Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TOP FIFTEEN DOS AND DON’TS FROM THE PENNY PINCHERS CLUB
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY SARAH STROHMEYER
Sweet Love
The Sleeping Beauty Proposal
The Cinderella Pact
The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives
Bubbles Betrothed
Bubbles A Broad
Bubbles Ablaze
Bubbles in Trouble
Bubbles Unbound
Bubbles All the Way
DUTTON
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, July 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Strohmeyer
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Strohmeyer, Sarah.
The penny pinchers club / Sarah Strohmeyer.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-08197-6
1. Married women—Fiction. 2. Home economics—Fiction. 3. New Jersey—Fiction. 4.
Domestic fiction. I.Title.
PS3569.T6972P46 2009
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For Rita, who can pinch a penny ’til it screams.Thank you.
“Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.”
JESUS, IN JOHN 6:12
“But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN
“I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.”
TAMMY FAYE BAKKER
Prologue
ENGAGEMENT RING: $7,340
WEDDING AND RECEPTION: $23,000
RAISING ONE KID FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS: $250,000
HOUSE IN JERSEY SUBURB: $462,000
TWO MINT TINGLE TROJAN CONDOM WRAPPERS FOUND
IN YOUR HUSBAND’S POCKETS: $1.40
BEING FINANCIALLY READY WHEN YOUR HUSBAND ANNOUNCES
HE’S LEAVING TO BE WITH HIS ASSISTANT: PRICELESS
It was the cruel law of Murphy that Mary Ellen Bartholomew chose the one time I’d been arrested to pick up the police permits for the Project Graduation yard sale and fund-raiser. Now it would be all over town that she saw Kat Griffiths in the Rocky Riverit would be all over town that she saw Kat Griffiths in the Rocky River Police Department wearing a bloodied sweatshirt and, almost worse, a pair of Keds.
Of course, the handcuffs wouldn’t have been necessary if the FBI hadn’t gotten involved. But the shackles were totally absurd. Did these federal agents honestly believe I, a forty-something mother who could barely jog three miles, would make a run for it?
It was simply embarrassing any way you cut it. Especially since I’d been the Project Graduation committee member designated to get the permits and forgot.
“Kat?” Mary Ellen squinted hard in an attempt to mask her shock. “Are you okay?”
“Sorry about dropping the ball.” I hid my hands by burrowing them in the folds of my skirt. “I figured we had until Friday seeing as how the sale’s not until next weekend. By the way, Donna Andrews dropped off a whole slew of American Girl dolls and clothes yesterday in mint condition. That should be big. You know how popular they are now.”
My attempt at distraction proved futile. Mary Ellen shifted her gaze from me to the handsome guy in his thirties by my side. Wade Rothschild III had the kind of angular jaw and flinty WASPishness one was more likely to find on the cover of the Brooks Brothers spring catalog sporting silk and cotton seersucker than in a faded yellow T-shirt and khaki shorts, his strong, tanned legs ending in a pair of ripped leather Docksiders.
“Mrs. Griffiths?” Officer Ramone—the nice one with the pot-belly and warm brown eyes—appeared at the door of a gray-painted cinder block room where he and the FBI had been holed up for a half hour. “We’re ready for you now.”
I got up, teetered slightly because of the shackles, and was righted by Wade’s knee.
“Keep ’em guessing,” he said, loving this. I’d come to like Wade, but he lived in a yurt in his mother’s backyard by himself with no dependents, not even goldfish, so he had nothing to lose. One might call him footloose and fancy free except, in light of his bound ankles, not so much with the footloose.
“What about Griff?” Mary Ellen stole another curious glance at Wade.
I’d been purposely trying not to think about how my law-abiding husband would react when he found out I’d been busted kissing another man in a high-security trash bin. We were dealing with enough marital problems without having to cope with rumors of my infidelity.
“He’s out of town.”
She filed this away along with hunky Wade and the handcuffs. Kat didn’t even want me calling her husband! “A lawyer, then? Stan Levinson is the best, and he’s a friend. His son and Devon are on the same soccer team.”
Stan Levinson charged an outrageou
s $250 an hour. I wouldn’t have thought twice about that before joining the Penny Pinchers Club, but these days I was such a skinflint the very notion of more bills made me nauseated. “Thanks, but I have nothing to hide. Searching a Dumpster is hardly a felony.”
