A Dollar Short (The Bottom Dollar Series Book 2) Read online

  Praise for the Bottom Dollar Series

  Books by Karin Gillespie

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  About the Author

  In Case You Missed the 1st Book in the Series

  Don’t Miss the 3rd Book in the Series

  GIRL MEETS CLASS

  Sign up for the Henery Press newsletter

  THE BREAKUP DOCTOR

  WAKE-UP CALL

  DOUBLE WHAMMY

  LOWCOUNTRY BOIL

  FIT TO BE DEAD

  Praise for the Bottom Dollar Series

  BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR (#1)

  “In a first novel that is guaranteed to please Fannie Flagg and Bailey White fans, Gillespie introduces the Bottom Dollar Girls with a flair for timing and a cheeky southern turn of phrase...Brace for a wild ride chock-full of Southern wit and down-home advice from a clutch of quirky characters you will hope to see again soon.”

  – Booklist

  “Use your very last bottom dollar, if you have to. Just BUY THIS BOOK. You will laugh yourself sick and love every minute of it.”

  – Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queen

  “A winner of a first novel, filled with Southern-style zingers and funny folks.”

  – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The characters are the kind of steel magnolias who would make Scarlett O’Hara envious.”

  – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Laugh out loud...this perfect summer read [will] find permanent beach-house residence.”

  – Richmond Times-Dispatch

  A DOLLAR SHORT (#2)

  “Those plain-speaking, cheeky Bottom Dollar gals (Bet Your Bottom Dollar) return with more rollicking adventures in Cayboo Creek, South Carolina...Never a dull moment...this fast-paced screamer of a romance begs a giggle, if not a guffaw.”

  – Booklist

  “Laugh-out-loud antics as...Gillespie continues her entertaining Bottom Dollar Girls series...Certain to please women’s fiction fans of all ages.”

  – Romantic Times (Top Pick)

  “As tart and delectable as lemon meringue pie...a pure delight.”

  – Jennifer Weiner, Author of Good in Bed and In Her Shoes

  “A fine romp of a book, well-written and thoroughly entertaining.”

  – The Winston-Salem Journal

  “A Dollar Short is meant to entertain, and it does. It takes talent to sustain this level of comic writing for over 300 pages. Gillespie keeps the ball in the air, spinning madly, until the end.”

  – The Boston Globe

  DOLLAR DAZE (#3)

  “Each character is lovingly crafted in Gillespie’s hilarious, heartwarming, and often irreverent look at senior living in small-town America. The third book in the Bottom Dollar Girls series (Bet Your Bottom Dollar; A Dollar Short) can also be enjoyed as a stand-alone.”

  – Booklist (starred review)

  “Hilarious and endearing...Gillespie’s humorous style will have readers hooting out loud, and her cheeky characters will have them coming back for more!”

  – Janean Nusz, The Road to Romance

  “Readers will be chuckling over crazy man-getting antics, sighing at the complexity of life, love and matrimony and maybe even shedding a tear over the heartbreak and tragedy. This novel is charismatic and replete with poignancy.”

  – Romantic Times

  Books by Karin Gillespie

  GIRL MEETS CLASS (#1)

  (September 2015)

  The Bottom Dollar Series

  BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR (#1)

  A DOLLAR SHORT (#2)

  DOLLAR DAZE (#3)

  Copyright

  BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR

  The Bottom Dollar Series

  Part of the Henery Press Chick Lit Collection

  Second Edition

  Kindle edition | February 2015

  Henery Press

  www.henerypress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2014 by Karin Gillespie

  Cover design by Stephanie Chontos

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Related subjects include: book club recommendations, women’s friendship and sisterhood, chick lit romantic comedy, chick lit books, funny romance, Southern humor, women’s fiction, Southern fiction.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940976-79-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To my readers.

  Thanks so much for your support.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the wonderful and professional Henery team: Kendel Lynn, Art Molinares, Kaitlyn Riley and the rest of the Hen House.

  One

  Menstruation, menopause, mental breakdown.

  Ever notice how all women’s problems begin with men?

  ~ Comment overheard under the hair dryers at Dazzling Do’s

  It isn’t every day a movie star steals your husband. Chiffon Butrell certainly wasn’t expecting such a major upheaval in her life on that nippy Tuesday in January. Instead, she was grappling with more trivial aggravations, such as hunting down a pencil for her eight-year-old daughter, Emily.

  Her oldest child stood near the front door, fully dressed, her light brown hair gathered up into a neat ponytail. Wearing a mask of quiet stoicism, she kept glancing at her Hello Kitty wristwatch.

  Chiffon, her blond hair snarled into rats from sleep, rummaged through the junk drawer of a battered desk. “You’d think that somewhere in all this mess there’d be one lousy...Ick!” She snatched back her hand as it touched something sticky.

