In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  Hirsch, thought Maggie, feeling her heart beat faster at the prospect of this mystery. Hirsch had been their mother’s maiden name.

  She eased one edge of the envelope open. After almost twenty years, the glue let go easily. It was a birthday card, a little-kid’s card with a pink frosted birthday cake and yellow candles on the front. “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” it read. And inside, beneath the preprinted “WISHING YOU A VERY HAPPY DAY!” she read, “Dear Maggie, I hope you’re well. I miss you very much and would love to hear from you.” Then a telephone number and a signature that said “Grandma,” with the words Ella Hirsch written in parenthesis beneath it. And a ten-dollar bill, which Maggie shoved in her pocket.

  Interesting, Maggie thought, getting to her feet and walking to the bedroom window, checking out the street for signs of Sydelle’s car. Maggie knew she had a grandmother; she had vague memories of sitting on someone’s lap, smelling flowery perfume, and feeling a smooth cheek against her own while her mother took her picture. She vaguely remembered the same woman, this grandmother, at her mother’s funeral. What had happened to the photograph was no mystery—after they moved in with Sydelle, all public evidence of their mother had disappeared. But what had happened to the grandmother? She remembered, years ago, on her first birthday in New Jersey, asking her father. “Where’s Grandma Ella? Did she send me something?” A shadow had crossed her father’s face. “I’m sorry,” he’d said—or at least, that’s what Maggie’d thought he’d said. “She can’t come.” And then, the next year, she remembered asking the same question and getting a different answer. “Grandma Ella’s in a home.”

  “Well, so are we,” said Maggie, who didn’t understand what the big deal was.

  But Rose knew. “Not this kind of home,” she said, looking at her father, who gave her a nod. “In a home for old people.” And that had been the end of that. But still, home or not, their grandmother had sent these cards. So why hadn’t Maggie and Rose ever received them?

  She wondered whether the cards were all the same, and selected another one from the stack, this one from 1982, addressed to Miss Rose Feller. This one wished Rose a happy Chanukah, and was signed the same way—“I love you, I miss you, I hope you’re well, love, Grandma (Ella).” And another bill, a twenty, this time, which joined the ten in Maggie’s pocket.

  Grandma. Ella, she thought to herself. What had happened? Her mother had died, and there’d been a funeral. The grandmother would have been there for sure. Then they’d moved, from Connecticut to New Jersey, within a month of their mother’s death, and as carefully as Maggie searched her memory, she couldn’t remember seeing or hearing from the grandmother ever again.

  Her eyes were still closed when she heard the garage-door opener churn into life, followed by car doors slamming. She added the Rose card to the money in her pocket and jumped to her feet.

  “Maggie?” called Sydelle, her heels clicking on the kitchen floor.

  “Almost done,” Maggie yelled. She put the box back on the shelf and walked downstairs, where her father and Sydelle were unloading grocery bags full of various sprouts and whole grains.

  “Stay for dinner,” her father offered, kissing her cheek as she shrugged on her coat. “We’re making . . .” He paused and squinted at one of the bags.

  “Quinoa,” said Sydelle, pronouncing the word with faux-Latino verve—keen-wah!

  “No thanks,” said Maggie, doing the buttons slowly, watching her father put groceries away. Hard to believe he’d once been handsome. But she’d seen pictures of him when he was younger, before his hairline had relocated to the center of his scalp and his face had sagged into a mass of wrinkles and resignation. And sometimes, from behind, or when he moved a certain way, she could look at the set of his shoulders and the shape of his face and see someone who’d been good-looking enough for a woman as beautiful as her mother to love. She wanted to ask her father about the cards, only not in front of Sydelle, because she knew that Sydelle would manage to change the subject from the mysterious grandmother to exactly what Maggie was doing going through their closet in the first place.

  “Hey, Dad,” she began. Sydelle zipped by her, heading toward the pantry with cans of the same brand of ultrabland, all-natural, salt-and-taste-free soup she’d found in Rose’s kitchen. “Do you want to have lunch with me one day this week?”

