The Penny Pinchers Club (11 page)

“Who sang that, Mary Chapin Carpenter?”

“No.” She acted hurt that I hadn’t recognized her genius. “Me . . . I think.”

“Good-bye, sister dear,” I said, practically pushing her down the hall to the front door.

“Mark my words.” Miffed, she tromped to a waiting Jaguar, where a teetotaling Adele was behind the wheel to take her home.

But the damage had been done.

After a brief sleep, I tossed and turned, unsatisfied, anxious, and incredibly thirsty. I drank two full glasses of water and returned to bed wide awake, staring at Griff ’s bare, broad back, torturing myself by imagining Bree stroking her hands along his wing muscles, moving lower, the two of them buck naked on his hand-carved Honduran mahogany desk.

Then, for some bizarre reason, I thought of Liam and wondered if he’d been through this exact same hell when he’d learned his wife was having an affair. Miles and years apart and yet we were connected by a common heartbreak of infidelity.

Maybe Mom was right; maybe I should give him a call. For old times’ sake, of course, nothing more.

Griff rolled over and flung an arm around my waist, pulling me into the C of his naked, warm body. “Love you,” he murmured. “Great party.”

That’s what he thought. But what about when he woke up and opened the Visa bill and found that I hadn’t spent $500 on the party but $2,000? Then what? What if Viv was correct in her assessment that our finances were a serious mess and we had no money left and I’d blown our last line of credit on crab cakes, cheese puffs, and champagne?

Geesh. Laura was going to college next year. What if we couldn’t afford to send her and no one would give us a loan because our credit was crap and Laura would have to join Todd at the community college, where he majored in Call of Duty 101, forever resenting that her mother had ruined her dreams of becoming a French doctor by buying towels and sheets and pillows and leather couches and . . . party stuff?

All of a sudden, I felt out of control, as if the condom wrappers and the receipt were simply the first symptoms of a larger disease, the spots before the fever of chicken pox. Griff and I were cooked, and no amount of laundry room sex was going to change that.

Somehow in this turbulent sea of anxiety, I fell asleep and woke up, groggy, to a bright dawn. Griff, who never slept in, bounced out of bed and suggested we go for a run to start our twenty-first year as husband and wife. I did (only because Bree would have) and, after a mile of whining and complaining and practically falling on my knees begging for coffee, I loosened up and managed to put one foot in front of the other.

We went through the neighborhood and I waved to Mrs. Demorts, who was putting her garden to bed for the year. Seeing me, she slowly stood and waddled over to gossip, brushing dirt off her knees along the way. Mrs. Demorts could talk you to death about such minutiae as where the trash collectors leave her garbage cans, which was why Griff begged off, saying he was going to sprint ahead “to get the sweat going.”

Chicken.

Fifteen minutes later, I turned the corner and found Griff dry as a bone, checking his iPhone, the one I bought him over his protests that it was nothing more than a fad and another one of my expensive impulsive purchases. His addiction to it was my own sweet vindication.

“What’s up?” I bent over to catch my breath, though I’d gone barely a half mile.

“Not much.” He clicked it off and shoved it into the pocket of his running shorts. “Let’s go. I’m starved.”

At home, I took a shower while Griff cut up fruit and flipped a few omelets that we took to the patio table where he read the Week in Review of the Sunday
New York Times
and I read the Style section. Every five minutes behind his paper he checked something in his lap.

“Breaking news?” I gestured with my fork to the iPhone.

“Just waiting for word on whether we snagged an interview with Hunter Christiansen.”

Ah, yes, the elusive Hunter Christiansen, the Fed’s most charismatic and secretive former chairman, the man who most economists—aside from Griff—claimed was single-handedly responsible for failing to recognize the need for the regulation of Wall Street, thereby leading to the biggest crash since the Great Depression. Which might have been why Christiansen had retired in disgrace and fled to some remote outpost eschewing all interviews and demurring from the time-honored tradition of selling the rights to his memoirs for a million plus.

An exclusive meeting with Christiansen would transform Griff ’s book from an obscure academic treatise by a small university press into a nonfiction best seller. It would be read by every economist, politician, stock broker, venture capitalist, businessman, and small-town banker searching for secrets to the Fed’s inner workings. Not to mention it would definitely get him tenure.

