Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You (v1.2) (6 page)

He looked at Brandy for a moment, then ducked his head, began concentrating on burying a plate of French fries under a gallon of ketchup.

“Dam right you can’t look at me, Gar. Pick a year between now and infinity, Shelley. I bought the gown when I was a size eight, if that gives you any hints as to how long we’ve been planning this thing,” Brandy said, stabbing a cherry tomato and then popping it, whole, into her mouth.

“Now, hon, don’t start—”

“Don’t start? Yeah, Gar, Lord knows we don’t want to
start
anything.” Then she smiled, kissed his cheek a third time, seemed to regain her good humor as quickly as she’d lost it. “We’ve been engaged for twelve years now, right, Gary?” She leaned over the table and whispered loudly, “He’s cute, but a bit of a slow starter, if you know what I mean. That,” she ended, leaning back once more, “and the fact that his dearest mommy has yet to run out of excuses for postponing the date.”

Gary flushed to the roots of his buzz cut. “Now, Brandy, that’s not true. Mom—”

“Hates me,” Brandy declared, another cherry tomato impaled on her fork. “Hates, loathes, and detests me. How dare I take her little baby away from her, leave her alone, a poor, sick old woman like her, yadda yadda.”

She looked at Shelby , made a face. “Let’s see. There’s been the flooded basement, the new roof, the bad back— that was
twice,
Gar, remember—unexplained fainting spells, failing eyesight, and so much more. She once tried out agoraphobia—you know, that thing where you’re afraid to leave your own house? That lasted about three weeks, until Tony ran one of his buses to Atlantic City .” She snapped her fingers. “Presto! Agoraphobia all cured.”

“Brandy, we’ve set the date for September, and we’re by God going to go through with it this time,” Gary protested, looking fairly embarrassed. “Besides, Mom has run out of good excuses.”

“Shame she never tried dropping dead the day before the ceremony. I could live with that, and it would only work once,” Brandy said, winking at Shelby . “Well, enough fun stuff. So, what brings you to Allentown , Shelley? From the look of things, I’d say you plan to be here for a while.”

Shelby chewed on a small bite of salad, turning it into mush in her mouth as she tried to summon a convincing lie. Failing that, she swallowed hard and went with the first thing that came into her head.

“I was living in New York , Brandy, and simply got tired of the hustle and bustle of a big city. So much noise, so much traffic.”

“And crime,” Gary added helpfully.

“Yes!” Shelby leaned forward, pressing her forearms against the edge of the table, grabbing at Gary’s help with both hands. “I was
mugged.
It was horrible, Brandy. I was, um, jogging in Central Park . Suddenly there was this
man.
This huge man! In broad daylight. He took my purse— you know, one of those things that ties around your waist?—and was about to drag me off the path, into the bushes, when the police arrived.”

She sat back, pleased with herself. “Well, let me tell you, I was shaken. I resigned my position—er, quit my job the next day, packed up everything I could, and took the first bus leaving the city. It just happened to be heading for Allentown .”

“Wow,” Brandy breathed, definitely impressed—impressed with how very bad a liar her new acquaintance was, not that Gary had seemed to notice. “That’s so scary.”

“Yeah, and what happens the second she gets off the bus?” Gary said to prove Brandy’s point, his beefy hands balling into fists. “Bam! She gets mugged again. Talk about your rotten luck.”

Shelby agreed happily, not knowing that her luck had undergone yet anodier change.

It had just gotten worse.

She’d handed her credit card to the waitress as the three of them were talking, and now the waitress was back, holding the platinum card in one hand, scissors in the other.

“This card isn’t any good, hon. The girl at the company told me it’s been canceled just this morning. They told me I’m supposed to cut this up right in front of you,” the waitress said, sounding apologetic. “Sorry about this.”

As Shelby watched, openmoudied, the waitress did just as she’d been told, and Shelby was left with her only access to cash beyond the four hundred dollars in her wallet lying in two uneven pieces on the table. She was without money. For the first time in her life she was without money. Real life had just hit with a vengeance.

“But… but…” she stammered, picking up the pieces, vainly, stupidly trying to stick them together again. And then, as Brandy slid onto the bench seat beside her and put her pudgy arms around her commiseratingly, she began to cry.