  “Sure,” said her father—at the same instant when Sydelle asked, “How’s that job hunt going, Maggie?”

  “Fine!” she said brightly. Bitch, she thought.

  Sydelle arranged her coral-painted lips into a bright, fake smile. “Glad to hear it,” she said, turning her back on Maggie, heading back toward the pantry. “You know that we only want the best for you, Maggie, and we’ve been concerned ...”

  Maggie grabbed her purse. “Gotta go,” she said. “Places to go, people to do!”

  “Call me!” said her father. Maggie gave a brief, distracted wave and got into Rose’s car, where she pulled out the card and the money and studied them to make sure that they were still there, that she hadn’t made them up, that they’d said what she thought they’d said. Grandma. Rose would know what to do about it. Except when Maggie got home, Rose was packing. “I’m going to the office to finish up a brief. I’ll be home late, and I’m leaving early in the morning. Business trip,” she’d said, in her bossy, self-important way, rushing around with her suits and her laptop. Well, when Rose came home, they’d put their heads together and figure out the Mystery of the Missing Grandmother.

  EIGHTEEN

  On Monday morning, Simon Stein stood in the lobby of Rose’s apartment building, wearing khaki pants and loafers, a Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick polo shirt with the firm’s logo embossed on its chest, and a Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick baseball cap on his head. Rose hurried out of the elevator and walked right past him.

  “Hey!” Simon said, waving.

  “Oh,” said Rose, running her hands through her wet hair. “Hi.” The morning had gotten off to a terrible start. When she’d reached under the bathroom sink for her tampons, she’d found an empty box, bearing only plastic wrappers and the rattling remnants of a single tampon applicator. “Maggie!” she’d yelled. And Maggie, who’d been asleep, had rummaged through her purse and tossed Rose a single Slender Regular by way of consolation. “Where did all my Supers go?” Rose had demanded. Maggie had just shrugged. Rose would have to buy more at the airport, assuming she could shake Simon Stein for long enough, and ...

  “. . . forward to this,” Simon was saying, merging onto the highway.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, I’m really looking forward to this,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Oh, I guess,” said Rose. In fact, she wasn’t looking forward to it at all. She’d spent weeks dreaming about being alone with Jim, in a city where nobody knew them, away from everyone at the firm. They’d have a wonderful romantic dinner somewhere . . . or maybe they’d just order room service. Stay in. Get reacquainted. And now she was stuck with Simon Stein, Boy Wonder.

  “Do you think they picked us because we’re good examples of young associates, or because they want to get rid of us?” she asked.

  “Oh,” said Simon, steering the car into the long-term parking lot, “me they picked because I’m a good example. You, they’re just trying to get rid of.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding,” he said, and gave her an impish smile. Revolting, thought Rose. Grown men should not look impish.

  They got to the gate a full forty-five minutes before boarding would commence. Perfect, thought Rose, and dropped her stuff on a chair. “Listen, I’m just going to run to the newsstand,” she said, and was relieved when Simon nodded and opened up a copy of ESPN: The Magazine. It was ridiculous, she knew, but she’d never been one of those women who could simply plop a box of Kotex Super Plus on top of her lettuce and turkey breast at the grocery store and stand, unflinching, as some teenage guy scanned her groceries. No indeed. Her tampons had to be purchased at the same CVS, a
nd she’d lurk in the aisles until she could be guaranteed no line and a female clerk. It was no big deal, she knew (and certainly Amy and Maggie had told her), but for some reason she was always embarrassed buying them. Probably because when she got her period, her father had been so completely freaked out he’d left her in the bathroom, bleeding onto wadded-up toilet paper, for three hours, until Sydelle returned from her Jazzercise class with a box of sanitary napkins. Maggie, she remembered, had waited patiently on the other side of the door, pumping Rose for information.

  “What’s going on in there?” she’d asked.

  “I’ve become a woman,” Rose had replied from her perch on the edge of the bathtub. “Yay me.”

