The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Mom appeared outside the screened porch. “Is there something I can get you girls? Iced tea, perhaps? Decaf coffee?”

  Viv muttered something about Mom always sticking her nose in other people’s matters. “No, Ma!” she yelled. “We’re fine. We got a glitch with the party, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” Mom slapped her cheek. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  “Just a problem with the mini quiches. Kat and I will be right out.”

  Not quite buying the mini-quiche excuse, Mom tinkered in the backyard, rolling up a hose and generally keeping herself within eavesdropping distance until she finally disappeared around the corner and Viv said, “Don’t freak. But Adele called Toni Feinzig for advice.”

  How could she have not expected me to freak? Toni Feinzig was the lawyer who represented Beth Williams’s husband, Bernie, in his divorce. In fact, she was the premier divorce lawyer around town. “Why . . . what need would you have had to call Toni? It’s not that bad, is it?”

  She pulled out my mother’s chaise and pushed me into it, a wise idea since my legs were beginning to feel weak. “It’s that bad.”

  I sank further.

  Sitting sideways on my father’s chaise,Viv leaned forward like I was on death’s bed. The expression on her face was so worried and sad, I almost felt more sorry for her than for myself.

  “Griff ’s having his cell bills and his brand-new MasterCard bills sent to his office at Emerly.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  She shushed me. “Quick. Let me get this out before Mom pops in with a bogus plate of cookies. That’s not the worst part. You have to brace yourself. . . .”

  What could have been worse than finding out that one’s husband had a separate credit card and that he didn’t want me to see what numbers he was calling on his cell?

  “He’s also got a separate banking account, Kat. He opened it a few months ago with $10,000.” Her eyes reddened, as if about to cry.

  “Why would Griff have a separate bank account?” It was like the world had stopped making sense.

  “Toni said that’s exactly what one of her clients did and I bet it was Bernie Williams. She said this client opened a separate account a few months before he forced his wife to ask for a divorce. She said that between the MasterCard and the condom wrappers and the dinner in San Francisco Griff lied about and the cell phone records and the separate bank account, it was as if he was taking a page out of this client’s playbook. Who else could it be but Bernie Williams?”

  I was stunned. Griff was no Bernie Williams, because Bernie Williams was a slimeball. Griff would never have gone to such lengths to deceive me, opening a secret bank account, of all things. Even if he had wanted to do that, where would he have gotten the money? Ten thousand dollars was a lot of cash, and as far as I knew, he hadn’t come into a sudden inheritance.

  But it wasn’t just the logistics that was bothersome, it was the logic of us. We were a pair who had fused our lives, promising to love, cherish, and have and hold until death us did part. We were parents to Laura and owners of 2116 Waldorf Hills Road. We were one.

  Just this morning we’d made love as dawn broke, Griff stroking my cheek afterward and kissing my hand as we chatted about the day ahead, about calling his nephew Jack at the Shore, inviting him up for Sunday night dinner, and trying to remember if Laura had to volunteer at the hospital and whether we’d go out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary or stay in and pop a bottle of champagne. What we had was so perfect, so comfortable, so solid that even through our worst fights I’d never questioned our validity.

  I looked to Vivian for an objection, for her to throw back her head and tell me it was a big prank. Instead, tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Kat. I like Griff. Always have. And you two make a great couple and a great family. This should not be happening.”

  Dazed, not quite following what she was getting at, I said, “What is happening?”

  “Can’t you see? It’s all there, Kat, in the black and white of your bank statements and credit card bills. Men might lie, but the numbers never do. Honey, he’s leaving you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Surprise!”

  That this shout came out of my mouth while my arms went up in feigned glee was more personally repulsive than the expression of manufactured astonishment on Griff ’s handsome face as he opened the French doors to the patio and dropped his jaw. His stubbled jaw (a nice effect), like he hadn’t been expecting thirty of his closest friends and neighbors to be gathered in the backyard.

