The Penny Pinchers Club (18 page)

“Don’t scoff,” Opal said as we huddled in her minivan and divvied up coupons she’d downloaded and printed out by the dozens. “Normally tampons run about five bucks a box. With the frequent shopper card, that would bring them to $4.50. Add the buy one, get one deal and now we’re at $2.25. Throw in the $1-off coupon and we’re at $1.25. Combine that with buy ten and get a $5 rebate and, ladies and gentlemen, you have your $5 box of tampons for seventy-five cents.”

Libby checked the van. “I think that’s only ladies, Opal.”

“Right. Well, those guys don’t know what they’re missing. If Wade and Steve were true Penny Pinchers, they would be in the trenches with us buying Kotex.” She let out a snort. “As if men were capable of putting anyone else first besides themselves.”

“Speaking of men,” Velma said when we zipped up our raincoats and grabbed our reusable bags to head into the cold drizzle of November. “How are you and your hubby getting along these days?”

Quieter,
I thought, struck by how strange, yet appropriate, that word was. With the televisions permanently off, our house was quieter. So was our free time. We’d given up going to the movies with their blasting Dolby stereo sound effects. Nor did we eat out, ever. Meals were filled with quiet conversation instead of shouting in noisy restaurants. After dinner we usually read in near silence or we went for long walks through our peaceful neighborhood, the fall leaves swirling at our feet, the tinge of woodsmoke in the air. Even the way we treated each other was more gentle, with “pleases” inserted liberally along with “thank-yous” and mild kisses.

“You know,” I said, having not given the issue thought before she asked. “I think we’re . . . better. Quieter. I guess that’s because we got rid of the TVs.”

“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s healthier, isn’t it? When I feel a cold coming on, I sometimes I turn off everything electronic—the TV, the computer, even the lights—and let myself heal.”

Was that what we were doing? I wondered.
Healing?

Velma stuffed her hands into pink knitted mittens. “So what is it you do for a living exactly, Kat?”

I told her I was an assistant interior decorator.

“Does that mean you paint and put up curtains?”

“Mostly it means I put up with my boss’s abuse.” I guided her fragile elbow as we negotiated a puddle and had a sudden thought. “You know, I come across lots of cast-offs in my job, Velma. Decorator miss-tints that can be bought for nothing. Discarded old curtains.” Gently, because I didn’t want to offend her, I said, “So if you need your walls repainted or new curtains, I could do that for you—gratis.”

She looked up at me and smiled, her thin lips erratically painted with coral lipstick. “Well, that’s very nice of you, Kat. But I like my apartment just the way it is. However, I’ve joined a bartering co-op which has been great except I’ve had nothing to exchange for a tune-up of my old Monte Carlo. Now I’ll have you.”

It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but that was okay.

At DrugSave, we opened the door and nearly ran into Libby, who was in one whale of a lather. “We got a problem at thirteen hundred,” she whispered, cocking her chin to a balding manager standing with his arms folded by Shampoo/Feminine Hygiene. “Opal should have picked a day when he wasn’t on duty. I know the guy and he’s a jerk. He’s got a bug up his butt about in-store rebates.”

Opal boldly pushed past him, arrived at the tampon shelf, and with one motion swept half the boxes into her cart. The manager plucked a walkie-talkie off his belt and spoke into it.

“He treats her like a shoplifter because she wears kerchiefs and hippie batik skirts and reeks of patchouli.” Libby clucked her tongue. “Profiling, pure and simple.”

Still, Libby didn’t move.

“Aren’t you going to get some?”

“And risk being blacklisted by DrugSave? Heck no. This place is the cheapest in town.”

Then it was up to me since Velma seemed to have gotten lost in the toothbrush section, her mittens to her lips as she debated soft versus medium bristles.

“Hi,” I said to the manager.

He scowled.

“What a bargain.” Doing as Opal had, I swept the rest into my cart. “Okay, see you around.”

At the end of the aisle, Opal gave me a wave. “Could you snag me a few rebate slips? I forgot mine.”

“No problem.” I yanked one off the shelf display. But when I went for another, a hand stopped me.

“One per customer,” the manager said.

