I own two hundred and fourteen pairs of shoes, and I can tell you where every one of them is right now.
That sentence has ended three relationships and one book club. I am thirty-eight years old. I run a wedding planning company called Abernathy & Bloom, which is just me, an assistant, and a minivan with a dent shaped like Ohio. I have planned one hundred and sixty-one weddings.
I have never lost a ring, a cake, or a groom. I have also never lost a shoe.
The shoes live in the second bedroom of my apartment. It used to be a guest room. Then it was a guest room with some shelves. Then the shelves won.
Now it is floor-to-ceiling cubbies on three walls, each cubby labeled with a small brass tag. My sister calls it the Wall, in the voice people usually save for diagnoses.
Every pair has an ID. W-001 is a pair of black flats I bought for my first wedding as a planner, in 2011. W-214 is a pair of navy loafers I bought last Tuesday. In between are boots, sandals, pumps, sneakers, one pair of rain boots shaped like ducks, and a spreadsheet to hold them all.
The spreadsheet has eleven columns.
Column A is the ID. Column B is the size, which is always seven and a half, except for four pairs that were mistakes of hope. Column C is color, using a system of my own.
I don’t say “beige.” I say “Oat 3,” and I know exactly what I mean.
Column D is heel height in millimeters. Column E is comfort, rated one to five, tested over a minimum of eight standing hours. Column G is location. Column H says whether the heels have protective caps.
Column I is “Times Worn.” Columns J and K are repairs and receipts. Column F is called “Story.” Nobody is allowed to touch column F.
Column F is where I write why I bought the pair. Most entries are short.
“Barn wedding, mud, never again.” “Bride cried at the cake tasting, I needed a win.” “Bought the morning Dad’s surgery went fine.”
It is the closest thing I have to a diary, if a diary could be sorted by heel height.
Then there is W-117.
W-117 is a pair of chartreuse pumps with a square gold buckle. Comfort: unknown. Times Worn: zero. I bought them in 2016 at the closing sale of a little store called Prell & Daughter.
I had stood in front of them for twenty minutes. I am a woman who wears Oat 3 to every event. Then the daughter, who was about seventy, mentioned that nobody else had looked at them in a year. I bought them on the spot.
Column F for W-117 says one word. “Someday.”
My sister calls them the Mistake. I let her. It’s easier than explaining.
My sister’s name is Dolores, but everyone calls her Dee. She is forty-one, a dental hygienist, and she begins every devastating sentence with the same three words.
“I’m just saying,” Dee said, standing in the doorway of the Wall on a Sunday night in May, “that a normal person has a closet.”
“A normal person loses shoes.”
“I’m just saying a normal person doesn’t have a column for feelings.”
“It’s not feelings. It’s context.”
She held up a pamphlet. It was pale green and showed a woman sitting serenely on an empty floor. The title was Room to Breathe: A Gentle Path to Less. Below it was a name: Harriet Voss, Certified Decluttering Consultant.
“She’s very nice,” Dee said. “She does a free assessment. She says most people only need about forty pairs.”
“Most people don’t stand for nine hours on reclaimed barn wood.”
“She’s coming Saturday.”
“I have a wedding Saturday.”
“I know.” Dee smiled the smile she uses when telling patients to floss more. “That’s why I have your spare key.
“She’ll just look. You won’t even be here to be weird about it.”
I looked at the Wall. Two hundred and fourteen pairs looked back. I thought about saying no. But Dee had done this with love, and with a pamphlet, and she had clearly rehearsed.
“She can look,” I said. “She can count. She doesn’t touch column F.”
“She doesn’t even know what column F is.”
“Then she’ll be fine.”
The wedding on Saturday was Corinne Vasquez and Desmond Hollis.
Corinne was twenty-nine, a software tester, and the calmest bride I had ever worked with. When things went wrong, she spoke about herself in the third person, like a pilot announcing turbulence. “Corinne is aware of the florist situation,” she would say. “Corinne is fine.”
