Free Wish Upon a Star by Goldsmith Olivia Page B

will you wear on the plane?’ Tina asked.
    ‘I guess whatever I wear to work on Wednesday. I’ll dress up.’
    Tina shook her head. ‘People dress down for the red-eye. You know, you sleep on it, so you don’t want to wear your best outfit.’
    Claire hadn’t known that. ‘What does…’ she couldn’t bring herself to call him Michael, though she would have to try. ‘What does he wear?’
    ‘Jeans, usually. Sometimes with a T-shirt and blazer. Sometimes just a sweater. He changes at the office.’
    Claire was surprised and mentally began revising her plan. She’d bring her Levi’s to work and she’d wear them along with the sweater she’d knit. ‘I still need a raincoat,’ Claire told Tina.
    ‘Century Twenty-one,’ Tina suggested. ‘You can go on your lunch hour, Monday.’
    ‘No. I have to get my passport.’ Claire shivered. It wasn’t just the March wind. If her passport didn’t come through, all this preparation, all the excitement and money spent was wasted and foolish.
    ‘Well, you only have to go and drop off your documents at Rockefeller Center. After that I can send up a messenger for it,’ Tina said airily. ‘We do it all the time. So I say after your drop-off we meet at Century Twenty-one.’
    Claire knew all the women from Crayden Smithers shopped at the discount store but she could never stand the hustle or the hassle. Still, she knew the green coat simply wouldn’t do. She doubted that the classy, perfect, sophisticated raincoat she pictured would be hanging on the seventy per cent off rack in Century Twenty-one. But she might as well give it a try. She shrugged. She couldn’t spin straw into gold but maybe she could find a needle in a haystack! ‘Meet you there,’ she promised.

Ten
    On Monday Claire took the morning off work, went straight up to the passport expeditor, dropped off her documents and took the subway back downtown for shopping with Tina. The store was as jammed as it always was at lunch hour and just walking in made Claire feel dizzy. But she had forgotten that she was with a pro. Before Claire even had a chance to register the racks and racks of men’s sports jackets, the display of dozens of scarves, bins with hundreds of sweaters—all at sixty per cent off—Tina had put a clamp on her shoulder and directed Claire ‘to the back, up the stairs, and to the right on the mezzanine’.
    Claire pushed her way up the steps through the crowd of women with bags, umbrellas, purses, and other armor.
    They were in a section with two rows—at least a hundred feet long—all lined with coats. ‘What size are you?’ Tina asked. ‘A ten? A twelve? Or bigger?’ Claire thought she heard contempt in Tina’s size-eight voice. ‘Will you wear a sweater under it?’
    Before Claire could answer, Tina had turned away and, with an expression of intense concentration, began to click through the rack in front of her, the extra inch or two between garments used to push the rejected coats further away and give the next candidate a moment of breath. Tina surveyed each, then, heartlessly, clicked it beside the previous reject before Claire could even get a look. Soon, Tina had gone through ten feet of coats and had pulled three out. ‘Here. Want a slicka?’
    It was a yellow plastic, exactly the color police wore when they directed traffic. Claire didn’t even respond. ‘I didn’t think so,’ Tina laughed. ‘How about this?’
    It was black, with more straps, buckles, epaulettes, and pockets than any uniform the French Legionnaires had ever imagined. ‘No, I want…’
    ‘…beige,’ they said simultaneously and to Claire’s complete amazement Tina flourished a decent-looking light tan raincoat.
    ‘Ta-da!’ Tina said. ‘Looks like your style. Really boring.’
    But when Claire began to unbutton it she saw the label and the lining. It was Aquascutum. And though Claire didn’t know anything about fashion she knew it was a label on the coats that the people with the windowed