Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer Read Free Book Online

her bare feet—a flash of toenail (red! as expected!)—and then the door is shutting and the locks are locking—
    And because she is barefoot I can’t hear her walking away, she is instantly a ghost, ghosted, STILETTO soft now and shoeless and who knows when she is coming back. I whimper; my ankle is killing me. I need to pee. I could get out—I have to get out—I could stand outside her house, look through her windows, find her face. But I don’t; I stay where I am, pleasureless, inhaling the cold sick smell of car carpet and my own damp crotch.
    I ease my phone from the pocket of my coveralls and dial each of my brothers until one of them answers. I close my eyes and say I need a ride, and Carl makes a farting sound with his mouth and says Where are you? I imagine STILETTO’s front door—I imagine knocking—I imagine her letting me in.
    I’m here, I say, and then I hang up.

 
    SHOP LADY
    There’s a woman, I don’t know if you know her, she works downtown, she’s a clerk at Kessler’s jewelry store. Men come in and stare at the ropes of silver and gold she lays across her hands; they never know what to buy so they say What do you think? And she always recommends the middle-priced one, so they’ll understand she isn’t just trying to get more money, she honestly thinks this is the best one. They pull out their wallets and put them on the counter, they flip through a stack of cards and rub their foreheads. She wraps what she’s chosen in tissue paper and a box with a shiny ribbon. That makes the men happy, they can barely remember on the way home what she has put inside, but they don’t worry. It’s always a hit, she has the touch, she knows what people are going to like. When it’s slow and there are no husbands or groups of women whispering and looking at their phones the woman leans against the counter, she’s tired, she has one foot wrapped around the ankle of the other as she rubs her tights together. Then someone comes in and she puts both heels on the floor; she smiles and runs her hand along the glass counter looking like she has just come out of a dream.
    *   *   *
    How I know all this is I’m watching her. When I moved here with my dad a few months ago I made friends with this girl, Charity, and we started to skip school and come down here almost every week to this coffee place across from where the jewelry shop is. When we sat on the curb to smoke I started noticing this woman in the shop. The store is almost all windows so you can see everything and after a while you get to know the kind of customers who go in and you know which one is shopping for his wife or girlfriend, which one is just looking, which one is bored or whatever and doesn’t care how much something costs. The shop lady smiles at everyone, not in a fake way, but like she really cares about selling all this stuff. She has dark skin, maybe she’s Spanish or Italian, and she wears long dresses and little quilted jackets and some of the jewelry they sell in the shop.
    Today I’m downtown by myself because Char’s grounded for ditching school. It’s really hot and the place is crawling with tourists who act like they’ve never seen a palm tree before. This guy comes up to me, some old bum, and he’s all Hey I’ll give you a kiss if you give me a quarter. I tell him to fuck off, and he holds up his arms and says Soorrrrry and he laughs at me and I stub out my cigarette and start walking back to the coffee shop, wondering why the only people who talk to me are psychos or freaks.
    *   *   *
    I don’t know when I started thinking about buying something at Kessler’s but it just happened that every time I’d see the shop lady I’d think about doing it. The nicest place I’d ever been in was the Nordstrom’s where Char and I looked for some underwear but there was too much