The Penny Pinchers Club (26 page)

Viv giggled.

Velma put down her knitting and raised her hand. “I do. As of last Tuesday, I am officially off parole.”

“What does that mean?” Opal asked.

“That I can cross state lines now and don’t have to check in with my parole officer.” She bit her lip guiltily. “That I can handle other people’s money and finances.”

What?

Sherise said, “Let’s give it up for Velma being able to touch other people’s money.”

I applauded tentatively. Good thing Griff wasn’t here. He would have thrown a fit knowing Velma had gone through our stuff illegally.

“So aside from Opal, who’s saved up enough to take her first vacation in ten years . . .”

“To Florida.” Opal waved her brochure featuring sunny beaches and palm trees. She’d been showing it to anyone who would look. “Four days in Fort Myers for $340 a person. I cannot wait to get in that sun after that long winter and stick my toes in that sand.”

Sherise slapped her with a high five. “All right, Opal. Okay. Anyone else?”

Libby looked to Wade. “I don’t know if this counts as good news.”

“Sure, it does.” Wade gave her an encouraging nod. “Absolutely.”

“But,” she went on, almost unable to contain herself,“Wade and I are planning on moving in together, just as soon as he can find someone to buy the yurt.”

Good for Libby. Weeks of ministering that head wound of his had finally paid off in his first steps toward commitment. Either that or the concussion hadn’t healed and he was delusional.

Steve said, “You mean in a bona fide apartment with a roof and running water?”

“And no mom?” Opal added.

“No mom.” Wade turned to Libby. “Do you want to tell them or should I?”

“Go ahead. It’s such good news.”

Wade said,“You don’t have to worry about me being a freeloader, Steve, because I have joined the ranks of the employed.”

Stunning. Way more stunning than Steve dating my sister or Velma being out from under the eyes of the law. Wade had been so opposed to any trappings of the capitalistic system that for him to get a job could only mean that he had found something larger than himself.

Or, that Libby was pregnant.

“It’s not being a broker again. Forget that. In this job I’ll actually be contributing to society because I’ll be working at a nonprofit in Trenton offering micro loans to regular, everyday people who want to start their own businesses.” He inclined his head toward me. “Like Kat, maybe. You can be my first client.”

Sherise said, “Wade might be onto something there, Kat. What do you think?”

What I thought was that all our lives were changing so fast. Sherise would be moving to New York and leaving the group. Opal was off to Florida, and Wade and Libby were settling down to build their lives. Even Viv was so wrapped up in Steve, she rarely called to chat. Everyone was moving forward except for me.

I was being left behind.

Laura’s graduation was weeks away and that meant Griff would soon be asking for a divorce. She’d be off to NYU and he’d be off with Bree. And I would be alone.

“I think I’d like to look into that,” I said, my eyes stinging. “You know, considering I’ll be on my own soon.”

A big tear plopped onto a coupon for thirty cents off Palmolive clutched in my hand. Quickly, since it was so embarrassing to be caught in a moment of self-pity, I swept it away, though it was followed by another. And another, until the Palmolive coupon was soaked and wrinkled.

It was soon covered by Libby’s hand. And then by Wade’s. And Steve’s. And Viv’s. And Opal’s. And Sherise’s. And, lastly,Velma’s tiny fist. All of them were gathered around me.

“Don’t you know,” Velma said, “that when you’re a member of the Penny Pinchers, you’re never alone.”

Opal cracked, “And take it from me. That’s not just a promise, that’s a threat.”

I was so lucky to have found them.

 

Chloe breezed in the front door, coffee in hand, newspaper under her arm, and headed for her office. “What’s on my agenda today, Kat?”

“Wall coverings.” I finished an email I was writing to Liam, closing out of it fast. “For the McWilliamses. They like the Maya Romanoff.”

“Excellent. I adore Maya Romanoff.” She held up a copy of the
Princeton Pen,
the town’s monthly newspaper. “Harry the coffee guy mentioned there was a story about you in here today. Can’t wait to read it.”

“About me?”

