I made up my mind to sell them on eBay. There were at least a dozen pairs of shoes, and if I could get two or three hundred dollars a pair, that would add up to a couple of thousand dollars. Yes, I’d get rid of them all. Except maybe the slingbacks. They’d look great with my sexy little black dress. Not that I actually owned a sexy little black dress. But I planned on buying one just as soon as I lost a dress size or three.

I tried on the slingbacks one more time. They really were fabulous. From the ankle down I was the spitting image of Sarah Jessica Parker.

It was at that moment that Prozac decided one of the shoe boxes was her mortal enemy. She lunged at it with the same ferocity she usually saves for my pantyhose. You’ve seen those nature films on the Discovery Channel where lions attack poor little gazelles? Well, Prozac went at that shoebox like a lioness on speed. I quickly grabbed it from her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I admonished her.

She shot me a dirty look, and jumped back on the sofa to resume her nap.

I was looking at the shoebox to see how badly she’d damaged it, when I noticed what looked like a photo peeking out from the tissue paper at the bottom of the box. I reached in and pulled it out. It was a faded picture of two tow-headed girls standing barefoot in front of a rundown house. The girls, in their late teens, were dressed for a special occasion, in cheap frilly dresses.

One of the girls was ordinary, short and squat, with a square face and limp hair. The other—in spite of her cheap dress and bare feet—was a knockout. Tall and willowy, with a beaming Prom Queen smile, she looked boldly into the camera. I’d know that face anywhere. It was SueEllen, the high school version. I flipped the picture over. On the back it said SueEllen and Carolee. Graduation Day.

I wondered who Carolee was. Probably a friend. Or a relative. Whoever she was, she was totally eclipsed by SueEllen’s radiance.

I took a closer look at the house behind them. It was straight out of Tobacco Road, with a sagging front porch and termite-eaten shutters. I remembered what SueEllen had said about growing up in genteel poverty. What a crock. From the looks of that house and the dress she was wearing, SueEllen was no Southern belle. She was plain old trailer trash.

How ironic, I thought, that Hal and SueEllen wound up together. Hal with his phony Anglo name, and SueEllen with her fictional landed gentry ancestors. I could just picture them in the early days of their courtship, pretending to be something they weren’t. Each of them falling in love with someone who didn’t exist.

I pulled out the rest of the tissue paper in the shoebox, wondering if anything else had been buried there. Indeed there was—a letter, addressed to SueEllen in a shaky hand. But this was no memento from the past. It was postmarked from Georgia, just a few months ago. I debated the ethics of reading it for a whole nanosecond, then dived right in.