Rules of the Road

  The Shoe Warehouse was a big chain of budget-priced shoe stores. “But the Shoe Warehouse can’t own Gladstone’s! They’d change it!”

  “That seems to be their plan,” she said heavily.

  I put my hand on Mrs. Gladstone’s bony shoulder. She tensed. I decided not to say that Elden was an all-time stinking shoe louse. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat next to her like I did with my grandmother, letting her know I was there.

  “Quality first, I always told him.” Mrs. Gladstone said this softly, shifting the weight from her bad hip. “From the time he was a little boy, I would say, ‘Elden, there is no substitute for quality in business. When you cut corners, you lose, the customer loses. Offer the best quality and services at the best price and the result will be profits.’” She stabbed her finger in the air, holding back tears. “That is what Gladstone’s has been built on. I keep hoping he’ll see the light.” She shook her old head. “I keep telling myself this isn’t happening.”

  She shifted her hip and looked out the window. For a minute she seemed like my grandmother. I understood about being rejected by someone you love—the carelessness of it, the pain. Elden was careless, so was my dad. You want so much to believe they’ll change and love you like you need them to. You’ll lie to yourself about them, make them more than they are.

  “Mrs. Gladstone, there’s got to be something you can do.”

  “It’s a young person’s game now.”

  “You’re giving up?”

  She looked down. “I’m moving aside.”

  “But what about quality, what about the Gladstone name?”

  “Floyd took care of those things, Jenna. I kept the books, oversaw the store expansion . . .”

  I put my face close to hers so she had to look at me. “Mrs. Gladstone, I can’t believe you’re not going to do anything.”

  Her gray eyes burned with hurt and anger. She lay back down, covered herself with a blanket, and that was that.

  CHAPTER 9

  We passed on El Pollo Loco for breakfast and hit the Honest Abe Pancake House down the street that had a tin of real maple syrup at every table and paintings depicting Abraham Lincoln’s life of truth on the walls. A waitress was pouring Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup into a real maple syrup tin, which would have made Honest Abe split a gut.

  Deception was everywhere.

  Mrs. Gladstone had coffee, poached eggs, and dry wheat toast. I had the Presidential platter of pigs in a blanket with a large orange juice to keep up my strength. Mrs. Gladstone looked like warmed-over oatmeal and she wasn’t talking much either, which is always weird when you’ve connected with a person one day and the next day they want to take it all back. My dad used to tell me about his big dreams to go into business for himself, even showed me the business plan he’d written once. But by the next day, he’d given up the whole thing, he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Inconsistency is a royal pain, but I’ve learned to live with it.

  Mrs. Gladstone and I headed toward the car in silence. Finally she said, “I’ll be having several meetings with the Springfield staff these next two days. Margaret Lundstrom, the manager, is an old friend.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “There is a Shoe Warehouse store a few blocks away. Perhaps you could use your unique talents there.”

  “You want me to snoop around?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I smiled, got her in the backseat, pulled the Cadillac onto the street, turned left by a statue of Abraham Lincoln that was covered with pigeons. “You want me to be a shoe spy, Mrs. Gladstone?”

  “I want you to tell me everything you see, hear, and feel from the moment you walk into that store. Left here.”

  “Got it.” I signaled left. “Anything you’re looking for in particular?”

  “I’m looking for your insight, Jenna. Turn here.”

  I did; nice and easy, the Cadillac turned perfectly under my steely control. I pulled in front of Gladstone’s Shoes, Springfield, Illinois. The windows were sparkling, the sale signs promised bargains. The Nike display was up front.

  “Nice store,” I said, helping Mrs. Gladstone out.

  “Margaret knows how to keep a store.”

  She handed me a piece of paper that had the Shoe Warehouse’s address. “Come back in three hours, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be obvious.” She leaned heavily on her cane, walked to the glass-etched G on the door, pushed it open, and limped inside.