“Oh!” My neck went hot. Congenitally easily embarrassed, I felt it worse when there was an implication of greed. “I didn’t know.”

“He’s lying.” Opal marched up the aisle, removed his hand, and took one. “Read the fine print. It’s one
per ten boxes
. It doesn’t say anything about one
per customer
.”

“One
per customer
,” he reiterated, not bothering to read the rebate. “My store. My rules. If you don’t like them, all of you can go.”

I gasped. I’d never been kicked out of anything. Well, that wasn’t true. The now defunct Woolworth’s in South River never forgave me for shoplifting a packet of Bubble Yum when I was thirteen.

Velma turned the corner. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s the old one-per-customer rebate hassle.” Opal made a rude gesture that obviously shocked the manager, whose eyes just about popped out of his head.

Velma slipped on her bifocals and took a rebate slip, reading it out loud for all of us to hear. Sure enough, it said nothing about one per customer.

“I’m the manager,” he said. “I should know.”

“You
should
,” Velma said. “But you don’t.”

So intriguing was this showdown that I barely heard the chimes coming from my purse until Opal said, “Is that your phone?”

It was Viv with her trademark bad timing, forcing me to take refuge by the shampoo. “Call back later . . . ,” I hissed.

“Where are you?”

“DrugSave on Market Street.”

“So Mom was right. Curse her.” She paused. “Is there a back door or something you can sneak out?”

A back door! “Why? And . . . no I can’t leave. I’m with Opal and Velma and we’ve run into a bit of a snafu.” Both women had their arms crossed and were facing the manager, also in crossed arms. “They need me for support.”

“You never should have told Mom to meet you there. That was a big mistake.” She sounded close to hysterics.

“What? Slow down,Viv. You’re not making sense.”

“Shoot. Here she comes now. I’m telling you . . . run! It’s your last chance.” Then the phone went dead.

Honestly, my sister was getting stranger by the day. Maybe she suffered from some form of post-traumatic distress after all those years of being stuck in cinder block rooms with high school students.

“We can stand here all day,” Opal was saying when I got back. “Or you can let me go to the cash register and check out. I mean, that is the purpose of a store, right? To purchase items within its walls?”

“Purchase, yes. Rip me off, no.”

It was then that I saw them approach in slow motion, my present and past stepping into my future.

First there was my mother in her purple raincoat and new Chooka rain boots with the cherries that gave her the appearance of a seventy-five-year-old with sixteen-year-old feet. She was strolling down the aisle, hand in pockets, wearing a mischievous grin that, in light of Viv’s urgent call, made me wonder until I saw . . .

. . . A tall man in a Barbour behind her, slightly older than I recalled, his hair more fashionably cut, though not quite as bright blond, his blue eyes creased at the edges.

Liam?

It was as if a figure in my dreams had been formed and come to life. Liam.
Liam!
How many nights had I lain awake, trying to recall his smile, the way he bent to kiss me once upon a time. And now he was here, not a fantasy, but a real person whose face had been aged by what had happened to us in the interim—marriage, deaths, glorious vacations, and horrific moments of despair in the hours of 9/11. At last, we met again—by shampoos and feminine hygiene in DrugSave.

I’d stopped breathing.

“Look who’s here!” Mom singsonged, though I couldn’t tell if that was directed toward me or him.

Between us stood the Penny Pinchers, Opal and Velma, and the manager, oblivious.

Mom, equally unaware of the confrontation, took Liam’s hand and wiggled past them. He looked as humiliated as I felt by the circumstances. If his helpless expression was any indication, meeting me in DrugSave had not been his idea.

“It’s Liam!” Mom exclaimed, declaring the obvious. “Can you believe it? I was on my way to meet you when I bumped into him on the street corner.”

I said, “Outside his house?”

Liam laughed, the old familiar laugh, low in the back of his throat. “Pretty close.” He extended his hand and said warmly, “Hi, Kat. Nice to see you again.”

A surge of excitement rippled through every nerve, catching me completely off guard. “You, too. You look . . . fantastic.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I wanted to hug him, to apologize for leaving him on that beach. And yet, every pulse of my joy was tempered by the beat of guilt. I’d made my choice long, long ago, so I had no right to wish differently out of mere curiosity. He must be treated as nothing more than a fond acquaintance, a potential new client for Chloe.

