Free Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) by Kathy Ebel Page A

gloves. “Please. My card. Give me a call and we chat.” Claudia made direct eye contact with Paolo, memorizing his sallow face with its thickly lashed, deeply set eyes so she could select it from the inevitable lineup. She plucked a card from his hand— IMAGE MODEL MANAGEMENT —as did Phoebe, but Claudia pointedly tore hers in half and deposited the scraps in Paolo’s gloved hand before he’d had time to retract it.
    â€œMaybe not you,” Paolo said to Claudia. Phoebe, who was familiar with Claudia’s occasional grocery-aisle smackdowns, slid Paolo’s card into the pocket of her peacoat and hungrily eyed the cigarettes.
    â€œWhat was that?” she asked Claudia rhetorically when Paolo had moved on.
    â€œThe shit that happens to you on a regular basis,” Claudia replied, piling a bunch of berried branches, a pot of lemon marmalade, and a box of Bahlsen Afrika cookies onto the checkout counter. She pulled the string shopping bag from her green vinyl purse as the storekeeper rung up her purchases. Claudia selected one of the two twenties from her wallet. Releasing the soft bill, she felt a pang, but was heartened by the crispness of the four singles returned to her as change.
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    The Tates lived in the Anselmo. The grand building had its broad shoulder to Central Park West and kept its face to the side street, in this way exemplifying a balance of prestige and humility.
    â€œOh no,” laughed Mr. Pettijohn when Claudia and Phoebe entered the lobby, “look who Santa brought me now.” The petite doorman came around from his desk and made his way across the marble checkerboard of the lobby in little dancing steps. Mr. Pettijohn’s singsongy lilt of the islands seemed utterly sincere, not like he was hiding his Bushwick for the sake and comfort of his clientele. “I want to say you got bigger since the last time I seen you, but I know how the ladies are. You gonna get mad, right?”
    Claudia handed Phoebe her bulging string bag and entered Mr. Pettijohn’s familiar embrace.
    Mr. Pettijohn was just Claudia’s height, with a short, impeccably kept salt-and-pepper afro. With his bay rum cologne, corduroy trousers, and drugstore reading glasses on a chain, if Mr. Pettijohn wasn’t hailing a taxi in the rain under a striped umbrella, or signing for another delivery from Gristedes, or monitoring the messy midnight comings and goings of the Anselmo’s teenagers as they obliterated another winter break, he could have passed for a visiting humanities professor. He now held Claudia at arm’s length. “You all grown now?” he asked with a rhetorical twinkle. “You got a job? You workin’ hard? Or hardly workin’?” His friendly questions caused Claudia’s skin to chill and prickle uncontrollably. She managed to nod and smile.
    The elevator opened with a clatter, depositing Claudia and Phoebe in a wood-paneled corridor. Swathed in fresh pine garlands and festooned with plaid taffeta rosettes, the Tates’ front door announced itself from the far end of the hall. The L.L. Bean boots and running shoes lined up neatly under long rows of enameled hooks from which all manner of foul-weather gear and faded Harvard sweatshirts hung suggested long walks over the heath, inclement weather be damned, decent sailing skills, and high SAT scores.
    â€œI know,” Claudia remarked, as Phoebe absorbed the intimate sprawl. “It looks like Vermont exploded, right?”
    Phoebe nodded at two decades’ worth of law-firm-boondoggle golf umbrellas stuffed into a majolica stand. “At least we’ll stay dry,” she noted.
    Claudia rang the bell.
    Paul and Annie Tate had bought their place in 1966, when the Upper West Side was still considered overly ethnic and dangerous. One of the first things they did was replace the shrieking buzzer with a proper bell. Its confident, brassy herald of the sisters’ arrival now