Not so, according to Officer Ramone. He said there was an exception when the Dumpster belonged to E. W. Drummond, an accounting firm that did the books of a major international defense contractor—as if I was supposed to have been privy to that. It wasn’t like I raided other people’s trash routinely, for heaven’s sake.
In fact, up until my arrest that morning, the only crime I’d committed was the one of paying too much for retail. By the way, that’s kind of a pet punch line among the Penny Pinchers. Cracks us up every time.
Most people get the wrong idea when I tell them I’m a member of the Rocky River Penny Pinchers Club. They assume I’m naturally frugal, that all my life I’ve carefully balanced my checkbook and flicked off lights around the house, clipped coupons and saved leftovers, that I keep the thermostat at sixty degrees in the winter and let my family broil in the summer.
Oh, if they only knew.
Being a Penny Pincher is more akin to being a member of AA, I think. What I’ve discovered since joining the group and meeting Wade the Wall Street dropout, Opal the Earth Mother, Velma the elderly woman with a mysterious past, Steve the widowed security guard/cop, and Sherise the former debutante is that, like alcoholic individuals with nothing in common except being one drink away from disaster, we are one Visa charge away from bankruptcy. Though, instead of calling up old friends to make amends, we have to call up credit card companies to negotiate reduced balances. It’s amazing how far you can get simply by refusing to hang up the phone.
That’s how I explained it to Officer Ramone and Agent Wasko, the unsmiling bureaucrat from the FBI. But he didn’t care.
Wasko was determined to link my innocent quest for authentic eighteenth-century tchotchkes to a much larger conspiracy. From his line of questioning, I could tell he was trying to pigeonhole me as a peacenik bent on bringing down the international defense contractor, maybe, or a disgruntled homeowner with a defaulted subprime mortgage since, apparently, the accountancy firm also did some work for Countrywide.
“The market crash made us all crazy,” he said, as if this news flash would earn my undying friendship. “I, personally, lost forty percent of my IRA.”
Ramone let out a whistle.
“So, it’s understandable how a frustrated housewife such as yourself might have gone over the edge and taken matters into her own hands, especially when you lost all the savings in your daughter’s college fund.”
I wanted to tell him that no one calls me a housewife. Not my mother. Not my daughter. Certainly not the FBI. As for losing our shirts in the Wall Street bust? Hah! Griff and I had already drained that account years before, and we had the tax penalty payments to prove it. Don’t even ask about our so-called college savings plan. Those leather couches I bought before I became a Penny Pincher didn’t pay for themselves.
“It wasn’t revenge,” I began, pausing to observe that my plastic handcuffs resembled the zip ties on oven bags (cooked goose?). “How I ended up in the Dumpster of E. W. Drummond has far less to do with the market crash and much more to do with what you might call domestic issues. In short, I was simply on the hunt for a sweet deal.”
Ramone cracked his gum dubiously. Wasko tapped a pencil.
“Nothing wrong with trying to find a bargain,” he said. “But trespassing onto private property at the crack of dawn, ignoring warning signs threatening prosecution, sneaking past electric gates, ducking security cameras, and breaking into a locked repository just for an old rocker or whatever strikes me as fairly implausible, especially considering the sensitive material that might have been found on E. W. Drummond’s premises. National security information and whatnot. If you’re found guilty, you know, you could be looking at ten years in a federal pen.”
He was pulling my leg. No one got ten years for sifting through trash.
Wasko linked his thin, pale fingers. “Then again, I might be more inclined to believe your story if not for your accomplice.”
“Wade? The guy lives with his mother.”
“I have a hunch there’s a lot you don’t know about Wade Rothschild III, Mrs. Griffiths. And I have my doubts about the real purpose of this so-called Penny Pinchers group of yours. Too bad you’ll learn the truth after it’s too late, when you’re convicted of economic espionage for stealing corporate secrets.”
That was absurd. “I promise, I wasn’t in there trying to steal corporate secrets.” Nevertheless, a bead of sweat balled at the base of my neck as it dawned on me I really was in serious trouble. This wasn’t a parking ticket. This wasn’t forgetting to get permits for a yard sale. This was ten years in the federal pen.
“Then why were you there?” Agent Wasko had stopped trying to be my friend. “What would motivate a suburban housewife with a nice house, a husband, a kid, a dog, and a job to risk it all by looking for a free chair?”