  Hah! He was so obvious. Having had my eyes opened to his secret machinations, I could see what a charade he really was, right down to his old gray Emerly College T-shirt that highlighted his pecs, carefully preserved through daily push-ups, and those faded worn jeans that outlined his firm thighs. Of course, that was exactly the getup he’d have picked to pretend to be caught off guard.

  Why had it taken me so long to realize the truth?

  I used to think he dressed young because he hung out with students, but that wasn’t the reason; it was because he wanted to impress Bree. My god, his hair! It was ridiculously longer than most men’s at the party and when he ran his fingers through it, even Chloe let out a sigh of lust.

  Griff waved me over. “Don’t tell me you had anything to do with this, dear wife of mine.”

  Wasn’t he just adorably naïve? My innocent geek of a husband so immersed in researching the Federal Reserve—and doing nothing else—he never suspected his loving wife would trick him with a surprise party. My hands involuntarily formed fists as I imagined Griff in bed with her in San Francisco while I frantically tried to call him about Laura’s accident practically a whole continent away.

  Buster Newcomb, an assistant football coach at Emerly and about as smart as pigskin, slammed his beer on the glass table so hard, foam exploded from the top. “You’re in trouble now, girl. Get up there and take your punishment.”

  All eyes were on me as I picked my way across the patio sensing a wide range of emotions among our friends—admiration, respect, and perhaps even a smidgen of jealousy. Who among them knows? I thought. Who was pitying me as I smiled and played demure? Who was saying to herself, if she only had an inkling of the horrible truth, that her so-called loyal husband was bonking his research assistant?

  “You never fail to surprise me.” Griff took me by the shoulders and gazed at me lovingly with his midnight blue eyes.

  A part of me wavered. Look how much he adores you, Kat. Worships, even. You know he’s not the type to cheat. Viv must have read the records wrong.

  But I was unable to fight a blitzkrieg of internal questions: Where were you all day, really? Why was your cell off? Why do you have a separate credit card and checking account, and how come you lied about being asleep in San Francisco when Laura hit the state trooper? Just when are you planning on leaving me? How could you cheat on me after all we’ve been through?

  “And you,” I managed to purr, summoning every ounce of inner civility, “never fail to surprise me.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” Buster clapped his beefy mitts when Griff bent down and graced me with a stage-show kiss, soft but not too soft. No tongue. Sweet and warm with hints of hidden passion. It melted me—and, I hoped, Bree, too.

  I couldn’t help it. The blue eyes were bad enough, but I was an absolute sucker when it came to Griff ’s lips. I wrapped my arms around his neck to pull him tighter, and everyone went, “Awww.”

  What a schmuck I was. Absolutely no backbone at all, the way I couldn’t help loving my husband. Halfway across the crowd, I could sense Viv’s pity flowing toward me like the waves of heat off the chiminea.

  We broke apart and thanked our guests, shaking hands and hugging, showing our appreciation for their support and love, inhaling so much patchouli in the process I nearly sprouted new leg hair.

  I often teased Griff about his college colleagues, but deep down, I was aware enough to know my teasing
was a poor attempt to hide my own insecurities. Unlike me, the women Griff worked with at Emerly did yoga and eschewed makeup. They developed their “inner beauty” (for what that was worth) by meditating and reading books written by authors with foreign names. To them, Botox was always botulinum toxin. They were politically active, Ivy educated, environmentally conscious recyclers.

  No wonder they had nothing in common with my friends and relatives—Viv (already half tanked on chardonnay), Libby (chain-smoking by my Smith & Hawken fire pit, the strap from her green tank top halfway down her spray-tanned arm), and Chloe (poring over the day’s Daily Candy sample-sale update on Elaine’s iPhone).

  These were my people—superficial, gossipy, born consumers. Of course Griff was bored by me and my ilk. One might have argued he should have been awarded a medal for tolerating my materialism for as long as he had.

  Laura came around the corner still in her purple scrubs from her volunteer job at the hospital and reminded me of the one bond Griff and I would always share: her. Cheeks naturally pink, her hair in frizzed brown braids, she came off as far more childish than her seventeen years. She was a treasure.