  It’s tricky not being obvious when you’re a five-foot-eleven-inch female. Whenever I walk in anywhere, people usually strain their necks to look up at me. I’d trade four inches of height for beauty any day, but no one would swap. I threw back my shoulders and stood extra tall like my grandma taught me. Grandma always said there is nothing more commanding than a tall woman who uses her height. Grandma was six feet even and wore three-inch heels to make the point. I walked into the Shoe Warehouse like I owned the place.

  I was glad I didn’t.

  First off, it was built like a factory with storage bins and steel shelving to make you think you were getting rock-bottom prices. There were sale signs and twenty-percent-off signs and a big bell that went bong whenever someone bought over four pairs of shoes at once. There was green astro turf on the floor and big mirrors on the wall. The merchandise was second-rate.

  I ran my finger over a large yellow display cube (dusty). A small round man wearing a green “Shoe Warehouse” shirt sat behind the cash register drinking noisily from a can of Dr. Pepper. I walked on past the low-end children’s section thinking my spy thoughts.

  No continuity among styles.

  Bad displays.

  Shoes not fully lined.

  I stopped to watch an exhausted woman with five children—all five of them were trying on shoes. The woman tied red sneakers on her little daughter.

  “Mommy, they hurt.”

  “They’re on sale, baby.” The mother felt the girl’s shoes. The small, round man walked by. “Could you help me?” she asked. “She says they hurt.”

  The man sighed like she was asking to borrow money, got on one knee, felt the girl’s shoes. “They just need to break in,” he said.

  “But they hurt!”

  “New shoes are supposed to hurt,” the man said and walked away.

  Lies.

  Manipulation.

  Child abuse.

  I grabbed a foot sizer and walked up to the woman. “I can help you, ma’am.” I knelt down in front of the little girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Belinda.”

  “Let’s see if we can find you some shoes that don’t hurt, Belinda.”

  I measured her feet—made sure she stood straight, positioned her foot flat on the sizer—quick scanned the children’s shoe displays. Not much. “What are you going to do in the shoes?” I asked. “Do you need them for all-around or something specific?”

  “I’m going to run and jump,” Belinda said.

  “Running and jumping.”

  I found two size 4s in a decent sneaker with passable padding. I put them on her, laced them up. She bounded around the store. “These are good!”

  I fitted her older son with high tops, which wasn’t easy, got her two teenage daughters out of spiked heels when I showed them that they were both developing hammer toe—a condition that causes the little toe to become curled up and sore from too-tight shoes—got them both into a lower cushioning heel, and found Rodney, age eight, a decent super-human, all-black laser-zooming sneaker at twenty percent off that wouldn’t give him shin splints on the basketball court if he double-laced them tight over the ankle like I showed him.

  I taught the mother how to check the shoe’s fit. “You want some room between the big toe and the tip, but not too much. See?”

  The mother checked all her children’s shoes herself. She shook my hand. “I’ve never had anyone help me in here. You must be new.”

  “I . . .don’t exactly work here.”

 
She looked at me strangely.

  “I just like to help.”

  “You sure did that. Thank you.” She took out a twenty-percent-off coupon, gathered her brood, and headed for the cash register. I put the shoes that didn’t fit back in the boxes, put the boxes back on the shelves.

  “You trying to rip me off?”

  It was the mother, shouting at the small round Shoe Warehouse man who was now behind the counter.

  “You saying my coupon’s no good?”

  The man didn’t look up. “Only two pairs of shoes per coupon,” he said flatly, turning the pages of a car magazine.

  I walked to the woman’s side, looked at the coupon: “Twenty percent off—the Shoe Warehouse.”

  “It doesn’t say anything about a two-pair limit,” I said to the man.

  “It was a misprint,” he said, still reading.

  I glared at the small round man who had guilty eyes. “Is that an official store policy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have it in writing?”

  He shrugged.

  I said, “If you don’t have it in writing, sir, you have to honor this coupon.”

  “I don’t have to do nothing,” the man said.

  The woman was shaking, looking in her wallet. “But I can’t get all my kids shoes without that twenty percent,” she said.