Desmond was thirty-one and taught high school chemistry. He had one job for the wedding, which was to show up, and he had color-coded it.
Then there was Lorraine.
Lorraine Vasquez was the mother of the bride. She was sixty-one and carried a white binder thicker than most dictionaries. It had tabs. The tabs had sub-tabs.
At our first meeting she set it on the table next to my laptop, the way a gunslinger sets down a pistol.
“I’ve seen your spreadsheet,” she said. “I have a binder.”
“I can see that.”
“Paper doesn’t crash.”
“Paper doesn’t filter by heel height.”
She looked at me with real interest for the first time. Then she wrote something on a sub-tab. I never found out what.
The venue was Larkspur Hall, an old grain exchange at the edge of town, nineteen minutes from my apartment. It had tall windows, a brass chandelier, and a manager named Felix Ostrowski. Felix was sixty-seven and had worked there since before it had a liquor license. He loved one thing in the world, and it was the floor.
“The floors are 1911,” he said, on my first walkthrough. “Original oak. Hand-pegged.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“They were here before the Titanic sank.” He pointed at my shoes. “Heel caps?”
“Rubber. Always.”
He nodded slowly, like a man accepting a bribe. “The floors are 1911,” he said again, in case I’d forgotten in the last eight seconds.
My assistant is Ollie Brandt. He is twenty-four, wears a headset to events whether or not it’s connected to anything, and answers every instruction with “Copy.” He also carries granola bars in every pocket. I once watched him produce four during a toast without appearing to move his hands.
“Timeline check,” I said at one-fifteen on the wedding day. We stood in the gravel lot outside Larkspur Hall. The ceremony was at four.
“Copy,” Ollie said. “Hair and makeup are in the bridal suite. Groomsmen are in the library.
“Flowers arrived at noon. Mr. Ostrowski has asked about the floors six times.”
“Only six?”
“He’s pacing himself.”
I opened the trunk of the minivan. Inside were eleven pairs of shoes in clear plastic boxes, each labeled with its ID. I call it the Trunk Library. It holds my emergency rotation: two flats, two boots, the duck rain boots, and six heels in assorted neutrals.
“You know other planners carry safety pins,” Ollie said. “And, like, aspirin.”
“I carry safety pins and aspirin.”
“In addition to eleven shoes.”
“Eleven pairs. Twenty-two shoes. Be precise, Ollie, it’s a wedding.”
“Copy.”
My phone buzzed. It was a photo from Dee. Harriet Voss stood in my second bedroom holding a clipboard, looking up at the Wall like a climber at the bottom of a mountain.
She says it’s “a lot.” I’m just saying, she has the voice for it.
Count only, I wrote back. No touching F.
She brought bins.
I put the phone away. I had a wedding to run.
For an hour and forty minutes, everything went perfectly.
The flowers were right. The string trio was tuning in the hall. Desmond’s tie was straight, which I knew because I had straightened it. Lorraine consulted her binder only nine times.
Felix found a scuff on the floor and then discovered he had caused it himself, which seemed to bring him peace.
At 2:58, I was in the hallway counting programs. The door to the bridal suite opened, and Corinne’s maid of honor came out. Her name was Kiki, she was twenty-eight, and she was holding an empty nest of tissue paper in both hands.
“Tess,” she said. “Where’s the box?”
“What box?”
“The shoe box. The big white one. Corinne’s shoes and all five of ours.”
She looked down at the tissue paper as if it might explain itself. “It was on the chair by the window. It’s not on the chair.”
Behind her, through the open door, I could see Corinne. She sat at the vanity in her dress, hair finished, makeup finished, perfectly still.
“Corinne,” she said, to no one in particular, “is aware of the shoe situation.”
It was one hour and two minutes until the ceremony. Six women needed shoes, and I had eleven pairs in a trunk, all of them in exactly one size.
Up next: The Search Party
Continue to Part 2 →