoe stores.” She laughed. “The good Lord knows how my father would have split his spleen laughing at that. He was always barking at me to put on my shoes. ‘Madeline Jean,’ he’d say, ‘you put on your shoes of peace, girl.’ Daddy was a Baptist minister and turned everything into a sermon. ‘Those aren’t just shoes you’re putting on,’ he’d shout, ‘those are the sandals of God Almighty.’”

  I looked at her from the corner of my eye. Some people are hard to imagine as children.

  Mrs. Gladstone leaned back in the wooden chair, lost in thought. “Daddy always said that shoes take us along life’s pathways, they get all muddied up, all scratched from wear. We’ve got to clean them up, take care of them. He said God was like a master cobbler, stretching a piece of leather over a wooden last, fastening it down with nails, carefully stitching it together to form something special. That man had three sermons about shoes.”

  “I never thought about shoes that way.”

  “PKs gets their share of sermonizing.”

  “PKs?”

  “Preacher’s kids.”

  I smiled. “He didn’t know about your business?”

  “He died right before Floyd and I opened the first store in Dallas. He would have baptized that whole place if he’d had the chance.”

  “That would have been something, Mrs. Gladstone.”

  The man who won the enchilada eating contest lunged toward the bathroom door marked HOMBRES. The bill came; Mrs. Gladstone got out her wallet. “I still feel like he’s with me in every store Floyd and I opened. When I was a child, I’d wonder why in the world did I have a father so all-fired fixated on shoes?” She opened her hands, grinning. “Sure made me think about selling them a little different.”

  I looked down. I always wondered why I had a father who was a drunk.

  I haven’t figured that one out yet.

  Curling up on the rollaway bed made me think about laying my father out on the living room couch when he was drunk. The couch wasn’t long enough for Dad (he was six four), so I’d bend his knees to get him to fit. Faith never had to do it. Dad always said there was a price to pay for being the oldest. You’re the one who gets practiced on. His dad would beat him to a pulp over something small while his younger brother Billy got the world handed to him on a Wedgewood plate.

  Billy was never as good a salesman as Dad, though.

  My best memories of my dad were when he’d take me out to study salespeople. Dad said you can learn anything by watching other people do it, and if they do it badly, you learn what not to do. The worst salesperson we ever saw sold washers and dryers. He’d sweat and slap the machines and yell that he was giving people a price so low his manager was going to hang him. One customer stormed off grumbling, “I’ll get the rope.” The best salesperson sold Singer sewing machines. She liked people, liked her product, and didn’t need to push anyone into buying anything they didn’t want. Dad said she knew the secret. When we got home I’d practice selling to Dad whatever we saw that day, and except when I was pitching swamp land in Florida, he always bought. Afterwards he’d celebrate what a good little salesperson I was by having a few drinks, but before the booze got hold of him, he was a real father.

  Mrs. Gladstone’s snoring was sounding like an approaching Amtrak train rumbling into Union Station. She was tossing, kicking off her sheets.

  “No!” she shouted in her sleep, then bolted up with a cry.

  I turned on the light. She was shaking.

  “Mrs. Gladstone, you were dreaming.”

  She nodded and covered her face with her hands.

  “Do you want to talk about it? My mom says talking about bad dreams can make them better.”

  She shook her old head.

  “I know about nightmares,” I assured her.

  She looked straight at me. “Yes, I suppose you do.”

  I sat down on the side of her bed. “I used to have one where I was taking a shower and instead of water coming out, it was bourbon, which is my dad’s favorite drink, and I kept trying to turn off the flow, but the bourbon was washing over me and getting in my hair and eyes and mouth. I kept trying to spit it out, but I couldn’t and it tasted awful and I was so afraid I was going to get drunk. It wasn’t going down the drain, either, just filling up the tub, rising higher in the room until it was over my shoulders and I was sure I was going to drown in it. I w
oke up screaming.”

  Mrs. Gladstone nodded a little. “And did I wake up . . .screaming?”

  “Kind of. Well, actually, yes.”

  She looked down, rubbed her sad eyes, and looked for her glasses. I took them off the nightstand, handed them to her. She put them on fast to cover the tears that were starting.

  “My son,” she began, clenching her mouth to keep control, “has been buying up Gladstone stock to gain control of the business because he was afraid I would not go quietly.”

  I didn’t know much about stocks. My grandma had given Faith and me both three shares of stock in her boyfriend Earl’s fire alarm company so we could learn the lessons of big business. In thirteen months we watched the stock go from $15 a share to nada and Earl go from CEO to the unemployment line, so the stock market didn’t hold much magic for me.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gladstone—I don’t understand.”

  She grabbed a pad and pencil by the bedside table. “You understand what a share of stock is?”

  “It’s like buying a tiny fraction of a company.”

  “That’s right. A share of stock is like a deed to a small piece of a company. Now in the case of Gladstone’s Shoes, there are four million public shares available, out of a possible twelve million. Those who own the most shares, own the most of the company. The problem arises when an individual or group of investors decide they want more say in a company.”

  “So they start buying more stock to get control.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And they can do that?”

  “They can.”

  “You mean anyone could take over any company they wanted if they had enough money?” I shuddered.

  “Theoretically. The system has many checks and balances built in to safeguard certain practices, but companies are taken over regularly.”

  “But what if the owners don’t want to give them up?”

  “Well, that’s the rub. It doesn’t much matter.”

  “But that’s not fair! That’s like stealing!”

  “Yes, it is. Elden and Ken Woldman, the president of the Shoe Warehouse, are buying up Gladstone stock to gain control.”