The odds were Griff didn’t have a shot in hell of talking to Christiansen. The old codger had already sent final word through his people that he wasn’t interested in participating in any book having to do with the Federal Reserve. So how come Griff was on tenterhooks, checking his iPhone every three seconds to see if Christiansen had changed his mind?

“Good luck with that,” I said.

He said, “You never know.”

So true.

As it turned out, the big call did come. Not for Griff, but for me.

“I’m so sorry to bother you at home. It wasn’t until after I dialed that I remembered it was a Sunday and that you might have other plans besides work,” an earnest voice prattled.

Madeleine Granville. She must have read the email I sent on Friday and reconsidered. “No. I’m the one who must apologize,” I jumped in. “I’m not in the habit of putting clients on hold, and someday when we’re old friends, I’ll be able to tell you the truth of what happened.”

She laughed. “I have an idea, from Elaine. Would it have anything to do with your boss?”

“Of course not. My boss is a lovely woman.” Who was I to burn bridges?

“Good for you, keeping it on the up and up. But even with the best boss it’s not easy breaking out on your own, is it?”

This question seemed more profound than it probably was in light of yesterday’s revelations. Madeleine was right. It wasn’t easy breaking out on one’s own. It required drive, planning, and, most of all, money.

The thing was, I could list a thousand reasons why I needed to break free from Chloe. What was the one reason Griff needed to break free from me?

Anyway, as it was not the time to drift off into an existential analysis, I snapped to and focused on reassuring her that I could do wonders for her house, and inexpensively, too. She’d appreciated the ideas in my email, which made my pitch easier. All we had to do was meet.

“The directions are rather complicated,” she said as I rustled through the bowl by the phone for a pen and paper. “Being a city girl, I don’t have a driver’s license, so the best I can do is tell you how to get to my house from the Princeton Junction train station.” At last, I found one of Laura’s eye liners and a thin envelope from Franklin Savings with an ominous OPEN IMMEDIATLY/TIMED MATERIAL stamped on top.

Uh-oh. I must have missed it in yesterday’s mail. Tentatively sliding my finger under the flap, I didn’t need to read the opening paragraph to realize it was a notice that on Friday our checking account had gone into overdraft by $64.

Griff was going to have a fit.

As Madeleine went into a lengthy description of lefts and rights and turning at the second light—or was it the third?—I crumpled the letter into a ball, my mind racing for a possible way to fix this. It was Sunday, the bank was closed, what could I do?

A car door slammed and I peeked out the window to see our godson Jack’s beaten-up Toyota in the driveway. True sport and loving kid that he was, he’d driven up from Stone Harbor for our anniversary. Or perhaps . . . to use our washing machine.

Done with Madeleine, I hung up and rushed outside to tell Griff, not only about Jack, but about my first bona fide client. Forget the overdraft, Madeleine’s call was so much more important and reminded me of one of the great perks of marriage—having someone with whom to share not only the bad news, but also the good.

My excitement quickly vanished when I found Griff bent over his iPhone again, his thumbs working back and forth, a huge smile on his face.

“Did Christiansen say yes?”

He lifted his head abruptly and, I swear, tried to hide what he’d been typing. “Pardon?”

“Christiansen. Did he say yes?”

He frowned, lost in a shadow of confusion. “Er, no. Did I just hear a car pull up? Is that Jack? He said he might come up.”

What was making him so happy if it wasn’t Christiansen?
I debated whether to push the iPhone issue further but, hearing Jack call, “Hello!” I decided to drop it. “Yep. Jack’s here.”

“Great. Let me finish this memo and then I’ll be out to see him.” And he went back to that damned phone.

Deflated, I left the patio to meet Jack in the driveway. He must have grown a foot since I saw him three weeks before, so tall and blond and . . . red. The boy had skin like a lobster.

“Didn’t you ever hear of sunblock?” I reached up to kiss him on the cheek.

“Yes, Aunt Kat. I know all about sunblock. It’s not my fault; blame global warming.” He hugged me tightly before handing me a present—a pillowcase packed with laundry. It reeked of old, mildewed sneakers, like he hadn’t done a wash since he’d left. Which he hadn’t.

