The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Steve said,“I saved four grand for my kids’ education. Not bad for a widower.”

  Viv patted his thigh. “Not bad at all.”

  “Hope I don’t have to use it for bail,” he said, half kidding. According to Viv, his sons were more than okay. Good, strong boys who benefited from seeing their father sacrifice himself for the community’s protection.

  My sister, I feared, was so in love she was a goner.

  Sherise said, “How about you, Libby? Since we’re sharing our success stories.”

  Underneath her eyelashes, Libby shyly eyed Wade, whose hand she’d been holding throughout the meeting. And for good reason, I noticed, my heart doing a little leap. Because something bright on her left ring finger had just caught the ray of the June sun. “Do you want to tell them?” she asked. “Or should I?”

  Wade lifted her hand and kissed it. “Not quite sure how to put this, but I’m thinking maybe Libby and I . . . this will be our last meeting.”

  Everyone in the room stirred.

  “It’s no secret in this group that I come from, well, means. Until recently, I’d been denying that because, you know, more money means more problems. I can’t tell you how freeing it’s been to live simply, to find food on my own, to find the love of a good woman.” He kissed her hand again. “Which is why I decided last night to ask Libby, if she could put up with me, would she mind being my wife.”

  Sherise burst into tears.

  “Hah!” Steve clapped once, loudly. “You did it, you fool. Now you’ll have to move her.”

  Wade put his arm around Libby. “I don’t mind. Right now, I’m so over the moon, I could move heaven and Earth.” He gave me a warm smile. “Right, Kat?”

  “I certainly hope so,” I said, overflowing with admiration for him and happiness for Libby, as well as love for this whole group of odd, but wonderful, people. “No. I’m sure of it. The two of you together? Anything’s possible.”

  “Of course this means I’ll have to help Sherise move, too,” Steve said, pretending to be begrudging. “I can’t let him be the only man here.”

  “Also,” Viv offered, “your sons. A little physical labor never hurt any boy.”

  “Good point.”

  Sherise blew her nose and dabbed her eyes. “I just realized something. Who’s going to be left after I go? Libby and Wade are going to be living high off the hog. I’m going to be in New York. Opal’s going to be fighting for justice and the American way.”

  “I’m moving to my sister’s in Florida,” Velma said. “Now that I can cross state lines. No more Jersey winters for me.”

  Velma! In some ways I’d miss her most of all.

  “Okay, so,Viv, Steve, and Kat. That’s going to be—”

  Steve interrupted. “Actually, they’re switching me to weekdays, Monday through Friday, seven to three, so I can be on my boys’ schedule. Wednesday mornings are out, therefore. Sorry.”

  Sherise shook her head. “So that leaves Kat and Viv. The sisters.”

  “I’m okay,” Viv said. “I just came to support Steve.”

  All eyes turned toward me. But, honestly, what did I need the Penny Pinchers for? I’d saved my money, or enough of it. I’d learned how to stack coupons and the value of store rain checks, the importance of sending in those rebates and plugging appliances into power strips. I didn’t need the tips or the coupons.

  I needed them.

  “I guess that’s it,” I said, tears coming to my own eyes. “We’re no longer a group.”

  “Never.” Sherise took my hand between both of hers. “We might not be up to our ears in debt. We might not be out of control with spending. But we will always, always be a group.”

  I thought:

  AMOUNT OF MONEY NEEDED TO PAY FOR A DIVORCE: $15,000

  AMOUNT OF CREDIT CARD DEBT: $10,000

  HOME EQUITY LOAN: $27,000

  COST TO ATTEND NYU FOR ONE YEAR: $50,000

  A group of friends with whom you can openly and honestly confide about money, who will listen and not judge you, who will hold your hand when you have to open those bills, who will give you their coupons, drive you across town to the discount grocery stores, who will teach you how to forage through Dumpsters for food, and who will make you laugh all through the whole journey.

  Now that was priceless.

  “I can’t believe the group disbanded.” Viv sighed.

  “These things have life cycles,” I said as we sat in my driveway. “Someday someone will find themselves with $30,000 in debt and another person will end up with fifty pounds of chicken parts and they’ll realize they can’t handle it alone, that they need a group.”

  Viv peered through the windshield. “Why are there lights on in your kitchen?”

  It wasn’t like me to ever leave the lights on—all that energy wasted! Laura’s car wasn’t here. Jasper was asleep in the garage, so it couldn’t have been a burglar. Which meant . . .

  Griff!

  Without saying good-bye, I opened the car door and ran to the house, dashing through raindrops.

  Griff!

  He’d come home to me. Here I’d been afraid that he’d stay in Alaska with Bree forever, but he came home!

  “Griff?” I called, throwing my purse and keys by the phone and checking the kitchen. Nothing. He wasn’t in the living room, either.

  I ran upstairs, a strange sort of panic overcoming me. Where is he? “Griff?”

  Why isn’t he answering? I thought as I searched all the bedrooms, even the bathrooms.

  Finally, I found him in the basement. At the computer.

  He looked good, scruffier, but good. His face was tanner from the midnight sun and he’d let a slight beard grow. But it was not a friendly face and he was not glad to see me.

