Going Away Shoes Read Online Free Page A

about two months ago when there was a naked clown living in her closet. He came out in the middle of the night and told her to take all of her clothes off, which is why Debby was finding her all tangled up and half naked each morning. Their mother said he should have been ashamed saying and doing all those things he did but she did have to chuckle over it all. He was a clown after all, even ifhe did bear a striking resemblance to that awful fat woman who used to work with their dear darling daddy. By then she loved to tell all about when she first met their father, how he fell madly in love with her and was still consumed with his passion for her as he drew his last breath.
    Her sisters live in soap opera time and forget from one day to the next exactly what has happened. They have friends who change partners as often as underwear, but as soon as the recessional march plays and they are out at the reception drinking champagne and eating little finger foods, that’s old news. They forget how they fucked first this one and then that one. Talked about this one, lied about that one. They forget because life is just so hard —so hard to get Justin in an Ivy and so hard to satisfy a husband while also satisfying yourself. So hard to find a good hair color person or a housekeeper or Russian tutor or pedicurist. They forget their dad was in love with Big-Butt Betty or that Uncle Ted and the sex-convention women flew too close to the sun, that Wanda once lived in a crack den and that Carly’s whole life has been dictated by her boobs and how the men she married have ordered her to wear them. Her sisters forget because it’s easier that way.
    They will, however, never forget that Debby has dated people of different colors and they will never forget the time she wore white shoes after Labor Day. She was only twenty-five and hadfractured her toe, and those were the only shoes that could accommodate a great big bandage. Still, they were embarrassed and ashamed. They talked about it and talked about it, their mother saying how surely she had taught Debby better than that! It all gets regularly visited, too, the white shoes and Koi and Ronnie, though the years have led them to call him Rashad.
    “Debby was international before international was cool,” Justin’s dad, Justin, says, standing tall in his shiny conservative shoes. They will remember those goddamned white shoes and her one real boyfriend (because he was black and not because he was nice) when all that’s left on earth are Tupperware products and the cockroaches.
    Sometimes, when it’s too late for a sisterly drive-by, Debby sits in that room with all the power of malicious force. She could withhold food and drink. She could accidentally trip and pull the oxygen plug. She could smoke long brown cigarettes and fill the room with carbon monoxide. But why? No one can give her an edited rerun, a return to the choices she didn’t make. No one can give her a second chance with Ronnie, the nerve to get in a car or on the bus and go when he invited her to come see him after he transferred to Furman. She told him her sister was getting married and she needed to be there to help (true); she told him her mother was having a memorial service on the anniversary of her father’s death (true); she told him she was sick,and she was. Sick with fear and lack of courage and the price tag of her own freedom. Pull it. Pull the plug . And then another year passed with an invitation she didn’t have the nerve to accept and then too many years passed and thoughts of Ronnie were replaced with those of places that she might go. She has read so much about certain places that she feels she’s been there and can play through it like memory on demand. She is on a remote country road in Scotland, surrounded by heather and shaggy wild ponies. Enormous stone castles emerge from the distant mist. Or she is stretched out on the pink sand of Bermuda, the ocean lulling her into sleep, or she is at the