  With her thumb and index finger, she picked up the offending object, a Hulk action figure, covered head to toe with peanut butter.

  “Dewitt, what is this?” she asked her five-year-old son, who was slicing the air with a series of karate chops.

  “It’s a spearmint,” he said, continuing to deliver blows to an invisible assailant.r />
  “What?” Chiffon said, bewildered.

  “An experiment,” Emily said matter-of-factly. She was a frequent translator for her younger brother. “We’d better go. The bus will be here any minute.”

  “I just can’t believe—Wait a second.” Chiffon picked up her pocketbook from the floor and scrabbled inside. “Aha!” she said, handing Emily a pencil she’d fished from the bottom. “Here we go, baby.”

  Her daughter examined it with large gray eyes. “Mama, this is an eyeliner pencil.”

  “It won’t do in a pinch?”

  “I’m taking a standardized test today. I need two sharpened No. 2 pencils.”

  Chiffon vaguely remembered signing an official-looking letter from Emily’s school about an upcoming test. And Emily, being a responsible child, had almost certainly mentioned that her pencil supply was running low. Unfortunately, Chiffon had completely forgotten about both.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” Emily said in an even voice. “My teacher will probably have some spare pencils. Come on, Dewitt, let’s go.”

  Emily opened the front door, letting in a gust of frigid air. Chiffon shivered and gripped together the lapels of her skimpy leopard-print robe. The local morning TV show had said it was 28 degrees outside, uncommonly chilly for Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, even in winter.

  “Stay warm!” Chiffon hollered after the pair. They waved at her with bare hands already pink from the cold as they crossed the frozen lawn, which looked like it was covered with a layer of powdered sugar.

  “Shoot,” Chiffon said to herself as she sprinted barefoot across the freezing wooden floor. “I should’ve made them wear mittens.” Trouble was, when she’d looked earlier, she hadn’t been able to find a pair anywhere in the house. Yesterday there’d been a light snow, and the kids had had to wear their daddy’s athletic socks on their hands to make snowballs.

  “Gotta go to Goodies and get some mittens,” she muttered to herself, adding to a mental list of errands she needed to accomplish today. Tuesday was her day off from her waitress job at the Wagon Wheel steak restaurant.

  Gabby, her six-month-old daughter, who up until now had been amusing herself with a plastic spoon, screwed up her face and let out a cranky cry.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Chiffon said, scooping up the baby from her walker. “Yeesh. Your diaper’s sopping.”

  On her way to the nursery from the living room, she banged her hip against the corner of her husband Lonnie’s pool table. “Dang it,” she said with a grimace, knowing a vivid yellow-blue bruise would soon blossom there. She didn’t know how many women would put up with a deluxe-size pool table smack dab in their living room, but she guessed the number was few.

  She changed Gabby’s diaper and outfitted her in flannel footie pajamas and a knit stocking cap. Then she dressed herself in a black turtleneck, jeans, and a fleece-lined denim jacket. She clapped Lonnie’s plaid, ear-flapped hunting hat over her head. Before she started her day, she wanted hot coffee, along with a dose of chitchat, and she knew exactly where to get it.

  With the baby in her arms, Chiffon slammed the front door behind her and made her way to her elderly Pontiac Firebird parked in the drive. As she strapped Gabby into her car seat, she noticed her eyes looked as glassy as blue marbles. Her daughter’s vacant look and the fine thread of drool on her lips meant she was moments from naptime.

  Chiffon cranked the car’s engine, which wheezed in protest, and backed out of her gravel driveway lined with halved tires, wedged in the ground and painted white. Her purple one-story house stuck out in the neighborhood like a peacock in a flock of wrens. Its garish color and its location, directly in front of an ABC Package Shop, were the reasons she and Lonnie had been able to afford it.

  She traveled down Main Street, watching red-cheeked passersby struggle against the sting of the icy wind. Unlike many boarded-up and abandoned small Southern towns, downtown Cayboo Creek bustled with a collection of thriving businesses. Boomer from the butcher shop stood on a stepladder taking down the letters from his outdated portable sign that read January is head cheese month. Reeky Flynn, bundled up in a bulky ski jacket and wool mittens, fumbled with her keys to open the Book Nook. When she passed the storefront for Dazzling Do’s, Chiffon touched a hand to her unruly blond curls. She was way overdue for a cut.

  Parking outside the Bottom Dollar Emporium, she slung her sleeping daughter over her shoulder and strode toward the entrance. The pansies out front, potted in gleaming copper washtubs, had wilted faces, stunned by the polar temperatures. The row of white rocking chairs on the porch, often occupied by the town elders in balmier weather, creaked in the bracing breeze.

