Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes. Lauren Baratz-Logsted

well. At least I owned the title of The Golden Squeegee.

      And I did love the women I worked with, if for their sheer vibrancy alone, even if they did have a tendency to pick on me.

      “Stel-la.” Conchita poked her head between the front seats. “How come she always gets to sit in front?”

      “She” was their name for me.

      “Because she gets carsick,” Stella explained for the umpteenth time. “And I don’t want her vomiting in my hair.”

      “Sounds pretty flimsy to me,” said Rivera. “Have you actually ever seen her get carsick?”

      “Well, no,” Stella conceded. “But do any of us really want to?”

      A valid argument, I thought, even as I muttered, “‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’” Honestly, did there have to be three of them to devil me?

      “What did she say?” Conchita asked.

      “Something about fire and bubbles,” Rivera said. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s singing some kind of dumb-ass song?”

      “Where are we working today?” Conchita asked.

      “First job, a big house in Westport,” Stella said. “Movie star.”

      Westport and the towns around it had more movie stars per square mile than anywhere else outside of Hollywood and it seemed that they were all clients of Squeaky Qlean. In fact, we did so many homes belonging to famous people that Stella occasionally flirted with the idea of adding “Window washers to the stars!” to her business cards but worried that her upscale clientele would find that too presumptuous.

      “So no salsa dancing on the ladders,” Stella cautioned. “You girls need to act like professionals today. The job is way overpriced and I’m hoping to talk them into having us back each month.”

      Monthly window cleaning might seem like a ridiculous expense for a private homeowner, but Stella had secured one such client already, a famous record producer who lived out on the water. When we first did his house, he hadn’t had it done in ten years and he spent the whole morning following me from room to room—I was always the inside person—stoned out of his mind, laughing and muttering, “Clean windows. Way cool. I can see. I can see!” Mister Famous Record Producer had moved in around the time of the Clinton impeachment, something he still hadn’t gotten over all these years later. “The man got impeached for a blow job—a blow job! If people in the music business got fired for that, there’d be no music left anywhere in the world.” Stella had actually needed to talk him out of having us come every week, which was what he originally wanted, and, good as the money was, none of us wanted to listen to him do his “I can see!” number that often or listen to him whine about how Bubba had gotten treated, even those of us who agreed with him. If every window washer lost their job over a…

      If traffic was kind and Rte 7 wasn’t one long parking lot, Westport was a good thirty-five minutes from Conchita and Rivera’s apartment, so I pulled out my book and went back to my Hemingway, figuring on getting some reading in. A few more chapters—I’d started the book the night before—and I would have read everything Papa’d ever written.

      “What you reading today?” Conchita asked.

      I held up the book, showed them the cover.

      “No shit, chica,” Rivera said, “but the sun also sets, too, you know, every damn day.”

      Indeed.

      Stella had not been whistling Windex when she said the client we were doing was a movie star. Elizabeth Hepburn, star of stage and screen, may have been as old as television, but even I, who preferred pages to celluloid, knew who she was. She had two Academy Awards on her mantel—I was tempted to dance with them when she went down for her morning nap, book in hand, but resisted the urge—and had starred in my all-time favorite movie, A Bitter Pill, about a starlet who overcomes her strumpet past only to be taken out by brain cancer on the night of the Oscars. “Did someone turn the lights out in here?” was a line that always made me bawl like a baby and always made Hillary laugh at me for bawling like a baby.

      Due to my fear of heights, I was always the inside person. Still, even though there were three of them outside and only one of me inside, despite Stella’s earlier admonitions to take this job seriously, they all goofed around so much that I was done long before they would finish.

      Hey, they don’t call me The Golden Squeegee for nothing.

      So I grabbed my lunch bag from the van and sat out on a far corner of the fieldstone terrace, figuring no one in the house could object to that too much so long as I cleaned up after myself, and pulled out my now-cold Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, popped open my Diet Pepsi Lime and polished off my Hemingway.

      Food done; drink done; book, and therefore all of Hemingway, done. Crap, I hadn’t thought to bring a backup book. What was taking the other three so long?

      “Miss?” The voice was tentative and a bit shaky, as though the speaker was recovering from something. And yet somehow the voice was confident as well, as though the speaker was also sure that whoever her audience was, that audience would immediately burst into applause. “Oh, miss?”

      I looked up to see Elizabeth Hepburn, wearing a plush pink satin bathrobe despite the warmth of the day, standing in the sliding-glass doorway. She may have been close to ninety, but she was still a stunner, with blue eyes like a chip from the sky, hair as white as a new Kleenex tissue and a perfect smile that defied the viewer to claim those teeth weren’t real; poking out from the bottom of her robe, she had white fur mules on her pedicured feet. If I hadn’t worried it might be taken amiss, I really might have applauded for her.

      But from doing other stars’ homes with Stella, I’d come to realize that stars could be, well, strange. It was like they didn’t know what they wanted. On the one hand, they wanted you to know who they were—“I am important!”—but on the other, they didn’t want you to acknowledge who they were, as if somehow that acknowledgment might be an intrusion.

      I jumped up from where I’d been sitting, wiped my hands off on my khakis.

      “I’m sorry,” I started to say. “I shouldn’t have—”

      “Of course you should have.” She pooh-poohed my concerns away. “I just looked out the windows—they’re so clean! I can see!—and saw you sitting out here while you waited for the others to finish and I thought you maybe could use some company.”

      There was something lonely-looking about her, making me think that maybe she was the one who could use some company, but I couldn’t say that. So I merely accepted the seat she indicated at the white-painted wrought-iron table.

      “Here,” she said. “You sit here and I’ll go inside and get dessert. I baked cookies last night,” she added proudly.

      Elizabeth Hepburn baked her own cookies?

      She was back in a flash, cookies and fresh lemonade on a tray, and damn if those cookies weren’t good. The rest of the crew didn’t know what they were missing, being such slow workers. Of course, if the rest of the crew were fast workers, I probably would never have gotten to taste those cookies, so there was that.

      “What were you reading?” she asked.

      Why did everyone always ask me that? It seemed like it was a question I answered several times a day.

      Like I’d done with Stella, Conchita and Rivera earlier, I flashed the book’s cover.

      “Ernie?” she said. “People still read Ernie?”

      Ernie?

      “Once I start reading an author, I read everything they ever wrote,” I said. “This is the last and I don’t know what to read next. Why? Did you know—?”

      “Oh, my, yes. When I was a lot younger, I hooked up with Ernie—is that how you say it these days, ‘hooked up’?—in Key West.”

      “Really?”