They leaned forward. I debated whether to tell them the truth. Was it worth it? Could confessing my most intimate secret save me from having to spend my days at a federal prison camp, as Martha Stewart had, wearing ugly brown ponchos?
I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Because I’m saving up for a divorce.”
CHAPTER ONE
The reason I’m lousy with money is because I was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey. In Jersey, we drive, we shop, we charge, we throw away. We do not save.
True, ours was the first state in the country to mandate recycling, but after a while we figured screw it. Let those J.Crew preppies in Connecticut separate their Paul Newman salad bottles. We had more important stuff to do, like buy more junk.
As a native of South River, I was particularly afflicted because South River is Jersey concentrate, an enclave of tidy, single-family homes straight from the backdrop of Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” Lots of bleached sidewalks and chain-link fences surrounding patchy lawns littered with Doritos and McDonald’s bags. I grew up with a Knights of Columbus right downtown, a five-and-dime around the corner, and as many churches as bars coexisting under an umbrella of sulfurous yellow haze.
Depressing in some ways. But where God closes a door, he also opens a window. Or, to put it in Jerseyese, he closes the window and turns on the air-conditioning.
For us, that relief was our town’s easy access (if you consider sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic down Route 18 easy) to ten major shopping malls—entrées to a more glamorous world of Pier I and cheap tamales.
So vital were the malls to our sense of freedom that I celebrated the passing of my driver’s test by getting behind the wheel of Dad’s embarrassing orange-brown Dodge Dart with my girlfriends and zipping right past Mom’s reliable discount mall (Loehmann’s of the awkward communal dressing room) for the upscale paradise of Menlo Park.
It was a complete rush of independence. Aerosmith wailed “Sweet Emotion” on the radio, our feathered, blow-dried hair waved in the New Jersey breeze, and we were headed to Edison, New Jersey, on the off chance of running into Jeff Doncha. Black hair, blue eyes. To die for. Hottest guy in South River hands down.
We didn’t smoke. We didn’t drink. We didn’t do drugs. We didn’t even have sex. Well, not technically. We shopped and gossiped and harassed the Clinique lady for makeovers (after which we bought nothing) before stopping off at a chain Mexican restaurant for virgin daiquiris. That launched our pastime, and in almost thirty years not much has changed.
Yes, we’ve moved up from the Dart. Most of us drive Highlanders or Lexus SUVs, cars with bigger rear ends (like ourselves) to hold more stuff. Our hair is foiled, and Loehmann’s now stocks Diesel jeans. We no longer endure the torture of seeing our pores enlarged in a Clinique magnifying mirror. But we still crank the Aerosmith and every so often treat ourselves to strawberry daiquiris that, like us, are not so virgin.
As for Jeff Doncha, last I checked he was holding his own down at his dad’s salvage yard after a couple of stints in rehab and one strike short of permanent incarceration. Funny enough, the guy I ended up marrying had black hair and midnight blue eyes, too, though that was where all similarities between him and Jeff ended.
My husband and I met when I was fresh out of Rutgers, sharing an apartment near Princeton with my former college roommate Suzanne Veruki. Back then, the two of us were miserably employed at PharMax, a corporate pharmaceutical conglomerate in Bridgewater, though we’d known each other for years, having been visual design majors in college with plans to be snapped up by the hottest interior design boutiques from Manhattan to Palm Beach.
Ah, the naïveté of youth. Our mortarboards weren’t yet dusty when we realized we couldn’t get jobs assembling furniture at IKEA, much less redoing interiors for Jed Johnson in Manhattan. So, I got a position at PharMax schlepping a new birth control pill (OvuTerm—later found to trigger early menopause), while Suzanne hawked a new colorectal cancer test made popular by Ronald Reagan’s very own presidential colon.
It was tough going, pushing drugs. Being a pharmaceutical rep meant constantly being rejected by snooty doctors’ receptionists after hours of waiting patiently with a smile for “just a moment to tell you about our new product.” It takes a very special person to face that kind of humiliation every day—a stripper, maybe, or a Jehovah’s Witness. But without the Franklins being shoved in our panties or the promise of eternal salvation, Suzanne and I couldn’t see the point. We went down in PharMax history as achieving the worst sales ever, a dishonor in which we took weird pride.
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