  “I won’t be staying.” He went to the printer and retrieved some papers.

  A shot of anxiety. “What do you mean not staying?” It was like my heart was ready to leap out of my chest. All these months of planning for this moment and still I was unprepared. “You can’t go. This is your home.”

  Griff didn’t reply. Walking around the desk, he handed me the papers. Legal documents. Contracts. Divorce papers of some sort. Separation decrees. Icky things.

  I couldn’t look at them. I refused.

  “Kat.” His voice was serious. “Read these and they’ll explain about the money and the bank account and the MasterCard. I didn’t tell you last year that I got a New York publisher for this book or an advance because, well, frankly because I needed the advance to cover my research expenses and I was afraid . . .”

  “I’d spend it.” With one eye, I glanced at the papers. They had nothing to do with my marriage. They were copies of book contracts, the $10,000 highlighted in yellow.

  “I’m sorry that you read my emails and that you thought I was leaving you after Laura’s graduation. My plan was to tell you after Laura’s graduation because by then the book would be mostly researched and there’d be no money left for you to take. The MasterCard was strictly for tax purposes, to make sure research expenses didn’t mix with our home expenses.”

  And, let’s face it, because you didn’t trust me.

  “Since then,” he said, looking so sad it made my heart break, “there’ve been developments.”

  My knees began to shake. They weren’t going to hold me and I had to lean against the desk simply to remain upright. “What kind of developments?”

  “Some good ones, like the publisher is increasing the print run in light of the Hunter Christiansen interview.”

  “Congratulations.” That was good news, though it was humbling to realize Bree had learned of it long before. “And . . .”

  “And others that have had me thinking.”

  “About Bree?”

  He closed his eyes. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that Bree and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “But you work together. Constantly. You email and call.”

  “So do you and Liam.” His
jaw clenched. “That’s what I mean by other developments.” Softening somewhat, he took my hand and led me over to the couch where Sherise had taken me before to break the news of our debt.

  “Throughout our marriage, there’s always been Liam.”

  “But—”

  He placed a finger over my lips. “I’m not saying that’s all your fault. Your mother, for example, won’t let the guy go. She seems to think he’s the second coming. It wasn’t so bad when he was married and out of our lives. Now, though . . .”

  Oh, no. No, don’t say it!

  “Now, he’s back and you’re with him.”

  He had that wrong. “I am NOT with him, Griff.”

  He smiled that patient smile he used with students when they were trying to bullshit about why their papers were overdue. “Don’t lie, Kat. Or, rather, stop lying. It was bad enough that you did the renovation for his house and didn’t tell me. But spending a night with him at the Shore the night Laura got sick in New York . . .”

  “How did you . . .”

  Griff turned grim and cold. The silence between us was suddenly so loud it was almost deafening. “I thought as much.”

  He didn’t know. He’d tricked me into admitting it.

  Like a robot, he got off the couch, grabbed a bag he’d packed, and headed toward the stairs.

  “Nothing happened!” I twirled around and ran after him. “We haven’t even kissed or anything. We just talked.”

  He took another step. “The fact that you even had to say that, Kat, speaks volumes.”

  “No! Wait!” I ran after him, up the stairs, and out the door. “I don’t love him,” I shouted. “I love you!”

  But I’d lost my chance. Griff backed out in his old beat-up car and headed out of the neighborhood. He was gone for good.

  One week before Laura’s graduation, right on schedule.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I had $13,000, little credit card debt, and no husband. If I wished, I could have called Toni Feinzig and told her I was all systems go. I had done as she’d instructed, photocopied all the documents I needed. I was prepared like I was supposed to be.

  All except for my heart.

  As a steady rain poured down, beating mercilessly on the roof, I sought my one and only refuge of a bathtub. But this time, I couldn’t call Griff to tell him what had happened, that my best friend and love of my life had walked out the door never to return. Viv, who’d called as soon as she got back to her place, was no comfort.

  Nothing anyone could say, no money I had saved, could solve the worst crisis of my life. As I lay in the cooling water, staring at our cracked ceiling, listening to the rain, sobbing softly so Laura couldn’t hear, it occurred to me that the last time I’d felt so overwhelmed was not in my bath, but in the basement when Sherise and Velma made me own up to spending my family into disaster.

  And yet, I had managed to pull myself out of that dark hole to vanquish what then had seemed like an unconquerable monster, one that threatened to steal our very home and send me hurtling into bankruptcy.

  A calm feeling of quiet strength came over me as I reasoned that if I could overcome my financial crisis, then I could overcome a marital one, too. It would require the same sort of determination and confidence that had freed me from debt. It would require the same honesty.

  And so, though it was almost midnight, I forced myself out of the bath and into clean clothes. Then I headed for Liam’s to take the first step in mending the hole I’d torn in the fabric of my marriage.

  Liam was awake. Perhaps that was the most amazing thing, that he was up at that hour when I banged on his door like a crazed woman. If the house had been dark, I might have run off and my marriage wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  It wasn’t until he opened the door in his navy cotton pj bottoms and nothing else that it crossed my mind I might have interrupted him with another woman.

