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she could rob….
    She was going to lose her car !
    How the hell was she going to get around?
    The answer came to her so swiftly and clearly, it was frightening: she was going to need a damn good pair of walking shoes.
    Silence followed that thought for a moment; then horrible self-realization fell over her.
    This was fucked-up.
    She had a problem.
    Without giving herself the luxury of reconsidering, she signed on to one site after another, canceling orders and crying like a child who was watching her Christmas gifts being taken away.
    She finished with the shoe sites and took out the card Boomer had given her earlier. The one she thought she’d never actually use.
    Phil Carson, credit counselor.
    Using the sensible caution she employed everywhere in her life but in shoe shopping, she looked his name up on the Internet, checking for signs of credibility as well as signs of fraud.
    His company was listed as a member of the Better Business Bureau. That was good. Better still, his name didn’t show up on any of the complaint sites, like epinions.com, scam.com, badbusiness.com, and so on. He was on the up and up, it appeared, and she was going to call him first thing in the morning.
    Well, right after she called Capital Auto about her car loan. She paid with her credit card over the phone.
    Then, in the dark of night, feeling as miserable as she’d ever felt without someone actually dying, Lorna got an idea.
    She signed on to the local Gregslist.biz, the community bulletin board for everything from personals to babysitting and maid services to used mattress sales. It ran the gamut from sales of bizarre artifacts like shrunken heads to support groups for people with an addiction to Twinkies. Not Ho Hos. Not Ding Dongs. Forget Little Debbies. And mallow bar addicts were shit out of luck as well. Just Twinkies.
    Lorna had no doubt that, somewhere on Gregslist, there was probably a special support group for people who ate only the orange part of candy corn.
    Which made Gregslist the perfect place for Lorna to place the ad that would, if she was lucky, set at least one small part of her life on the right track again.

    Shoe Addicts Anonymous —Are you like me? Love shoes but can’t keep buying them? If you wear a size 7½ medium and are interested in swapping your Manolos for Maglis, etc., Tuesday nights in the Bethesda area, e-mail [email protected] or call 301-555-5801. Maybe we can help each other.

Chapter
5

    H elene 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