Chapter One: Eighty-Seven Dollars
Clara had been saving the eighty-seven dollars for three weeks.
Not for the dress — she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine the dress — but for the handbag in the window of the shop two doors down, the one that had been marked down twice and sat at the edge of the display as if waiting to see if anyone would finally commit. The bag was practical. Sturdy. The kind of thing that would last several years if you took care of it, and Clara was very good at taking care of things.
She passed the boutique on her lunch break, the way she passed it every Tuesday and Thursday when she took the longer route back from the sandwich place on Elm, and normally she looked at the window and kept walking. This was a reasonable and efficient approach to windows displaying things you cannot afford: observe, register, continue.
But today there was a red dress on the mannequin just inside the door, and the door was propped open because of the October warmth, and the dress was the kind of red that stops the eye the way a fire does — not aggressively, not demanding anything, simply present in a way that made everything around it quieter.
Clara stopped.
She was wearing her Tuesday clothes: dark trousers that had survived four years of office work through careful washing, a cream blouse she had ironed that morning with the focused attention she applied to things that mattered, and a cardigan her mother had given her two Christmases ago in a grey that matched everything. Her hair was pinned back. She wore small gold posts in her ears that had belonged to her grandmother. She looked, she knew, like a person with a reasonable job and a careful life and no business standing in front of a boutique on Meridian Street.
She went inside anyway.
The store was cool and quiet, the way expensive stores are quiet — a specific, cultivated silence that is itself a product, something you’re meant to feel the moment you cross the threshold. The racks were spaced generously apart. The lighting was warm and exact. A woman behind the counter with very good posture was watching Clara the way people watch things they’ve already categorized.
Clara walked toward the mannequin. She told herself she only wanted to see the fabric up close, to understand what made it that particular color, whether it was the weave or the dye or some combination of the two. She was not going to try it on. She was not going to ask the price. She was going to look at it for thirty seconds and then go back to the office.
She reached out and touched the hem.
The saleswoman moved fast.