  Laura had never given us five minutes of worry. She was a cheerful, easygoing kid who knew exactly what she wanted out of life: to go to NYU, become a doctor, marry her boyfriend, Todd, and move to France.

  “Wash and wear,” Griff called her. “As easy as they make ’em.”

  She gave us a pinkie wave and wafted her top. Gotta get out of these clothes, she mouthed, slipping through the crowd and inching right past the infamous Bree.

  My body turned to ice.

  I guess I’d never studied this home wrecker before, how her sweetheart face and bouncy brunette hair created the misimpression of a vapid Texas debutante—until she opened her plump red lips and in a sultry Houston drawl explained why the Fed’s tampering with the interest rate undermined a Keynesian view of market forces.

  Bree was that intoxicating Southern combination of self-deprecating humility, sweetness, sexiness, and smarts. Of course she was having a premarital fling with my husband. She had way too much on the ball for her fiancé, Dewitt.

  “That Bree’s one in a million,” Griff had said one night while straightening the forks and knives in his geeky way. “They didn’t make women like that when I was young, I swear.”

  At the time, I’d passed off his comment as nothing more than an endearing fatherly attitude toward his much younger assistant. Though there must have been something disturbing about his words since they remained with me. Perhaps my subconscious realized what my ego at the time could not: that Griff wasn’t being protective. He was being jealous.

  Bree swished our way and casually placed a hand on Griff ’s forearm. “You two are just the most darling lovebirds. I can only hope that after twenty years Dewitt and I will be the same way.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could tell Griff was struggling to bite his tongue. “I don’t know,” he said, carefully extricating his arm. “Kat and I got damned lucky, didn’t we?”

  “Mmm,” was all I could manage.

  The two of them exchanged meaningful looks—in the open, right in front of me!—before Bree sauntered off, her A-line skirt hanging provocatively.

  Once she was out of earshot, Griff murmured something about wishing “that asshole Dewitt would drop off the face of the earth.”

  “I just bet you do,” I said. “That would make you sooo happy, to have her all to yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” His voice was edged with irritation.

  The last thing I wanted was to have a fight in front of all these people at our anniversary party, so I said, “I’m sorry. It was nothing. I wasn’t even thinking.”

  “Yes, you were. You’ve been frosty to me ever since I got here, and you were almost rude to Bree. What’s going on?”

  Like most men of his ilk, Griff rarely asked about our relationship or how we were doing, but on the few occasions when he did, he refused to drop it until he was satisfied. We needed to talk—alone—before we ruined our own party.

  Taking him by the hand, I said, “Come with me,” before leading him to the house on claims there was an emergency with the grilled lime shrimp. As I passed Viv, I asked her to keep the party going and to maybe turn up the volume on the music.

  She opened her eyes wide and whispered, “Good luck! I love you.”

  We made it to the kitchen, where Griff closed the swinging door and blocked it, his tanned arms folded across his broad chest. Did he have to be so sexy?

  “It must be pretty bad if you dragged me into the kitchen,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  Okay, Kat. Keep your cool. Don’t let him put you on the defensive. “Well, for starters, you weren’t exactly surprised out there, were you?”

  “Is that what’s got you upset? That I wasn’t surprised?” He acted incredulous. “So what? Would it have been better if I’d told everyone I already knew and that they could go home?”

  “No. It would have been better if you’d been surprised. Who told you . . . Bree?”

  “Bree?” He rolled his eyes and moved from the door to the counter littered with open cracker boxes, bunches of washed green grapes, and cheese rinds. “Why Bree?” He popped a Wheat Thin in his mouth and crunched once, then twice, then stopped. “Geesh! Look at you with your arms on your hips and that sour puss. You’re envious!”

  For the record, I did not have a sour puss, though I gave him points for being extremely perceptive. “Envious? No!” I scoffed. “Of Bree?” Then, in what I thought was a very clever turnabout, I said, “This has nothing to do with Bree. All I wanted to know was how you found out about the party.”