Because she rarely needed to do more than express a wish for something before it was handed to her, Shelby wasn’t quite as overwhelmed by her good fortune as she might have been. Still, she did know that she could have done a lot worse than to be taken in by Brandy Wasilkowski.

What she considered to be the best of good luck was finding out that Brandy lived in the Allentown suburb of East Wapaneken , residing in a second-floor apartment in an old, converted school building.

Within hours of her silly collapse into tears at the diner, Shelby found herself firmly under Brandy’s wing, and she and her five suitcases were transferred to the spare bedroom in that same apartment.

She even found it possible to smile as Gary had put down the luggage, as the two of them stepped first right, then left, trying to make enough room for him to pass by her, back into the hallway.

The bedroom was infinitesimally small, half the size of Shelby’s closet. It was stuffed with what had to be someone’s mistaken impression of white French Provincial furniture, the narrow bed was covered in stuffed animals of varying vintage, and shelves on the walls were lined with cute little things called Beanie Babies that Brandy had already told her were someday going to be worth a small fortune.

Considering that Shelby had spent a lifetime around all-but-priceless pieces of art, she thought she’d done a fairly good job of looking as impressed as possible.

The walls of the room crowded in on her, painted a dark green and barely visible behind the shelves, pictures of Persian cats, and half a dozen very large posters of country music singers. Garth Brooks. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Reba McEntire. Shania Twain. And somebody else, her poster not favored with a signature, as if everyone should automatically know her—or recognize her by the size of her blond wig and the absolutely magnificent display of breasts beneath a jeweled gown and above a wasp-thin waist.

Well, Shelby thought, turning away from those unbelievable breasts, at least she wouldn’t feel alone in here. A person couldn’t possibly feel alone in this room.

She picked up one of the dozen photographs from the dresser, seeing a smiling Brandy as she made her way through the years-—and the dress sizes—all while surrounded by dozens of other smiling faces that could only be other Wasikowskis, if she could tell something like that merely by counting freckles.

Shelby took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then smiled. She was in a real bedroom in a real town, living with a real person, and she was about to have the adventure of her life. As she’d heard someone say on the bus, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

Then she remembered the two pieces of the credit card Somerton had canceled on her stuck in her purse, and felt her first real pangs of what it must be like for all these nice, normal people when money got tight, when there were too many days and too few dollars between now and their next paycheck.

Not that she even had a paycheck to look forward to. Damn Somerton for taking all the fun out of her adventure!

She felt sorry for herself for a moment, until a huge silver-shaded Persian with a neon pink collar flounced into the room, meowed at her briefly, hopped up on her bed, and began lazily cleaning herself. A cat. A pet. She’d never had a pet. What a simple, simply wonderful homey and fuzzy life Brandy lived. And now, if just for a little while, so did she.

Brandy and Gary were the good people Jim had talked about when he’d told her about East Wapaneken . They were the down-home, small-town folks who did more than host a charity ball for the less fortunate. They took them in, fed them, gave them a roof over their heads,
cared
for them. It was so wonderfully small town, just the way she’d imagined it.

It was real life, just as Shelby had wanted to see it, experience it. Even if, as she remembered Jim saying, everyone in a small town felt a right to know all your personal business.

As if to prove that fact, and over a dinner of home-delivered pizza (and while feeding pepperoni to Princess the Persian), Brandy promised not to ask any personal questions until her new friend was ready to answer them— and then asked at least two dozen of them.

Shelby pretty much held her own throughout Brandy’s questions, or so she’d thought, making up lies as fast as she could. But later that night, as she shared her narrow bed with Princess and a big, red plush dog with one ratty ear, she could hear Brandy and Gary talking in the living room down the hall.

“Those were Gucci loafers, Gary.
Gucci.
And did you see her watch? Solid gold, with
diamonds.
Not chips, Gar— real diamonds. I’m telling you, Shelley isn’t just a French Literature professor running away from New York , like she says she is. Professors don’t make that kind of money.”

“They do if they run up their credit cards until some waitress cuts them in half in front of you,” Gary pointed out reasonably. “I like her, too, babe, but she could be on the lam or something. Running away from the police. Did you think of that before you invited her to move in with you?”