  “Oh,” Maggie said. “Well, congratulations.” And, Rose remembered, Maggie had tried to shove a People magazine underneath the door and had actually baked her a cake, thick with chocolate frosting, with “Congradulations Rose” written on top. True, their father had been too mortified to eat a bite, and Sydelle had made unpleasant noises about the fat grams and the misspelling, but it had been nice.

  On the airplane, she shoved her bag into the overhead compartment, fastened her seat belt, and stared out the window, nibbling at her mixed nuts, trying to ignore her growling stomach, thinking that if she hadn’t been so busy trying to make her brief as Jim-pressive as possible, or running around playing Guess What Maggie’s Taken Now, she’d have had time to buy a bagel. Simon, meanwhile, had reached under his seat and retrieved a small box-shaped nylon pouch. He unzipped it with a flourish.

  “Here,” he said.

  Rose glanced to her left and saw that he was holding a seed-studded roll.

  “Nine-grain,” he said. “From Le Bus. I’ve got an eleven-grain one.”

  “In case nine grains aren’t enough?” Rose asked. She stared at him curiously, then accepted the roll, which was still warm and, all things considered, delicious. A minute later, he tapped her arm and offered her a wedge of cheese.

  “What is this?” she finally asked. “Did your Mom pack you lunch?”

  Simon shook his head. “My mother’s lunches were nothing like this. She’s not a morning person. So every morning, she’d, like, stagger down the stairs ...”

  “Stagger?” asked Rose, readying herself to produce the necessary sympathy if Simon started in on some dreary tale about his mother’s drinking problem.

  “She’s not really graceful under the best circumstances, and especially not when she’s half asleep. So she’d stagger downstairs and grab the economy-size loaf of generic white Wonder bread, and whatever lunch meat had been on sale, and a five-pound tub of margarine.” Rose could almost picture his mother, in a ratty nightgown and bare feet, standing in front of the kitchen counter, performing this detested chore. “So she’d slap down the bread, and then she’d spread the margarine, or try to, but the margarine was cold, so usually it wasn’t very spreadable, and the bread would rip, and you’d get these sandwiches with, like, lumps of margarine in them, and then she’d slap down a wad of lunch meat”—Simon performed the slapping motion—“and she’d put the other slice of bread on top, and shove the sandwich in a Baggie, and put it in a brown paper bag with some bruised fruit and a handful of peanuts in shells. And that was lunch. And that,” he concluded, pulling a brownie from his bag and offering Rose half of it, “explains me.”

  “How does it explain you?”

  “You grow up in a house where nobody cares about food, and you either end up not caring about food yourself, or probably caring too much.” He gave his belly an affectionate pat. “Guess which one I am. How were your school lunches?”

  “It would depend,” Rose said.

  “On what?”

  Rose bit her lip. School lunches, for her, had fallen into three categories. Her mother’s happy lunches were beautiful affairs—the sandwiches with crusts neatly cut off, the carrots peeled and cut into sticks of equal length, the apple washed, a paper napkin folded at the bottom of the bag, sometimes containing fifty cents for an ice-cream sandwich and a note reading “Have a treat on me.” Then there were the deteriorating lunches. The crusts would stay on the bread. The carrots wouldn’t be peeled—one time, her mother had put a whole carrot into her lunch bag, with the green fronds still on top. She’d forget napkins, forget milk money, sometimes forget the sandwich altogether. Once, Rose remembered, Maggie had caught her at her locker, looking dismayed. “Look,” she’d said, and showed Rose that her lunch bag contained nothing except, inexplicably, her mother’s checkbook. Rose had looked inside her own bag and found a crumpled leather glove.

  “We got hot lunch, mostly,” she told Simon. Which was true. She’d had two years of her mother’s lunches, good and bad, followed by the third category—ten years of steam-table pizza and mystery meat and Sydelle’s offers of Lean Cuisine and chopped salad, which Rose usually turned down.

  Simon sighed. “I would have killed for hot lunch. Anyhow,” he said, his face brightening, “do you think this will be fun?”

