Best Foot Forward (12 page)

She walked off.

I think I just got promoted, but I wasn't sure. Running after her wouldn't have seemed managerial, so I stood tall, sucked in my stomach.

I had no idea what to do next.

“You think of any more of my strengths?” Tanner asked hopefully.

“Well . . . you're good with kids. You taught Webster really well and you helped that little girl learn to write her name.”

“I like kids.”

“Not everyone who likes kids can teach them. You're a good teacher, Tanner.”

He scoffed. “Teachers don't make any money.”

“But they get the summer off.”

That got him thinking.

 

It was like a whole new world of possibilities opened up to him.

“If you want to learn about a shoe store,” I told him, “read the material that comes in.”

So Tanner brought shoe brochures home and the next day he came back saying things like, “Bright colors are here for fall with a brushed tone for men, but that doesn't mean anyone has to give up style or comfort.” He looked at me intensely.

We approached goal setting.

“I want to sell shoes,” he insisted.

“Okay, that's going to be the goal that you have to work toward. You've got to understand how the store works first. That's what I had to do.” I got on the sliding ladder and gave it a push all the way to the end of the row, one-handed. Look, Ma, no net.

Tanner laughed.
“Let me try.”

“You can't do that yet.”

“Why not?”

I knew there was an answer, but I wasn't sure what it was. It was just a feeling I had that he wasn't ready for this yet. You can't just walk into a shoe store and expect to do it all immediately. I remembered my mom telling me over and over when I wanted to accomplish a big goal:
You've got to earn the privilege.

“Because you've got to earn it,” I said. Disgust crossed his face.

I walked him to the foot poster. “See, you've got all these bones and muscles in the feet and they all have a part to play in helping us walk. If a shoe doesn't fit right, it affects lots of areas because so many parts of the foot are connected.”

Tanner gazed at his feet. “That's a lot of bones.”

“Twenty-six bones,” I said. “Per foot.”

“You have a life other than this?”

Not much of one. “And see”—I took a pair of stiletto heels out—“see how high that heel is? These heels are really bad for women's feet because they stretch that muscle and make the toes do too much of the work.”

“My girlfriend wears those.”

“Girl
friends,
isn't it?”

“Hey, they come, they go.”

Like bad shoe designs. I told him how stiletto heels cause knee and back problems.

He pressed in. “Then how come you sell 'em?”

“Because people want them. I don't think we should sell them. I try to talk people out of them.”

“You don't get fired for that?”

“No.” I smiled. “Here, we tell the truth.”

But as soon as I said it, I wondered if that were really true.

 

I tore into Mrs. Gladstone's office the first chance I got.

“I'm not sure how to be a manager,” I confessed.

“I think you've been doing it, Jenna. You just have the official title now.”

I bit my lip. “But
goal setting.
I have trouble with that in my own life.”

She smiled. “Setting goals for others is always much easier than setting them for ourselves. That's one of the joys of management.”

“But I don't know what he should be concentrating on!”

“Jenna, that young man needs some successes under his belt. So give him short-term projects he can easily accomplish and praise him when he gets them done. Build up his confidence, then later add something that will take him longer to finish. Don't overwhelm him.” She got up, walked past me, and headed toward the bathroom.

I guess the only person around here who was allowed to be overwhelmed was me.

 

Mrs. Gladstone was spending time with Tanner—a little too much time, in my opinion. With everything else going on in the store, with Elden doing who knows what in Dallas, you'd think she'd be busier with the corporate guys.

She was telling Tanner all these stories about the shoe business—even some I'd never heard—like the one about Harry Bender's all-out sales composure.

“Once there was a mouse in the Dallas store,” I heard her say. “It ran across the sales floor and stopped right in the middle of the women's section in the middle of the end-of-the-year sale. Ladies were screaming, and Harry raised that voice of his, looked at the mouse, and said, ‘You'll have to wait your turn like everybody else.' ” She and Tanner had a good laugh over that one.

It didn't make me feel like laughing.

Yaley was coming in daily to check up on Tanner and to tell me how happy he seemed at home these days. Murray was saying how he thought Tanner had the goods to be one of the great salespeople. The whole world was focused on Tanner. Mrs. Gladstone even took him out to lunch. When he came back, he actually said to me, “I put in a good word for you.”

It took all my training in an alcoholic home not to tell him off.

Tanner kept asking me what was wrong and I kept lying. “Nothing.”

I had to hold myself tight, I had to be strong for everyone. I was trying to be happy that he liked his job and he was doing so much better. I knew he'd crawled out of a dark hole and I wanted to help. I really did. But I felt like I was losing ground.

“The doughnut guy's here.”

I was sitting at my desk, looking through factory reports for Mrs. Gladstone. I tried to make it seem like that wasn't big news.

Tanner said, “So you should go down. Right?”

Casual and distant, I told myself. “Murray's there. Right?”

“The guy asked for you.”

“Oh.” I got up, walked casually down the stairs, onto the sales floor, and tripped.

Charlie caught me. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I need boots,” he added.

“We've got those.”

I could feel Murray and Tanner staring at me. I dropped my shoehorn, picked it up.

Charlie Duran looked at the big bell. “What's that for?”

“Dramatic impact,” Murray said solemnly.

I showed Charlie the all-around boots. He didn't seem like the Western type.

Mrs. Gladstone had come down and stood at the register, watching, too. Charlie picked up a desert suede boot, an all-leather chukka, a rugged leather pull-up boot with a leather-lined rubber sole. “
Very
good,” I told him, “for all-around wear.”