  Chiffon pushed open the door and immediately heard the querulous voice of Attalee Gaines, the soda jerk, coming from the soda fountain in back.

  “What a lot of twaddle!” Attalee said. Chiffon guessed she was addressing the owner of the Bottom Dollar Emporium, Mavis Loomis.

  Chiffon threaded past several wooden barrels, heaped high with bulk candy from another age. Every time her children came into the Bottom Dollar Emporium, their eyes glazed over as they tried to take in the vast hodgepodge of sweets. Voluptuous wax lips brushed up against Teaberry gum and lengths of licorice pipes. Burlap bags bulging with Gold Nugget bubble-gum were nestled among Charleston Chews, Chick-O-Sticks, and a tangle of Slo Pokes.

  If the barrels of treats failed to tempt customers, the line of glass jars crammed with Swedish red fish, anise squares, and peppermint sticks would definitely set mouths to watering.

  Chiffon gazed greedily at a jar packed tight with gummy bears, imagining them beating their fruit-flavored fists against the glass, pleading, “Let me out!”

  With a swift motion, Chiffon shook a menagerie of bears into the metal scoop of the candy scale, poured her purchase into a small white paper bag, and scribbled the amount on a chit sheet, which she stuck by the register.

  Weaving her way to the back of the store, she paused at a display of sourwood honey jars and courtin’ candles (used long ago by fathers to let their daughters’ beaus know when their dates were over). The Bottom Dollar Emporium was chocka-block with all manner of items from a bygone era. Button-flap union suits, pine-tar soap, and galvanized watering cans could all be found among the cluttered aisles of the store.

  Stiff floorboards groaned beneath her feet as Chiffon headed toward the rich fragrance of roasted coffee beans, which curled from the break area to her eager nostrils. She parked her gum in an old brass spittoon attached to the wall and poured steaming coffee into a heavy chipped mug with her name on it. The toasty cup warmed her hands, which were raw from the cold. She saw Mavis and Attalee fussing over some kind of contraption lying on the soda fountain.

  “What have you got there?” she asked the two women as she settled the baby into her carrier.

  “A Diaper Houdini,” Attalee said, pointing a yellowed fingernail at the box on the fountain. She wore her soda-jerk uniform, and her crisp white cap sat on her head at a crooked angle.

  “Diaper Genie,” Mavis corrected.

  Attalee brushed a gray sausage curl from her wrinkled face with the back of her hand. She was well into her eighties but still sported the fussy hairdo of a seven-year-old girl.

  “Heck,” she said in a voice like sandpaper over wood. “A real Diaper Genie would change the young ‘un and wipe its bottom.”

  Mavis scratched her head in bewilderment. She was a plump woman with short, wiry salt-and-pepper hair and bemused brown eyes.

  “As it is, we’re not real sure what it does,” Mavis said.

  “That must be your baby-shower gift for Elizabeth,” Chiffon said. Elizabeth used to be a clerk at the Bottom Dollar Emporium, and she and Chiffon had gotten to be best chums over the years.

  Chiffon picked up the Diaper Genie box. “These things are all the rage. You can stuff about thirty diapers ins
ide, and the Diaper Genie will twist them up into a cone with no stinky smell.”

  “That’s all?” Attalee said, looking dispirited, as if she’d expected something more miraculous.

  “Don’t worry. Elizabeth will love it.”

  As Chiffon dropped into a heart-backed chair and propped her elbows on a small table, her eyes fell on the baby-word scramble Attalee had been working on as a part of the shower games.

  “‘Drool,’ ‘spit-up,’ ‘colic,’ and ‘stinky,’” Chiffon said, picking up the paper from the table and reading from it. “Shoot, Attalee. Couldn’t you come up with some sweeter baby words for the scramble? You’ll put a scare into Elizabeth.”

  Attalee straightened her cap in the mirror behind the soda fountain. “Raising young ‘uns is dirty work. Don’t see no need to prettify it.”

  Chiffon nibbled on her thumbnail, trying to come up with some nicer baby words to add to Attalee’s list. But with an infant in the house, the first thing that came to mind was the mounting pile of spit-up rags she’d gone through while Gabby fought off a bug. Attalee was right; there was nothing glamorous about raising kids. And with Lonnie gone for the last few days, it’d been doubly hard.

  “When’s your man going to quit hobnobbing with movie stars and get on back to Cayboo Creek?” Attalee asked, as if she’d been reading Chiffon’s mind.

  “His plane leaves California Sunday morning,” Chiffon said.

  A few months ago Chiffon had entered the Be-a-Movie-Star contest at Showtime Video Store. She’d long forgotten her impulsive entry when a company representative called and said she was the grand-prize winner of two round-trip tickets to Los Angeles and the opportunity to appear as an extra in a movie starring Janie-Lynn Lauren.