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There it sat, a Cloud Nine queen-sized luxury gold
comforter with red ribbon appliqué and metallic embroidery.
Forty-percent off. It was the last one left. Tiffany Turner
had seen it, and so had the other woman.
The woman caught Tiffany looking at it and her eyes
narrowed. Tiffany narrowed hers right back. Her competitor
was somewhere in her fifties, dressed for comfort in jeans
and a sweater, her feet shod in tennis shoes for quick
movement – obviously a sale veteran, but Tiffany wasn’t
intimidated. She was younger. She had the drive, the
determination.
It only took that one second to start the race. The other
woman strode toward the comforter with the confidence that
comes with age, her hand stretched toward the prize.
Tiffany chose that moment to look over her
competitor’s shoulder. Her eyes went wide and she
gasped. “Oh, my gosh.” Her hands flew to her face in horror.
The other woman turned to see the calamity
happening in back of her.
And that was her undoing. In a superhuman leap,
Tiffany bagged the comforter just as her competitor turned
back. Score.
Boy, if looks could kill.
It would be rude to gloat. Tiffany gave an apologetic
shrug and murmured, “Sorry.”
The woman paid her homage with a reluctant
nod. “You’re good.”
Yes, I am. “Thanks,” Tiffany murmured, and left the
field of battle for the customer service counter.
As she walked away, she heard the other woman
mutter, “Little beast.”
Okay, now she’d gloat.
She was still gloating as she drove home from the mall an
hour later. She’d not only scored on the comforter, she’d
gotten two sets of towels (buy one, get one free), a great
top for work, a cute little jacket, a new shirt for Brian,
and a pair of patent metallic purple shoes with 3 ½ inch
heels that were so hot she’d burn the pavement when she
walked. With the new dress she’d snagged at thirty percent
off (plus another ten percent off for using her department
store card), she’d be a walking inferno. Brian would melt
when he saw her.
Her husband would also melt if he saw how much she’d spent
today, so she had to beat him home. And since he would be
back from the office in half an hour, she was now in
another race, one that she didn’t dare lose. That was the
downside of hitting the mall after work. She always had to
hurry home to hide her treasures before Brian walked in the
door. But she could do it.
Tiffany followed the Abracadabra shopping method: get the
bargain and then make it disappear for a while so you could
later insist that said bargain had been sitting around the
house for ages. She’d learned that one from her mother. Two
years before, she had successfully used the Guessing Game
method: bring home the bargains, and lull husband into
acceptance by having him guess how incredibly little you’d
paid for each one.
She’d pull a catch of the day from its bag and say, “Guess
how much I paid for this sweater.”
He’d say, “Twenty dollars.”
“Too high,” she’d reply with a smirk.
“Okay. Fifteen.”
“Too high.”
“Ten.”
“Nope. Eight-ninety-nine. I’m good.”
And she was. As far as Tiffany was concerned, the three
sexiest words in the English language were fifty percent
off. She was a world-class bargain hunter (not surprising,
since she’d sat at the feet of an expert – her mom), and
she could smell a sale a mile away.
Great as she was at ferreting out a bargain, she wasn’t
good with credit cards. It hadn’t taken Tiffany long to
snarl her finances to the point where she and Brian had to
use their small, start-a-family savings and Brian’s car
fund to bail her out.
She’d felt awful about that, not only because she suspected
they’d never need that family fund anyway (that suspicion
was what led to her first shopping binge), but because
Brian had suffered from the fallout of her mismanagement.
He’d had his eye on some rusty old beater on the other side
of the lake and had been talking about buying and restoring
it. The car wound up rusting at someone else’s house,
thanks to her. Even the money they’d scraped together for
her bailout wasn’t enough. She’d had to call in the big
guns: Daddy. That had probably been harder on Brian than
waving good-bye to their savings.
“Tiffy, baby, you should have told me,” he said the day the
awful truth came out and they sat on the couch, her crying
in his arms.
She would have, except she kept thinking she could get
control of her runaway credit card bills. It seemed like
one minute she only had a couple and the next thing she
knew they’d bred and taken over. “I thought I could handle
it.”
It was a reasonable assumption since they both worked.
There was just one problem: their income had never quite
managed to keep up with the demands of life. It still
didn’t.
She sighed. Brian so didn’t understand. All he did
was pay the mortgage, utilities, and the car payments. He
had no idea how much it really cost to live. First of all,
they had to eat. Did he have any idea how much wine cost?