  “Do you remember what you were like as a first-year law student?”

  Simon considered. “Insufferable,” he said.

  “Right. Me, too. So I think we can safely assume that the vast majority of these kids are going to be just as obnoxious as we were.”

  “Ah.” said Simon. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a handful of magazines.“Reading material?”

  Rose considered a copy of Cook’s Illustrated, then picked up something called The Green Bag. “What’s this?”

  “A fun legal journal,” said Simon.

  “As if,” Rose said. She turned back toward the window, closed her eyes hoping that Simon would leave her alone, and feeling relieved when he did.

  The first candidate blinked at Rose and Simon, repeating Simon’s last question. “My goals?” she asked. She was disgustingly young and fresh-faced in her black suit as she stared at Rose and Simon in a way that was probably meant to be assertive but instead just made her look nearsighted. “I want to be sitting where you are five years from now.”

  Only with better feminine protection, Rose thought. For the past ten minutes she’d had the distinct feeling that the airport tampon wasn’t getting the job done.

  “Tell us why you’re interested in Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick,” Simon prompted.

  “Well,” she began confidently, “I’m very impressed by your firm’s commitment to pro bono work . . .”

  Simon glanced at Rose and made a check mark on the piece of paper they were using to keep score.

  “. . . and I respect the partners’ understanding that there should be balance between work and family commitments ...”

  Simon made a second check mark.

  “And,” the young woman concluded, “I think Boston would be a wonderful city to work in.”

  Rose and Simon stared at each other, mid-check-mark. Boston?

  The candidate stared at them uncertainly. “There’s so much to do there! So much history!”

  “True,” said Simon, “but we’re actually located in Philadelphia.”

  The young woman gulped.

  “Oh,” she said. “There’s lots to do in Philadelphia, too,” said Rose, thinking that this was something she would have done as a law student—scheduled so many interviews that all of the firms would have run together in one great big, family-friendly, committed-to-pro-bono blur.

  “Tell us about yourself,” Rose prompted the red-haired guy sitting across from her.

  He sighed. “Well,” he began, “I got married last year.”

  “That’s great,” said Simon.

  “Yeah,” the guy said bitterly, “except she told me last night that she’s leaving me for our Criminal Law professor.”

  “Oh, dear,” Rose murmured.

  “‘He’s advising me on my paper,’ she told me. Okay, I wasn’t suspicious. Would you have been suspicious?” he demanded, glaring at Simon and Rose.

  “Um,” said Simon. “Well, I’m not married.”

  The law
student slumped in his suit. “Look, you’ve got my résumé,” he said. “If you’re interested, you know where to find me.”

  “Yeah,” whispered Simon, as the guy left the room and the next candidate entered, “in the bushes outside the professor’s apartment building with night-vision goggles and a mayonnaise jar to pee in.”

  “I began my legal career out of disgust,” began the thin-lipped brunette. “Do you remember the case of the hot McNugget?”

  “No,” said Rose.

  “Not really,” said Simon.

  The law student shook her head and stared at them scornfully. “A woman, through the drive-through of McDonald’s, orders McNuggets. The McNuggets arrive, fresh from the fryer. They’re hot. The woman bites into a McNugget, burns her lip, sues McDonald’s for failing to inform her that the McNuggets would be dangerously hot, and wins hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was disgusted.” She glared at them both to highlight her disgust. “Rewards like that create the cancer of litigiousness that’s infecting America.”

  “You know, my uncle had that,” Simon said sadly. “Cancer of litigiousness. Nothing much you can do for it, either.”

  The woman glared at them. “I’m serious!” she said. “Frivolous lawsuits are a terrible problem for the legal profession.” Simon nodded attentively, and Rose stifled a yawn as the woman spent fifteen minutes giving them pertinent examples, cases, decisions, and footnotes, until she stood up abruptly, smoothing her skirt.

  “Good day,” she said, and marched out the door.

  Rose and Simon stared at each other, then burst out laughing.

  “Oh, dear,” said Rose.