“You haven’t aged a bit,” I added with slightly more reserve.

“I was just about to say the same about you.” He was polite but distant. A proper response as always.

Mom, however, was like a precocious child from a Disney movie who’d successfully reunited her previously estranged parents. “So . . . are you almost done? I’m in no rush to go down to Lambertville if you two want to get a cup of coffee and catch up. Or . . . why don’t you go to Lambertville with us, Liam? Kat just finished designing a kitchen . . .”

It was then that a third puzzle piece appeared, bringing the larger picture into sharp focus.

Chloe—who to my knowledge had never stepped in a discount drug store since her Manville days—approached us carrying a basket that held a lone pack of Trident. “Did I just hear your mother say something about a kitchen you designed? Which one was that?”

Man, oh man. It was like I had one of those monitoring bracelets around my ankles the way she was aware of my every move.

Her gray eyes fixated on Liam. “And who’s this, Kat? And, more important, does Griff know?”

Mom giggled, but I was tempted to slap my boss. Chloe knew too much about my personal life. How? That was a mystery. But somewhere along the line she’d discerned that Griff and I were riding through a bumpy patch and she’d started using this as subtle ammunition in her campaign to remain in charge.

“Liam, this is Kat’s . . . ,” Mom began.

“Partner,” Chloe interjected, slipping him her slim white paw. “At Designs by Chloe.
Interior
designs, that is.”

“Oooh,” Mom gushed, right on cue. “I should have thought of this sooner, Liam. You need a professional to redo that big old house of yours.” Turning to Chloe, she said,“Liam just bought the Macalester House. You know, the old stone one with the eight fireplaces that the university sold this fall.”

Chloe said, “Is that so?”

Wait. She already knew that. She was the one who told me. And how come she was in DrugSave just when I was there with Liam and my mother? And why was my mother so eager to offer Chloe’s redecorating services?

Because . . . this was
a setup
! And I had been the bait. Those two battleaxes must have been in cahoots, too, since it was too much of a coincidence for all of us to be in DrugSave on a miserable Saturday afternoon.

From the other end of the aisle a shout went out. Opal.

“This is outrageous.” She waved her arms madly as doors opened and two uniformed rent-a-cops burst in. For a brief second, I thought one of them was Steve—wouldn’t that show the manager!—but, alas, no.

“All I’m trying to do is exercise my constitutional right to buy some tampons,” Opal shouted. “Also, Kat!”

Liam’s eyes dropped to my cart, filled halfway with Kotex. Mom, of that generation, went crimson, while I wished for a hole in the floor beneath my feet.

Chloe said, “What’s going on?”

“You, too.” The manager waved me off. “You can buy those with one rebate or you can leave the store.”

Behind his back,Velma snuck a handful more of rebate forms.

“I’ll buy them,” I told the manager. “Thanks.”

“Then follow me.”

I followed him to the cash register, piled the boxes on the counter, and prayed to be anywhere else. Since I didn’t have a DrugSave frequent-shopper card—that was supposed to have been Opal’s bailiwick—and since I only had about ten dollar-off coupons, the total was nothing close to the seventy-five cents per box that had been promised.

Meanwhile, Chloe used my encounter with the manager as a distraction to get her clutches on Liam, leading him away to the rainy outdoors. I never even got a chance to say good-bye.

“I cannot believe you just spent over $140 on tampons,” Mom said as we got in the car to head toward Lambertville.

Frankly, it was hard for me to be civil, so furious was I at my mother’s unconscionable scheming. “I cannot believe you and Chloe set me up,” I retorted, gripping the wheel.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my mother beginning to form a denial. “Don’t even try it, Mom. For you to have ‘bumped’ into Liam on the street corner and then for Chloe to conveniently show up after weeks of hounding me to call him so she could get the contract on that house is no mere happenstance and you know it.”

But there was another hurt under the surface, one I hadn’t realized was there until I’d said Chloe’s name out loud. “And how could you have thrown Chloe his business when you knew perfectly well that I was trying to strike out on my own? Do you know what having a client like Liam would have done for me? It would have been my ticket to freedom!”