Bet Your Bottom Dollar (The Bottom Dollar Series Book 1) Read online

  Praise for the Bottom Dollar Series

  Books by Karin Gillespie

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  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

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Meemaw’s Oatmeal Cookies

  About the Author

  Books by Karin Gillespie

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  GIRL MEETS CLASS

  LOVE LITERARY STYLE

  THE BREAKUP DOCTOR

  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

  LOVE LITERARY STYLE

  The Bottom Dollar Series

  BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR (#1)

  A DOLLAR SHORT (#2)

  DOLLAR DAZE (#3)

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  Copyright

  BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR

  The Bottom Dollar Series

  Part of the Henery Press Chick Lit Collection

  Second Edition | October 2014

  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.

  Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-940976-73-0

  Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-940976-74-7

  Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-940976-75-4

  Hardcover Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-940976-76-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To all the small Southern towns in America.

  Long may you prosper.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Susan M. Boyer for steering me in the direction of Henery Press. Thanks to Kendel Lynn, Art C. Molinares and the team at Henery Press. And as always the greatest thanks goes to my readers.

  One

  If you don’t like my driving, stay off the sidewalk.

  ~ Bumper sticker on Attalee Gaines’s 1963 Buick Skylark

  Yellow and red leaves spun around my face as I tramped up the cracked sidewalk to the Bottom Dollar Emporium. It was October in Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, and the fall air felt crisp as a pickle fresh out of the brine. The store’s candy-striped awning flapped in the breeze as I rummaged in my smock pocket for my key. On my day off, I noticed, Mavis had decorated the display window with cutouts of jack-o’-lanterns and black cats. A grinning cardboard skeleton with accordion-pleated legs swung from the front entrance. As I pushed open the door, a horrible moan sounded from somewhere above my head. I screamed, but not loudly enough to drown out a terrified shriek from the shadowy depths of the store.

  I was about to turn tail and run when the store flooded with light and I saw Mavis, her face pale as paste, standing by the entra
nce of the stockroom holding a box of Frootee Ice Freezer Pops.

  “Lord, Elizabeth, I almost jumped out of my skin,” Mavis said. “I told Attalee not to hook up that silly, moaning contraption, but she must have went ahead and done it. I came in through the service entrance this morning so it didn’t get me.”

  I glanced up and saw a suspect speaker rigged to the door. I gave it a good yank.

  “If I hear that sound every time someone walks in this door, I won’t have a nerve left in my body,” I said.

  I crossed the creaking floor to the break area, where Mavis had settled herself in one of the plastic, stackable chairs. Mavis Loomis had worked as a clerk at the Bottom Dollar Emporium for going on fifteen years. Three years ago she’d purchased the business when its owner, Dora Phelps, had died from a stroke.

  The Bottom Dollar Emporium used to be a Kress Dime Store back in the ‘40s, when retail stores still had a certain amount of glamour. The ceiling was pressed tin and supported by a series of carved wooden columns. The original sconce light fixtures still hung on the walls, and there was even a brass spittoon by the door. But the merchandise at the Bottom Dollar was anything but glamorous. We stocked everyday items—from coconut mallow cookies to Clabber Girl Baking Powder to canisters of Comet. Most of our items cost no more than a dollar.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat next to Mavis, who was patting her short salt-and-pepper hair with the palms of her hands.

  “I like what you did with the Halloween decorations out front,” I said, stirring some Sweet’N Low into my coffee.

  “I’ll probably catch it from the ladies’ league at the Baptist church,” Mavis said. “Last year they gave me grief for that witch I had hanging in the window.”

  A sputtering engine interrupted our chat. I glanced out the front window and watched Attalee squeal her 1963 Buick Skylark into a parking spot. Her front fender was attached to the body of the car with duct tape.

  “Looks like Attalee had herself another mishap,” I said.

  Mavis blew on her coffee. “You know how crazy she drives. She sideswiped a telephone pole yesterday. I keep telling her she’s too old to pretend she’s a NASCAR driver.”

  Attalee swung open the front door, winded as usual from rushing to get to work on time. She grabbed one of the columns to steady herself as she wheezed like a dog with a stick stuck in its throat.

  “Something’s afoot,” Attalee said, recovering her breath. She narrowed her eyes mysteriously.

  “And what might that be, Attalee?” Mavis said with a yawn. “Bunions?”

  Attalee ignored Mavis and strode toward us, stopping short in front of the candy display. She drew back and pointed a finger at a bag of Halloween candy. “Land Almighty! What on earth are these bloodshot thingamagigs?”

  Mavis craned her neck to see what Attalee was staring at. “Eyes of Terror gumballs,” she said.

  Attalee shuddered. “Well, they give me the heebie-jeebies, gaping up at me that way. Reminds me of Burl when he was on a bender.”

  Burl was Attalee’s late husband—a man who was fond of Old Grandad. He was reportedly tipsy when he walked into the path of a Colonial Bread truck five years before.

  Attalee parked herself in the chair next to mine. Although she was knee-deep into her eighties, Attalee looked like a wizened six-year-old, favoring floral dresses with wide lacy collars and twirling her gray hair into sausage curls that dangled girlishly down her back.