“She
cried,
Gary ,” Brandy pointed out. “Just broke down and sobbed. Criminals don’t cry like that. She was shocked out of her gourd when the waitress cut up her card. And did you notice how she stumbled over her own name, like she wasn’t used to saying it? Or answering to it, come to think of it. No, Shelley’s in some kind of trouble. I’m sure of it. Maybe she’s running away from a boyfriend, or even an abusive husband.”

“It did look like she’d been wearing a ring on her left hand,” Gary had put in, playing detective now himself. “You know, like her hand is a little bit tanned, but there’s this one spot on her finger that isn’t. You may be right, hon. Still, what are we going to do with her? She can’t just stay here, can she?”

“And why not? She needs help; she needs a job. I’m an employment counselor, Gar, remember? She couldn’t have it any better than to be here. I can get her a job, keep her here with me until she earns enough to afford her own apartment, gets back on her own two feet. What could be easier?”

Indeed. What could?

That was when Shelby had finally fallen asleep, smiling at the thought that she had somehow become a woman of mystery. A very lucky woman of mystery who was about to embark on what could only be a wonderful adventure out in the “real” world.

The real world arrived at five-thirty the next morning as Brandy’s three different-sounding alarm clocks went off on the other side of the thin bedroom wall.

Shelby sat up all at once as Princess deserted her, clapping her hands over her ears, listening to Brandy grumble and complain as her bedsprings creaked as she got out of bed and turned off the alarms one after the other.

Not that the silence lasted for more than a few moments before Brandy knocked on Shelby’s door, then stuck her head in to say good morning, to be followed by her short, slightly chubby body, which was currently wrapped in a red-and-black-flowered faux-silk kimono. “Sorry about the racket. Should have warned you, I guess,” she said, wrinkling her freckled nose. “ Gary says it’s like waking the dead, trying to get me up in the morning. You want the shower first, Shelley, while I put some coffee on?”

“Um… well… sure, sure,” Shelby said, pushing her fingers through her hair, trying to remember who she was, where she was,
why
she was. “That… that would be just fine. Oh, and Brandy? Is my clock right? Is it really five-thirty?”

“Yeah. Scary, ain’t it? But I’ve got to be at work by eight, and I usually stop at Tony’s for breakfast before I catch my bus. You’ll go with me, of course.”

Shelby’s head was still struggling with the idea of being up before the dawn. “To work? I’m going to work with you?”

“No, silly, to Tony’s. You do want to eat, don’t you? I mean, you don’t really think I
use
the kitchen, do you? Now come on. Chop, chop.”

Once Brandy was gone, padding off down the hallway toward the kitchen, Shelby collapsed against the pillows once more, drinking she’d had enough of real life for one morning and planning to sleep until at least ten. She turned onto her side, tucked one hand beneath the pillows, and snuggled beneath the blankets.

Her eyes flew open once more as the apartment filled with the sound of a twangy male voice happily complaining that “nobody gets off in this town.” Brandy joined in seconds later with an off-key accompaniment that told the story of a town so small the trains didn’t stop there, there was only one stop light, one dog, and if the bus stopped there people got on but nobody got off.

“Like that?” Brandy asked, sticking her head inside the door once more. “That’s Garth Brooks, king of the world. You know, if anyone had told me I’d like country and western a year ago I would have laughed myself silly. Now I’m taking line-dancing lessons at the bowling alley on Friday nights, not that Gary will go with me, the jerk. Hey, you want to come along next time? It’s fun, honest. Oh,” she said, opening the door fully and walking into the room, “here’s your coffee. As I remember it, you take it black. I’ll hit the shower first, okay, keep the bathroom warm for you. But I’m warning you, unless you get into the shower before Mrs. Leopold in One B starts filling her tub, you’ll be showering in cold water.”  Shelby opened and closed her mouth a few times, unable to think of a single thing to say, finally settling on a weak “Thank you” as Brandy passed over the coffee mug with the drawing of some hairy, widemouthed cartoon monster on it.  Forty-five minutes later, with the punch line of a bad joke told on the radio by someone named Howard Sterm, or Stern, or something like that echoing in her ears, Shelby was following Brandy down the stairs and out into the already bright sunshine. A two-block walk ended at Tony’s Family Restaurant, located on a corner and, according to her new friend, converted from a gas station just five years earlier and now the favorite eating spot for most of East Wapaneken.