Jaine Austen 4 - Shoes to Die For by Laura Levine Page A

garbage can.
    I don’t know how long I sat there, staring blankly at the impossibly beautiful soap stars, not hearing a word they were saying. Finally, I gave up. This was ridiculous. If I had to stay in the apartment one more minute, I’d go nuts. I grabbed my car keys and headed out the door.
    As long as I was going to be stressed out, I might as well be stressed out with Mr. Goldman.

    Trying to find a patient at Cedars Sinai Hospital is like trying to find a fat woman on network television.
    An elderly volunteer at the information desk told me to take the elevator to the fifth floor and follow the blue line on the linoleum until I reached the nurses’ station, after which I was to follow a red line and then a green line, and then eventually another blue line. I began the trek feeling a lot like Sir Edmund Hillary must have felt when he decided to take his little hike up Mount Everest.
    Several red, blue, and green lines later, I made it to Mr. Goldman’s room. The door was half open, and I peeked inside.
    Mr. Goldman was lying in his hospital bed, an IV tube attached to his hand, watching Emeril on a TV mounted high on the wall. I knocked on the door, and he looked up.
    “Cookie!” he said, waving me over with his remote. “Come in. I was just watching Emeril. He’s making fried clams. Feh! He’s using too much seasoning.
    “Enough with the Bam! already!” he shouted at the screen, then clicked off the TV in disgust.
    “It’s good to see you, cookie,” he said, smiling up at me.
    “I brought you some flowers.”
    I held out a bouquet of roses I’d picked up on my way over to the hospital.
    “That’s nice, darling. Unfortunately, I’m allergic,” he said, with a sneeze.
    Oh, great. First I’d given him a heart attack, and now I was giving him an allergy attack.
    I sprinted out to the nurses’ station and gave the roses to a thin-lipped nurse, who shook her head in disapproval.
    “You should never bring roses to a hospital,” she scolded. “So many people are allergic.”
    Obviously this was a woman who’d cut class the day they were teaching How to Be Pleasant at nursing school.
    I felt like taking them back and giving them to someone who might actually appreciate them, but it wasn’t worth it. Instead, I sprinted back to Mr. Goldman’s side. In the bright light of day, I could see every line and liver spot on his face. There was something so sad about those liver spots, so vulnerable; just the sight of them made me feel guiltier than ever.
    “So,” I said, “how are you doing?”
    “I’ll live,” he said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. He seemed so much tinier than he did in class.
    “Oh, Mr. Goldman. I feel awful about what happened.”
    “Don’t be silly. Like I already told you, just because you yelled at me and I had a heart attack, that doesn’t mean you caused it.”
    “If there’s anything I can do to make it up to you, just name it.”
    “As a matter of fact,” he said, “there is.”
    “What?” I asked. “What can I do?”
    He smiled hesitantly.
    “Well, you see, I told Mr. Perez you were my girlfriend.”
    “Mr. Perez?”
    “The guy in the next bed.” He pointed to the bed next to him. From the rumpled sheets and dent in the pillow I could see someone had been lying there, but it was empty now.
    “He’s in the toilet,” Mr. Goldman explained.
    “Why would you tell him I’m your girlfriend?”
    “I know I shouldn’t have, but he was bragging about his young girlfriend and what a hot number she was, acting like a real Romeo. And suddenly it just popped out of my mouth. I said I had a young girlfriend, too. You’re the only young gal I know so I told him it was you. So would you mind very much pretending to be my fiancée?”
    Are you crazy? I felt like shouting. Of course I mind!
    But then I looked down at those pathetic liver spots. And before I could stop myself, I was saying:
    “Sure. I don’t mind. Not at all.”
    At which point we heard a toilet