“That's what I need.”

I measured his feet; went into the back; brought the wrong sizes out.

He tried on six pairs—none of them worked. But then I thought,
Boller, do what you know.

“Look,” I said, “you've got a narrow foot and the styles you're looking at aren't going to feel right. Try this one.” I held up a hiking boot—part leather, part fabric, totally waterproof. “They clean up well. You can splash mud on these. You can drop doughnuts on these.”

“The ultimate test.” He laughed.

He had a good laugh. I was feeling more like myself. “You know a boot's all about sturdiness. And if you've got too much room, you're going to be miserable.”

“I try to avoid misery,” he said.

I slipped the boots on him, laced them up tight, but not too tight. He could have done that himself, but, okay, I was showing off a little. He walked around in them. “Go up on your toes,” I told him.

“It feels good.”

I nodded. “They'll move with you, not against you.”

He walked back over to me. “You know what you're doing.”

“Thanks.” Putting my shoehorn in my pocket, I walked him to the register past Mrs. Gladstone, Murray, and Tanner.

I hoped I wasn't blushing. I rang him up at the register. Made a mistake. Had to cancel the charge.

“Doughnuts are easier,” he said.

“But they're dangerous.”

He laughed. “The chocolate chip ones are menacing.”

“Tell me about it. But the raspberry . . .”

“The ultimate danger.”

He always had a comeback. I liked that. Finally, the credit card went through. Murray looked like he might ring the bell. If he did, I'd kill him.

“So,” Charlie said.

“So . . . ,” I answered.

“I'll see you.”

“I hope you like the shoes.”

“I already do.”

He stood there for a minute, then he left. I would have sighed openly, but
everyone
was looking at me.

I put the receipt bill in the drawer.

“You had the guy,” Tanner said to me.

“He seems like quite a nice young man.” That was Mrs. Gladstone.

I felt my face flame red. “He's
just
a guy.”

Tanner scoffed, “You need to get out more, girl.”

 

“Out with it, Jenna. What do you like about this guy?” Opal dug her chopsticks into the plate of pad thai noodles.

I shifted in my chair. How do you explain chemistry?

“Well . . . he's sure of himself.”

Opal nodded. She appreciated confidence.

“He seems to be his own person.”

“How?”

“He's just cool about himself and what he does. He likes being a doughnut guy. I like that.” I ate a dumpling. “I just want to let things happen or not, you know? Like you and Jacques.”

She made a pained noise. Jacques hadn't asked her out yet.

“Maybe you shouldn't be quite so distant,” I suggested.

“Look, Jenna. The whole relationship can look totally dead, but you have to be ready. Anytime. Anyplace. It's always when you least expect it.”

 

We were waiting for Elden Gladstone's official word on the redesign of the Rollings Walkers. Mrs. Gladstone was a lot more patient than me. She said that sometimes you have to give people a chance to do the right thing.

She didn't add what we were both thinking:
even if you don't believe they will.

I was about to have my first meeting with Tanner to see how he was doing with his goals. An “assessment” meeting, Mrs. Gladstone called it. I hoped I wasn't going to mess up. She'd finally taken
me
out to lunch and told me what a good job I was doing.

“I haven't spent much time with you lately,” she said, “because you were doing so well on your own. I didn't want to interfere with your momentum.”

That made me sit tall.

I leaned forward and asked Tanner the big management question. “
So,
how do you think you're doing?”

Tanner grinned like he was ready to be CEO. “Good.”

He sat at the chair near my desk, picked up an Al-Anon book I had lying there. He opened it, leafed through.

“You believe in this stuff?”

This was an assessment meeting about him, not me. “Yeah. I do.”

“ ‘Step Ten,' ” he read. “ ‘Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.' ” He closed the book. “What's that mean?”

“Usually, you work the steps from one to twelve.”

He smiled. “I take the fast way through.”

“Funny,” I said, “but there are no Twelve-Step Cliff Notes.”

He took out his sheet that I'd made for him. He'd checked off everything for the week—recycling, organizing, reading more of the shoe brochures that we'd discussed. He'd coordinated with Murray about the daily specials and had a system in place to make the shoes easier to find. He'd checked the inventory every day, too.

“That's great, Tanner. You're really helping us.”

His face lit up like a little kid's.

“Have you got any questions about anything?”

He held up a plastic Gladstone's shoehorn. “How do you use this?”

I took out my silver shoehorn, the one I got after my first anniversary with Gladstone's. It had my initials on it.

I took off my shoe. “You put the shoehorn under the heel to slide it into the shoe. See? Gently.”

He tried it with my foot.

“Sorry.”

He practiced some more. He practiced on himself.

I said, “I appreciate how hard you work to do things right.”

He gave me a soft smile. “I do that?”

“All the time,” I assured him.

“Thanks.”

He stood up and put the plastic shoehorn in his pocket like it cost a million bucks.

“‘Fall comes,'” Webster read haltingly from his book. “ ‘Squirrels find nuts.' ”

Mrs. Gladstone patted his hand.

He scrunched up his face and kept reading. “ ‘Winter is coming. How do they know?' ”

“Boots go on sale,” Murray offered.

I was taking down Harry's memorial. That twenty percent off was not meant for the ages. Soon we'd be putting a few winter boots on special to get people in the store.

I rolled up the THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, HARRY! sign.

That's when Charlie Duran walked into the store in his new boots.

I hadn't seen him in over a week. I tried to appear casual.

Charlie checked his watch. “Look, I'm on break. Sometime do you want to go to a movie . . . ?”