In the end, he threw a bill down on the table. I told him I couldn’t possibly take it, but he insisted. I think he wanted me to leave him alone. I pressed a hug on him, lingering with a swipe of the 34Ds, and hoped that’d be enough of a cheap thrill that I wouldn’t feel guilty about taking his money.

But to be honest: I didn’t feel guilty at all. All I felt was relief—it hadn’t been pretty, but it had worked and now I could save the cash. I wobbled back to Lou, trying not to swagger, swiping at my eyes and feeling, for the first time in a long time, the freshness of being somebody I liked.

When I got back to the table, Lou was chewing on the end of her unlit cigarette. I plunked the money down as I scooted into the booth.

“Not great,” she said.

“It worked.”

Lou nodded. “You think on your feet pretty well.”

“I didn’t plan that!”

“Then you have good instincts. Or you got lucky. Either way, I think you’ve got some sort of potential.”

Later, she’d take me shopping. She’d buy me red lipstick and six thousand pairs of stockings and pumps and handbags and filmy little undernothings. Later, she’d explain the importance of style, that I was selling a desire made flesh, and that it was our job to figure out the marks once we got them. The Lady Upstairs gave us the orders, and it was the better part of our job to learn to not ask questions. Later, she’d give me cases and walk me through them. The first step: tailing the mark, figuring out all his likes and dislikes, followed by the meet-up, something so manufactured it was able to appear totally serendipitous. The last stage: the sting. Learning to shake off the end like water off a dog. It was a three-act play, she told me, except we were also the playwrights and the director and even our own audience.

But she didn’t tell me any of that over the sticky pie plates and the sweaty crumpled twenty-dollar bill I’d pried out of the man who took his eggs plain.

Instead, she plucked the drooping cigarette out of her mouth, smiled at me, and said: “I think I have a job you’d be perfect for. But first, I’ve got an idea for how we can make him pay, this asshole who hurt you.”

Chapter 11