  He dove his hand into the Wheat Thins box again. “You wanna know?”

  “I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Try me.”

  “Visa called.” He crunched down. “Now it’s your turn to be surprised.”

  Shit. Next to Griff running off with Bree, any encounter with a credit card company was my worst nightmare. “Why? I didn’t reach the credit limit, did I?”

  “I should hope not. Just how much did you spend on this party, anyway?”

  The rough estimate—because I couldn’t bear to sit down and actually add the numbers—would have been high enough to send him into outer orbit. “Not that much.”

  “Five hundred?”

  As if! This wasn’t one of Laura’s baby birthday parties. We weren’t serving pizza and ice-cream cake. There was smoked salmon and champagne on those tables. “Yeah. About right.” Multiplied by four.

  “Whew. I thought it might have been twice that. Which wouldn’t have been good, considering our current bank balance.”

  The familiar feelings of regret and dread briefly washed over me as I cursed myself for ever opening the door of Smith & Hawken.

  “So, if I didn’t reach the credit limit, why did they call?”

  “Just a routine fraud alert, one of those things the computer generates randomly.”

  Like when your wife is racking up thousands of dollars in merchandise over a three-hour period, I thought, fighting a renewed spike of anxiety.

  Hold on!

  “How come Visa was able to call you at work and I wasn’t? I thought Janice was off.”

  “They left a message.” Griff cocked his head. “Did you leave a message?”

  “No.” I hadn’t, come to think of it.

  “Let me get this straight. You tried me all day at work and instead of leaving a message and waiting for me to call back, you got all upset about where I was, is that right? I mean, I called you on my cell. What more did you want?”

  He sliced off a piece of Swiss and let it fall to the cutting board as I weighed what to say next. Toni Feinzig’s advice to Viv was that I should avoid confronting him until I’d met with her, but that was a bit drastic. This was my husband, after all.

  “The reason I didn’t leave a message,” I said, gripping the oven ha
ndle for support, “was because of what I found when I unpacked your suitcase from San Francisco today.”

  He placed the slice of cheese on top of the cracker, completely unperturbed. “And that was . . . ?”

  I took a big breath and let it spill. “Two condom wrappers in the pocket of your khakis and a bill for $236 at a restaurant on the night I was trying to reach you about Laura’s accident. How could you, Griff? How could you be having an affair with . . . Bree?”

  There. Done. Out in the open. Suddenly, I felt dizzy.

  He carefully put down the cracker and stared at the rooster timer by the sink. This was vintage Griff—mature, steady, unflappable—and I hated him for it. “You mean to tell me you seriously think I’ve been having an affair with Bree.”

  I remained silent. Years of fighting had taught me that if I answered, I’d be caught in his powerful rhetorical vortex in which he’d suck out all the meaning of my words and trivialize my concerns.

  “Bree,” he said, “who’s getting married.”

  Again, I stayed mum.

  “All because you found a couple of condom wrappers in my pants and the receipt from my dinner with Walter Maddox, head of economic research at the Federal Reserve in San Francisco and definitely not my type.”

  Walter Maddox? “But last Thursday when I tried to reach you and couldn’t, you claimed you were asleep.”

  “I was. On Thursday night. However, I believe if you check the receipt you’ll see that dinner happened the night before. In your eagerness to prove me an adulterer, you must have forgotten to consult your calendar.”

  I counted back the days and then thought about the receipt. Today was the twentieth. Friday was the nineteenth. Thursday was the eighteenth. Wednesday was the . . .

  Curse that Viv. Never trust an English teacher with even the simplest numbers.

  “Don’t you remember me telling you about the dinner with Walter to thank him for giving us so much help?”

  Flames of red shot up my neck. He was too clever by far. I would have to change course in order to set a new trap. “Okay, so maybe I was off about the dinner, but where did you get those condom wrappers?”