At first, I couldn’t imagine why the
Princeton Pen
would have written about little old me. I’d been in the
Pen
twice before: One time had been a random photo of me trick-or-treating with Laura when she was small, and the other was when I stood up at a school board meeting during a teachers’ strike to defend Viv. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done recently that had been photographed or ...

The police blotter! But, wait, the cops wouldn’t have filed a report about Wade and me if our charges had been dropped, right?

“You know, Chloe,” I said, swinging around from my desk. “We really need to get cracking on the McWilliams project. Those people are going to be back from Italy soon and . . .”

“They’re not going to be back until the end of summer. We have oodles of leeway.” She spread open the paper and studied the front page. The newsprint looked very out of place on her white Louis XIV desk with the gold-leaf legs next to her hand-painted pink and cream lamp. I couldn’t ever remember seeing Chloe read a newspaper or anything besides catalogs.

“Hmmm. They’re raising the price of parking downtown. We should complain about that.”

“Let’s write a letter right now.”

If Chloe found out I’d been arrested, it would be the end of my job. No question. My hands shook as I riffled through my desk drawer for a pad and pen thinking I could not, absolutely
could not
, afford to be fired. Yes, I wanted to be out from under her. But not now. Not when we needed savings for Laura’s tuition.

Not when Griff was just about to leave me for Bree and I needed money to pay Toni and . . . survive.

“I don’t see it in the first section. Let me try local.”

Oh, god.

“To the Princeton Parking Authority,” I began, drafting her letter of complaint. “As the owner of Interiors by Chloe, I was disheartened to discover that, once again, the Borough of Princeton is intent on thwarting business. . . .”

“I wouldn’t say that.” She placed a finger on the paragraph where she’d been reading. “Why, I happen to be very good friends with the mayor of . . .”

The front bell tinkled right as Chloe’s phone rang. In my paranoia, I pictured every one of her clients bursting through the front door and burning up the telephone lines in outrage over my behavior as reported in this morning’s
Princeton Pen
.

“Better go see who it is,” Chloe said, picking up her phone and shooing me away.

I would have gathered my purse and marched out then and there if the person waiting on the chintz couch wasn’t a small woman with short curly hair dressed head to toe in black. My first client, Madeleine Granville, holding a copy of the
Princeton Pen
.

She waved the paper. “I was waiting for the nine-twenty back to New York, reading in the Princeton Junction station, when I came across this delightful item about you!”

I hid my face in my hands. “It’s not how it appears. There’s a back story....”

“Oh, I’m sure there is.” Madeleine laughed. “Wade Rothschild III? How did you ever get hooked up with the likes of him?”

How did she know Wade? “He’s just a guy from my Penny Pinchers group who happens to enjoy the occasional Dumpster dive, that’s all.”

I thought Madeleine would bust a gut. “
Penny Pinchers group? Dumpster diving?
” She could barely get out the words, gasping between
Dumpster
and
diving
. “
Wade?
”

“Is that surprising?”

“Uh, yeah. Don’t you think?”

I blinked.

She furrowed her brow curiously. “You mean, you have no idea that the guy you went Dumpster diving with has got to be worth at least fifty million dollars?”

It was as though the wind had been knocked out of me. “I don’t think we’re talking about the same person.”

“Oh, yes, we are. He’s the son of another Wade Rothschild. You know, as in the Rothschild hotel chain.”

I’d never heard of him or the Rothschild hotel chain. Sitting down next to her on the couch, I said, “The Wade I know lives in a tent in his mother’s backyard and eats garbage.”

“Well, he may be eating garbage now because he’s dropped out of society,” she said. “But once upon a time he had his own private jet and lived in a condo overlooking Central Park. I should know because I interviewed him in a documentary I did for VH1 on children of the super rich.”

According to Madeleine,Wade was born in Princeton but moved to Fifth Avenue to live with his father after his parents divorced. He graduated from Princeton University and from Columbia University’s School of Business and had been working as a broker, learning the ropes of finances in preparation for taking over the family empire, when a close friend (Eric) committed suicide in distress over his losses on Wall Street. That prompted him to turn his back on business and drop off the face of the earth, never to be heard from again.

“Until now,” Madeleine said. “I had no idea he was right here in town all along.”