  “As I was saying, something’s brewing. I saw a couple of men on Mule Pen Road surveying the vacant lot across from the old Piggly Wiggly,” Attalee continued.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Mavis dunked a powdered doughnut into her coffee. “That road is really building up. A Winn-Dixie’s supposed to open up in the old Piggly Wiggly building soon. We got a Goody’s last year. Who knows what’s coming up next?”

  “Myself, I hope it’s a miniature golf course,” Attalee said. “We’re short on recreation in this town. If you don’t like bingo, bass fishing, or bowling, you’re out of luck.”

  “I wouldn’t pin my hopes on a golf course,” I said. “It’s probably going to be something dull like a carpet shop or a TireTown.”

  Attalee snapped open her compact and touched up her eyebrows with a stubby black pencil. “Too bad they don’t have dance halls anymore. That would liven up this place. The three of us could go there on Saturday nights. Two widows and a spinster, painting the town.”

  “Elizabeth’s much too young to be called a spinster,” Mavis said. “She’s not but twenty-five years old. That’s a baby still.”

  “Twenty-six,” Attalee said. “Her birthday’s three days from now. Ain’t that right, Elizabeth? Shoot, in my day, you were a spinster if you were over eighteen and still didn’t have a ring on your finger.”

  “Attalee,” Mavis warned. She made a cutting motion across her throat.

  “It’s alright, Mavis,” I said. “The word ‘ring’ isn’t going to send me crying to the ladies’ room.”

  I rubbed the finger where my engagement ring used to be. Sometimes I swore I could still feel it there, although I hadn’t put it on in sixty-two days.

  I’d only been engaged to Clip Jenkins for three weeks when he broke off it. He didn’t even have the guts to tell me. Instead he’d scrawled a “Dear Jane” letter on the back of a Hardee’s bag and stuck it under the windshield wiper of my Geo Metro. After that, I’d wrapped the ring in a handkerchief and tucked it away in my underwear drawer.

  I lifted my chin bravely. “A comment like that might have upset me a few weeks back, but I believe I’m finally getting over Clip.”

  Attalee nodded. “Men are like buses. You miss one, you hop on the next one that comes along. ‘Course at my age, the bus service has slowed down to a crawl.”

  “Amen,” Mavis said. She propped her tennis shoes up on an empty storage carton.

  “The hurt hasn’t gone away completely,” I said. “It’s still there some, like a pebble in my shoe.”

  Just this morning, I’d been looking for a ponytail holder in my junk drawer and I’d come across an old greeting card from Clip. When I saw his handwriting, I crumpled inside.

  “Well, y’all had been sweethearts since high school,” Mavis said. “It’s going to take some time to heal up completely.”

  I nodded and went to freshen my coffee. That’s when I spotted Birdie Murdock crossing Main Street on a beeline toward the Bottom Dollar Emporium. Birdie was the publisher of the Cayboo Creek Crier. A visit from Birdie meant one of two things: She’d either run out of Silver Luster No. 5 or she had some news to report.

  I scurried to flip the welcome sign from “closed” to “open,” saying over my shoulder, “Birdie’s coming this way.”

  Attalee groaned as she got up from her chair. Her back was curled like a cashew and she jerked to straighten it. “Am I on cashier duty today?”

  “That all depends,” said Mavis. She stood, adjusting her name tag and smoothing the dark green smock she wore over her clothes. “Did you bring your teeth?”

  Attalee’s bad eye flickered behind the lens of her glasses, and she dipped a hand into her brassiere to adjust the long slope of her bosom.

  “Today’s Friday,” she said. “Ain’t you ever heard of casual Friday?”

  Before Mavis had a chance to respond, the bell over the front door jingled and Birdie strode in.

  Birdie was dressed in a pressed navy-blue suit that matched her saucer-shaped hat. She had a polka-dot hankie tucked into her breast pocket and carried a reporter’s notebook under her arm.

  “Hey, Birdie,” Mavis called out. “Hope you’re not here to sweet-talk me into taking out another ad. I’m tapped out since I bought that brand-new cash register.”

  Mavis was so proud of her cash register. It was a Samso Model CT-A32O with a d
igital readout and a built-in calculator that replaced the one that had been used since the 70s.

  To celebrate its arrival Mavis had staged a ribbon-cutting ceremony and served sparkling grape juice and party cookies that came in individual, fluted paper wrappings.

  Birdie’s pumps and purse matched the navy of her suit and her silver hair floated around her face in well-trained swoops. Her appearance was marred only by the scrawl of eyeliner just a shade too high up on her lids.

  “Mavis, I came as soon as the news arrived over my fax machine,” Birdie said. She pulled the polka-dotted hankie out of her pocket and dabbed her face with it. “I had to read it twice before it actually sunk in.”

  She thrust a piece of paper under Mavis’s nose. Mavis took it and perched her reading glasses on her face. As she read, her eyebrows worried into a V. Me and Attalee peeked over her shoulder.

  The press release headlined, “Super Saver Dollar Store to Locate on Mule Pen Road in Cayboo Creek, South Carolina.”

  “Four checkout lines with over three thousand items in inventory,” Mavis said. “Oh my lord.”

  “Super Saver expects to bring twelve jobs to Cayboo Creek,” I read.

  “The fastest-growing retailer in the Southeast with average monthly earnings of approximately $444.6 million.” Attalee clawed at her chest. “If this is true the Bottom Dollar Emporium has less chance than a kerosene cat in hell.”