The Penny Pinchers Club Read Free Page A

from admirers across a crowded bar as nothing more than the benefits of fleeting youth. Liam was that rare commodity—a heterosexual American male who loved style for style’s sake, whether it pertained to his car, his clothes, or—my personal passion—interior decorating.
    And he loved to go shopping. Happily. Half the time it would be his idea. My roommate Suzanne used to claim I’d hit the jackpot with Liam, though that might have been because she was miserably dating a chef who spent his off-hours watching football while sharpening his knives.
    That said, Liam was not perfect. For one thing, he had a tendency to automatically issue decisions without my input, like making dinner reservations and advising me what to wear. At restaurants, he’d occasionally order for me or he’d take my car in for tune-ups without asking. Once, he called up my dentist to make an appointment to have my teeth cleaned.
    I’m sure he thought he was being masculine and protective, or maybe he was emulating his father, who also tended toward the dictatorial, but I found it increasingly annoying to be told what I would do and when to floss.
    Then there was the day when he stepped into my cubicle at PharMax and plunked down a purchase agreement for a classic Morrisville colonial on a shady oak-lined street with a brick fireplace, kitchen nook, and five bedrooms.
    “The kids might have to double up,” he said.
    Kids? Just how many kids was he talking about, because if Liam was entertaining notions of me turning into another Bridget Novak, with her dropped uterus and bulging varicose veins, he had another think coming.
    “Go with it,” my sister Viv advised when I mentioned this over lunch. “You just know Liam’s going to propose to you this spring, followed by an August wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Pain in South River. It’s the script! Then all you’ll have to do is spit out babies like a royal princess while he climbs the corporate ladder. With nannies galore—what could be easier?”
    I took a bite of my chicken salad and thought about the possibility of being Mrs. Liam Novak.
    “In between stints in the maternity ward, you can spend your days working out and driving around in your wood-paneled station wagon from mall to mall, shopping to your heart’s content. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
    I put myself inViv’s picture. Me with a highlighted bob and bright pink lips, one of those little woven purses in the crook of my arm. Entire summers at the Shore making peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder bread for when the kids got back from swimming. Bright green lawns. Blue country club swimming pools and the squeaky clean perfume of chlorine in my children’s hair. Perfectly appointed living rooms with fireplaces and deep shag. Whole school days devoted to choosing new drapes before the kids got home at three and I had to chaperone them to piano and catechism.
    That wasn’t so bad.
    Besides, I loved Liam—or so my twenty-three-year-old self assumed. He was kind to me and I was kind to him. Our religious and ethnic backgrounds were comfortably similar and yet different enough to spice up the mix. My only concerns were his mother—who no doubt would be at our house every single day organizing the sock drawers—and those controlling tendencies of his that seemed to be growing stronger the closer we got to marriage.
    But, heck, I could nip that in the bud, right? We were still young and flexible. It wasn’t etched in stone that he had to turn into his father.
    As Viv predicted, Liam did propose on Easter Sunday while we took a chilly walk on the beach in Avalon after church and brunch. We were holding hands and chatting about nothing in particular, dodging the frigid waves, when I felt something cold on my ring finger, looked down, and saw his grandmother’s diamond, repositioned in a spectacular Tiffany platinum setting.
    “All I can promise you,” he said, gently kissing me on the forehead, “is that I’ll do my best to