This explained so much, why he’d been distrustful when I joined the group, why he didn’t want to talk about his past, why the cops were so fascinated with our simple trespassing case that they interrogated us for hours and brought in the FBI. Why Libby made that reference about Wade’s background.

Did she know? I wondered since, as far as I was aware, she’d been practically supporting him, buying him food, clothes, and acting as his chauffeur. The thought of that made me suddenly very mad. How could he, an alleged multimillionaire, soak off a poor cleaning woman who barely made enough money to afford McDonald’s? Maybe that was why Steve was always on his case.

“He’s a hurting bird,” I said, thinking of how proud Wade had been when he’d announced that he had a job working for a nonprofit at a salary that, in his previous life, would have barely covered his shoe-shine bill.

Madeleine said, “He’s no average hurting bird. More like he’s the golden goose, Kat. That guy could buy us a thousand times over.”

Chloe’s door opened, her seething anger wafting to me like a plume of red-hot indignation. “Could you step into my office, Kat?”

I’d almost forgotten about the
Princeton Pen
article. But seeing Chloe teetering on a rage, I remembered very fast. “I’ll be right there, Chloe. I’m with someone.”

Madeleine hopped up excitedly. “Chloe Sykes. I’ve heard so much about you from Kat.”

Chloe brushed me aside and took in this new person, her all-black Armani suit and Birkin bag, and decided she liked what she saw. “And this is . . . ?”

“Madeleine Granville.”

“And you’re a friend of Kat’s?”

The words that formed on Madeleine’s lips were like hammers driving in the final nails of my coffin. I wanted to stop them, to slap my hand over her mouth as Wade had done in the Rocky River police interrogation room, but it was too late.

“Not a friend, actually,” Madeleine said sweetly, “a
client
.”

That was it. I was cooked.

Chloe didn’t miss a beat. She shook Madeleine’s hand politely and let it drop at the exact right time. But, her displeasure was evident. Even Madeleine intuited that she’d uttered a fatal faux pas, which she unsuccessfully tried to correct by explaining that I’d only done a small job for her. And only one at that.

“You’ll have to excuse me. I have a very busy schedule.” Chloe weakly gestured to her office. “Kat . . . if you don’t mind.”

“Right.” Pushing myself up from the couch, I thanked Madeleine for stopping by. “You can reach me at home from now on. Or my cell.”

She mouthed,
I’m sorry
, but the damage had been done. The only thing left for me to do was to walk into my boss’s office and take my punishment, or pink slip, or both.

Chloe was already at her desk, the newspaper spread wide, an item circled in thick red pen. “Have a seat, Kat.”

I took a seat, praying that Chloe would be merciful, that she would remember I had worked for her for twenty years at rock-bottom pay. That I had come in Sundays and Saturdays and my days off, that I took her phone calls at five A.M. and listened to her neurotic ramblings at midnight. That I, as she liked to say, was her partner.
My girl Friday.

“You have not been the most perfect employee,” she began, her long red nails glinting in the light of her lamp. “I have not been the most perfect boss. But what’s the one thing I demand?”

I closed my eyes, detesting the fact she put me in the position of having to answer like I was her naughty child. “Loyalty.”

“That’s right. Loyalty. We’re in a competitive business in a rotten economy, Kat. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you don’t go out and steal clients from my boutique, do you?”

“I did not steal clients, Chloe. Madeleine was a one-time shot. A very small job for which I was paid a pittance.” Not exactly true.

Chloe blinked. “Madeleine? You mean that shrimp of a woman in the Armani ripoff?” She snorted. “Of course she paid you a pittance, because she’s peanuts. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about this.”

She rotated the paper for me to read. As she did, I had a flash that maybe she was mad because I hadn’t introduced her to Wade or, as I’d earlier feared, that I’d been arrested. But then I saw it was a feature photo of a library I knew well. It belonged in Liam’s home. And, in fact, Liam was pictured reading in a wing chair.

Below it was a caption about how Liam had purchased Macalester House for preservation and how he planned to restore the place to its original decor with the help of a relatively unknown local interior designer. Me.