  “Store policy,” said the man.

  My insides were steaming. I looked out the window. A large policeman walked by twirling his nightstick. “Stay there,” I said to the woman and ran out the door.

  “Officer, we need some help.”

  He put his hand on his gun—a nice touch—and stormed inside. The Law.

  I showed him the coupon as the round man grew pale.

  The officer walked toward him.

  “Made a mistake,” the small man said, reaching for the coupon. “It’s good. We’ll take it. Sure.”

  The policeman waited until the woman paid for and got her merchandise; he held the door for her as she walked out buried in shoe boxes and children. He held the door for me, then went back in the store, said something to the small round man who nodded wildly. The policeman walked out the door whistling, tipped his hat to us, and walked off.

  Another evil retail plot foiled.

  The woman looked at me over her packages. “Who are you, anyway, miss?”

  I smiled mysteriously. I wished I was wearing one of those trench coats with the big collars that stand up around the neck. I put on my extra-cool driver sunglasses, touched my forehead in a tough-guy salute, and walked down the street whistling, just missing a mound of dog poop.

  We stayed in Springfield for three days. I mostly poked around, took stealth walks, and wrote postcards home.

  I sent Faith a completely black postcard with the words “Springfield at night,” which should give her a real yuck. I got Mom a postcard of Abraham Lincoln looking presidential and wrote “Thinking great thoughts. Keeping two-and-a-half car lengths on all major thoroughfares. How’s by you?” I mailed Grandma a postcard of a field of daisies and told her to pin it on her memory board. I found a card for Opal with an old-fashioned jail and wrote “Counting the days till you’ll be free.”

  Mrs. Gladstone said I could call home whenever I wanted, but I’m not much of a phone person. I think it’s because my dad used to make me answer the phone when I was small, tell people he wasn’t home when he was standing right there. I didn’t know at the time that he owed those people money. Dad owed more money than he could ever pay back. I don’t use a phone unless I absolutely have to.

  I liked being on my own. Springfield is a good town to do that in because it’s easy to get around and there’s so much history to see. I visited Lincoln’s Tomb twice, stood there on the perfect green grass and thought about all the greatness and courage of that man. I touched the white-gray wall, wondering if some of it could rub off on me.

  I love travelling and meeting new people. I met a retired couple from Canada who said that talking to me made them feel good about American teenagers. I said talking to them made me feel good about Canada, although I’d never had a reason not to. New people just take you how you come. They don’t know about all the free-throws you missed in the regional basketball tournament, don’t know how you looked seventeen and a half pounds thinner.

  I unwrapped an Almond Joy and told Mrs. Gladstone what I’d seen at the Shoe Warehouse. She said my “insights” were illuminating and wrote down everything I said in her blue leather book.

  She was writing down other insights as well, mostly about Elden, heard mostly from Margaret Lundstrom, who had learned big and terrible things from Harry Bender, the world’s greatest shoe salesman and manager of Gladstone’s flagship store in Dallas, Texas, that was famous for its immense size (everything is bigger in Texas) and the fact that it contained the world’s largest plastic foot. Harry Bender found out that Elden, the rat, was ready to sell Gladstone’s to the Shoe Warehouse the day after Mrs. Gladstone retired; all the meetings had taken place, the board of directors had okayed the deal without letting Mrs. Gladstone know. The Shoe Warehouse wanted to use the Gladstone’s name in all their tacky prefab stores so that people would think they were better than they were.

  Mrs. Gladstone kept talking on her portable phone to Harry Bender about it all the way back to the hotel, saying, “Harry Bender, are you sure?” There’d be a pause and she’d say, “Well! You’d think blood would count for something.”

  I didn’t think customers were that dumb and I said this to Mrs. Gladstone after she hung up.

  “It’s called perception,” she answered softly. “Gladstone’s has built such good will over the years. People trust us to sell quality merchandise. It’s going to take the public a little while to catch on that just because there’s a Gladstone’s sign on the door doesn’t mean there’s Gladstone’s quality inside. By then the Shoe Warehouse and Elden will be rich.”