Laura shuffled out in a pair of light flannel pj bottoms and a tank top and, without saying so much as hi, began to tease her cousin about his surfer hair and bronzed skin. Again, I found myself glancing off, unable to think of her alone with Todd in
that
way. Well, I would just have to learn to deal with it. She couldn’t stay my little girl forever.

We whittled away the rest of the day in pleasant family togetherness. Jack did his laundry and helped his uncle fix the backyard fence. The four of us played a couple of halfhearted games of badminton before a few of Laura’s friends—alerted that a strapping, blond lifeguard was on the premises—stopped by to clean us out of chips, crackers, cheese, and hors d’oeuvres left over from the party.

Griff, ever the professor, gravitated to the kids, plying them with questions and abstract bits of random economics theory having to do with the purchasing power of their meager after-school earnings.

Any other middle-aged man explaining the “income effect of a price increase on demand” would have driven off the most polite teenagers. But Laura’s friends didn’t mind. In fact, they seemed to get a kick out Griff ’s mini lecture, needling him about being mind- numbingly boring, pretending to commit hara-kiri or keel over dead as, playing to their jokes, he proceeded to use a tortilla chip to draw a price curve in the bowl of salsa.

It reminded me of our first unofficial date at the Alchemist & Barrister when he was hanging out with the Princeton students and I realized my whole life had been leading up to our meeting. It wasn’t merely that he was still handsome, that, with his longish, dark hair and jeans he stood apart from these girls’ staid fathers. It was—as always—his energy, his enthusiasm, his interest in others.

I must remember to think of him like this,
I thought, confused by my shifting feelings of suspicion, anger, doubt, and intense love. If I only knew for certain he wasn’t cheating on me—or if he was—it would be far easier on my psyche than hovering in this limbo. At least I could take the appropriate action and move forward.

But, as the saying goes, be careful what you ask for.

It happened completely by accident. I was
not
snooping (no matter what Viv claims). I was simply going downstairs to get the last bottle of champagne to accompany our anniversary dinner of steaks and the last of the summer’s corn to put on the grill.

If Griff, or Laura or Jack, had fetched the champagne, if I hadn’t accidentally bumped his desk and jolted the computer out of sleep thereby revealing the outbox for Griff ’s online iPhone email account, there was a good chance Griff and I would never have stepped on the road to divorce.

But I
did
bump the computer and I
did
see the emails he’d sent that morning when I’d been on the phone with Madeleine, and once I read them, I knew Toni Feinzig was right: His passion for me in the laundry room had only been a pathetic ploy to buy time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“
y
ou did the right thing,” Toni said, pushing a box of aloe vera Kleenex in my direction, “by coming to me first.”

She sounded more like Tony Soprano than Toni Feinzig, I thought, blowing my nose and rethinking my decision to see a lawyer so soon. I didn’t want to ruin Griff or leave him destitute, far from it. I didn’t even want a divorce.

“I want him to, to . . . to love me.”

“Absolutely. Of course.” Toni’s voice was scripted sympathetic. As a veteran divorce attorney who specifically sought women clients in her yellow page ads, she’d been in this position many a time before.

“I can’t believe I . . .” Oh, god. Here came the tears again. “. . . love a man who’s lying to me, who’s planning to leave me for his assistant. . . .” My chest tightened, the crushing words of Griff ’s email hitting as hard as they did the first time I’d read them. “. . . as soon as Laura graduates from high school.”

Another tsunami of self-pity crashed and I broke down in waves of sobs. Viv brought her arm around my shoulders and squeezed tightly. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “Try to forget about the SOB and concentrate on what you need to do.”

Thank god for Viv, that she was always there for me when the chips were down. It was true that on the night of the party I’d been so annoyed by her nosiness I’d literally pushed her out the door.

And yet, within twenty-four hours, there I was in the master bath on the phone to her, breaking down about the emails as she clucked in sympathy just like she used to when I was thirteen and couldn’t stand the utter heartbreak of learning that Justin Danyhew had been passing me love notes in class only to get to my best friend Francine Bracchia, the prettiest girl at South River Junior High.