Or meat? Even toilet paper wasn’t cheap. And they had to
have clothes. She couldn’t show up at Salon H to do nails
in sweats, for heaven’s sake. What woman wanted to go to a
nail artist who looked like a slob? Food and clothes were
the tip of the expense iceberg. Friends and family had
birthdays; she couldn’t give them IOUs. And she had to buy
Christmas presents. And decorations. And hostess gifts. Now
it was June and soon there would be picnics at the lake and
neighborhood barbecues. A girl could hardly show up empty-
handed. Then there were bridal showers to attend, and
baby . . . No, no. She wasn’t going there.
After the great credit card cleanup the Guessing
Game method lost its effectiveness and she’d had to retire
it. Hiding her purchases worked better anyway.
Her bargains weren’t the only things she was
hiding. In the last year she’d gotten two new credit cards,
and they were both well used. Brian might panic if he knew,
but there was no need for panic. She’d be okay this time.
She’d learned her lesson. In fact, she was going to make a
big payment on one of them this week. So, there was no need
for Brian to know about the purchases in her car trunk.
She checked the clock on the dash: 4:50. Brian got
off at five. He worked at the Heart Lake Department of
Planning and Community Development. It took him exactly six
minutes to get from his office to their cul-de-sac in Heart
Lake Estates and another fifty-five seconds to park his car
and get to the front door. That gave her seventeen minutes
and five seconds to beat him home.
A little voice at the back of her mind
whispered, “You wouldn’t have to worry about beating your
husband home if you were honest with him.”
She ignored it and applied more pressure to the gas
pedal. She could feel her heart rate picking up as two new
voices began to echo in the back of her head.
Brian:
That’s a lot of shopping bags. Were you
at the mall?
Tiffany:
Yes, but I didn’t spend much. This was all on
sale.
Brian:
You had that much cash on you?
Tiffany:
Here the dialogue stopped because she didn’t know
what script to follow. Should she lie and say, “Yes,
actually, I did,” or should she say, “Well, I only charged
a couple of things.”
No, of course, she wouldn’t use that last line. She
wasn’t supposed to be charging anything. She’d promised.
But she didn’t have enough money to take advantage of the
sales. And if she didn’t take advantage of the sales, how
could she save money? It was a terrible, vicious circle.
She should take it all back. Brian probably
wouldn’t get that excited about the shoes or the dress
anyway. Just show up naked. That was what her friends
always joked. Even naked she couldn’t explain about the new
charge cards. Not these days.
Her best bet was to get home before Brian. She
could make it. Her foot pressed down harder. She wouldn’t
buy anything more all month, and she’d take back the shoes.
But the dress – fifty percent off, for heaven’s sake.
Just get home and ditch the stuff. Then you can
decide what to do. She roared off the exit ramp then
turned right onto Cedar Springs Road. Ten more minutes and
she’d be in Heart Lake Estates. The finish line was in
sight.
Oh, no. What was this behind her? Her stomach fell
at the sight of the flashing lights. Nooo. This was so
unfair. Yes, she was going fifteen miles over the speed
limit, but she had an emergency brewing here. And thirty
was too slow. What sicko had decided you could only go
thirty on this road anyway? It was probably someone who had
no life, nowhere to be, no husband to beat home.
Once again a conversation started at the back of
her brain.
Brian
Hey, I beat you home. Where were you?
Tiffany:
Just out running some errands.
Brian:
What’s that piece of paper in your hand?
Tiffany:
Ummmm . . .
She could not, COULD NOT, get a speeding ticket.
They couldn’t afford it.
Heart thudding, she watched as the policeman got
out of his patrol car. He was big and burly. Big men loved
sweet, little blondes with blue eyes. That had to work in
her favor. She saw the wedding ring on his finger. Darn. It
would have worked more in her favor if he’d been single.
She let down her window and showed him the most pitiful
expression she could muster. “I was speeding, I know, but
please don’t give me a ticket. I haven’t had a ticket since
I was eighteen.” Actually, twenty, but close enough.
Parking tickets didn’t count. Neither did citations for
running stop signs. “I promise I won’t speed again. Ever.
If I come home with a speeding ticket . . .” And a trunk
full of shopping bags. She couldn’t even think about it.
She might as well throw herself in the lake and be done
with it.
The officer regarded her sadly. Good, she’d won his
sympathy. She looked back at him with tears in her eyes.
“Lady, you were going twenty miles over the limit.
I can’t not give you a ticket.”
What? What was this? “Oh, God, please.” Now she opted to
shed the tears. They were wasted sitting around in her
eyeballs. “My husband will kill me.” How was she going to
pay on her credit card if she had to use the money for a
stupid speeding ticket?
“Don’t worry,” said the officer.
“Yes?” He’d had a change of heart. She was saved! Long live
blonde.
“They take MasterCard at the courthouse. May I have your
driver’s license and registration please?”
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