  I mentioned that it didn’t seem like the Peoria store was making money with all that junky merchandise.

  “That was Elden’s early experiment,” she said. “He’s gotten smarter since then.”

  We got to the hotel; I let the attendant park the car. Mrs. Gladstone was really dragging that bad leg of hers. I could see by her face that she’d about reached her limit. I tried to mention this to her gently, but coming at her that way just got her frosted.

  “I need a new hip if you must know!”

  A new one? I thought you had to stay with the original.

  “I’m having the operation when I return to Chicago, and I don’t want to discuss it again.”

  “Does it hurt bad?”

  Mrs. Gladstone leaned on her cane and looked at me, trying to be tough. “This leg will make it to Texas.”

  “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt,” I said and helped her into the lobby.

  Mrs. Gladstone and I were turning in for the night. I was wondering how to add a foot to the rollaway bed so I wouldn’t have to scrunch up like a contortionist to get some rest. I was trying to put the pillow as high up on the cot as possible to gain inches in leg room.

  “Harry Bender . . .” she said. “That man is one of a kind.”

  I fiddled with the pillow, quick lay down to see if it helped. The pillow fell off. I said, “I’ve heard.”

  Mostly I’d heard about Harry Bender from Murray Castlebaum, who said that Harry could sell sandals to Eskimos if he felt like it. The man was a shoe legend. He sold more shoes each year than the number two, three, four, and five ranking salespeople combined.

  “The great Mahatma,” Murray called him. Mahatma is a title of respect that people called Gandhi, the spiritual leader of India. It means Great Soul if you’re in India. If you’re in the shoe business, it means Great Sole.

  “Mahatma Bender,” Murray would say, putting his hands together and bowing down, “once he got them in the store, he wouldn’t let them out without a sale. The man was like a magnet. People couldn’t say no. If you ever meet him, all y
ou gotta do is stand there in his presence. Believe me, kid, you’ll learn something.”

  Mrs. Gladstone’s shoulders dropped like the wind got knocked out of her.

  “Is everything okay, Mrs. Gladstone?”

  Mrs. Gladstone looked small and wrinkled propped up like she was in the bed. “No,” she said softly. “No, it’s not.”

  My mind raced back to when I was seven years old. Mom was in the kitchen pouring bourbon down the sink so there wouldn’t be any for Dad to drink when he came home—if he came home. Whenever he left, even if it was just to buy cigarettes down the street, I always wondered if I’d see him again.

  But this night was worse than the others. I was getting peanut butter from the pantry when Dad staggered home loaded. Mom called him an alcoholic; said he needed to get help. I’d never heard him get so angry, shouting that no one had faith in him; what’s the big deal about a few drinks; couldn’t a man unwind after a long day at work? He kept yelling and Mom kept saying she wasn’t going to be a co-dependent anymore, wasn’t going to cover up for him. He kicked a big dent in the refrigerator and stormed out.

  I went out to Mom. She was crying on the kitchen stool, bent over.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “No, it’s not.”

  From that day on I knew Dad would go permanently.

  When Mom and Dad got divorced, Mom gathered me and Faith on her lap. “We’re not going to pretend like this hasn’t been hard,” she said, “because it’s been very hard. We’re not going to pretend that everything’s okay, because right now it’s not. What we’re going to do is talk to each other and let our feelings out and trust that in the process we will find a better life. Deal?”

  Faith said, “Deal,” and held out her hand. She was smiling.

  I said, “Deal,” and held out my hand. I was crying.

  Mom took both our hands and put them between hers. I felt strength zooming from her hands into mine, right up to my heart.

  I thought about taking Mrs. Gladstone’s hand, but she turned off the light before I got a chance. This is what Faith does when she doesn’t want to talk anymore. You could be bursting with questions and Faith yanks the light chain and leaves you sitting there in darkness, real and otherwise. Lately, with Faith, I’ve been yanking the light back on and glaring at her, but that sure wouldn’t work tonight.