  “Remember those dark nights you warned me about?” I began. “Well, this might be one of them.”

  He squinted. “Kat? You look like a drowned rat.” He pulled me in and shut the door. “You’re soaked.”

  “It’s not raining that hard. I was in the bath.” I slipped off my hood and watched his expression shift from curiosity to alarm.

  “What happened?” He went into the living room and returned in his maroon robe and holding a blanket.

  “Griff left me tonight.”

  “Holy . . .” He took my coat, threw it on the floor, and wrapped me in the blanket. “Come on.”

  I followed him into the living room, where he pushed me on the couch. “Sit,” he said, though I was already sitting. Then he opened a cabinet and pulled out a bottle with something dark inside. Pouring a shot or two into a glass, he handed it to me and said, “Single malt, twenty years old. It helps.”

  The scotch burned and warmed. Twenty years, I thought, how apropos.

  Pouring himself some, he pulled up a leather hassock and positioned himself across from me. Liam could have been a model in a Chivas ad, handsome in his opened robe that allowed a tantalizing glimpse of his bare chest. Perfect age, not too old, not too young. Wealthy. Mature. In control, as always.

  “Okay, tell me everything.”

  I did, sparing nothing. I told him how he had always been a presence in our marriage, how when he stopped being a presence my mother would do her best to bring him back. I confessed to being in deep money woes.

  “You should have told me. I could have loaned you whatever you needed.”

  I gave him a look. “Loans were what sank me, Liam. But, thanks.”

  Then I filled him in on the fight Griff and I had on the phone the day I left Avalon and how I’d lied about where I’d been.

  “Understandable,” he said. “Go on.”

  Finally, I delivered Griff’s rational explanation for the emails. “He’s had a book contract all along and he didn’t want me dipping into his funds. That’s why he had the MasterCard.”

  “Probably he was advised to keep a separate account,” Liam said, taking a sip of his scotch, “for business and tax purposes.”

  “You got it. But that’s not why he left. He left because he thinks I’m still in love with you.”

  Liam stared down at his drink. “I see.”

  I wondered if this was a victory for him, that having destroyed the marriage that had broken his heart, he, vindicated, could get on with his own life.

  We sat for a while saying nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “So, I suppose the obvious rejoinder to that,” Liam said, getting up and helping himself to more scotch, “is . . . what are your feelings for me?”

  “I don’t know.”And that was the truth. I didn’t. “It’s been a helluva night. My husband who hasn’t spoken to me for a week has come to tell me he must be going and you’re standing there drinking single-malt scotch looking like you could swing as a GQ centerfold.”

  Putting my drink down, I clutched my head, wishing for the gift of rational thought.

  “Then, let me help you out.” He sat across from me again and put both hands on my knees. “I love you.”

  The words hung there like a smoke ka-boom! in a cartoon.

  “I have always loved you,” he continued. “Ever since we first met at PharMax. I remember, you were coming back from a sale . . .”

  “In my case, not a sale.”

  “. . . and you were crossing the parking lot lugging a big bag of samples. I was new to the place. In fact, Charlie Worthy was showing me around and I took one look at you and said . . . ”

  That’s my future wife. I’d heard the story a million times.

  “But, then, you know what I said because I’ve told you so often.” He smiled to himself. “It wasn’t a joke and years later I never forgot the feeling of knowing—just knowing—you’d be my wife. I had no idea if you were married or single. We hadn’t been introduced. I just knew.”

  It would be so easy for me to have taken this gift of his love and cherish it. It wa
sn’t just the security or protection Liam offered, it was his uncanny ability to instinctively know what I needed before I knew myself.

  Most of us want to believe we have found and married our soul mates, and yet, how many of us in the hard light of day can be honest with ourselves and admit we haven’t. That somewhere out there is the person we’re meant to be with and that each day is a day wasted with the wrong one.

  I said to him, “I sense a big but coming on.”

  He rubbed my knees. “There is a big but, as you would say. And it doesn’t mean I love you any less or that if you gave me the least little sign I wouldn’t take you in my arms and take you upstairs and never let you out of my bed.”

  My cheeks felt hot and it wasn’t only because of the scotch.

  “But... as a survivor of divorce—and I use that term tentatively—I love you too much to be a party to putting you through that torture.”

  I looked up, studied him, tried to get a clue. “You want me to stay married to Griff.”

  “I know you love him, Kat. I’ve given you numerous opportunities to take our relationship back to what it was. I purposely created those opportunities. And you know I would have been more than discreet, would have never jeopardized your marriage. Yet, with all those open doors, you never once stepped in. . . . Kat, look at me.” He lifted my chin with one finger. His blue eyes shone with sympathy. “I love you and I’m always here for you. But Griff’s your soul mate, not me.”

  I would never know if Liam himself believed that or if he said those words because he knew I needed to hear them in order to save my marriage. What I did know was that true love is proved not by what it does for us, but what it makes us do for those we love.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, leaning over and kissing him for the very last time.

  Elaine followed me through the house, making notes on her clipboard as she went. “You’re wise to put it on the market now, before July. Last two weeks of June are my best weeks.”

  She was trying to make me feel better, but nothing could make me feel better about selling our family home.