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

  “Chiffon Amber Butrell,” Wanda said. “I’ve been calling you all morning long. I just rang the Wagon Wheel and the manager said that you were no longer an employee there. What mess have you gotten into now?”

  A phone ringing interrupted her interrogation, and Wanda clipped down the hallway to answer it.

  With a furtive glance at her mother, who was now gabbing on the phone, Chiffon zipped into the kitchen and flung open the pantry door where she knew Wanda hid a gold foil box of Godiva chocolate. She located the stash and simultaneously stuffed her mouth with an Amaretto truffle and a milk chocolate raspberry starfish.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” her mother squawked.

  Wanda was directly behind her. Chiffon nearly choked on the candies.

  “Wilbur ish imposhible,” she mumbled as an explanation, her mouth stuffed with chocolate. Liquid raspberry trickled down her cheek and was immediately lapped up by her tongue.

  “Give me those chocolates, Chiffon Amber,” Wanda said. Her voice had the eerie calm of a SWAT team leader negotiating the release of a hostage. “They have eight grams of fat each. Hand them over.”

  Chiffon reluctantly surrendered the plundered chocolate box to Wanda, who placed it on the highest shelf of the pantry and shut the door behind her.

  Looking at her mama was like looking into a ragged version of Chiffon’s own future. Wanda’s long faded blond hair was pinned up on her head. The once-strong jawline had disappeared into the folds of her neck, and despite the liberal use of Mary Kay’s Triple Action Eye Enhancer, the skin around her washed-out blue eyes looked like it had been trounced on by a whole flock of crows.

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, because I received the strangest phone call this morning,” Wanda said. “Effie Stykes was watching television last night and she could have sworn she saw Lonnie kissing that movie star Janie-Lynn Lauren.”

  Chiffon had naively hoped that nobody, except her and her friends, had seen the show last night. The last thing she needed was a repeat of last year’s fiasco, when the whole town knew that Lonnie had been sleeping around with Jonelle Jasper. As the affair became public, Chiffon could sense folks’ eyes pressing into her back when she marketed at the Winn-Dixie or pushed her kids on the swings at the playground near the creek. She could hear the muffled whispers following her everywhere she went.

  Poor, pitiful Chiffon! Her husband’s running around on her again. Why, I remember when she had the world by the tail. We expected such grand things from her. I wonder what happened.

  No, she definitely didn’t want a repeat of that humiliation. And if the town’s tongues wagged when Lonnie had an affair with a local woman, imagine the brouhaha if people found out he was salting his beans with a real, live movie star.

  “Effie must be taking a nip at suppertime, Mama,” Chiffon said with a snort. “What in the world would a movie star like Janie-Lynn Lauren want with my man Lonnie?”

  “I’ve no idea. I don’t even know what you want with him,” Wanda snapped. “But everyone knows Lonnie is as faithful as an alleycat.”

  She eyed Chiffon, who was nibbling on a lock of her hair. Chiffon chewed her hair so often it was a wonder she didn’t cough up hairballs.

  Wanda picked up her leather clutch bag from the counter. “How much do you need?” she asked brusquely.

  “Who said I needed money?” Chiffon said.

  “You didn’t work today, and it’s the end of the month. And why else would you visit me in the middle of the day?” Wanda plucked a crisp bill from her wallet. “Will fifty dollars tide you over, or do you need more?”

  Chiffon took the cash and stuffed it in the pocket of her brown polyester uniform, bracing herself for the inevitable lecture. Fifty bucks was a heap of change, so it was bound to be a doozy. Wanda didn’t disappoint.

  First she harped about Chiffon and Lonnie’s financial situation, living from paycheck to paycheck and spreading themselves thin every month. Then she questioned Chiffon’s tolerance of her husband’s wandering eye, wondering why she’d married such a hound dog in the first place, throwing away her chance to be “somebody.” Wanda had been over this road so many times, Chiffon knew every pothole and dip. It was now white noise to her ears.

  “Where are my grandbabies?” Wanda said, her voice finally taxed from her tirade.

  “Gabby’s at Wee World. Dewitt and Emily are at school. You know that, Mama,” Chiffon said. She jingled her keys in her pocket, desperate for escape.

  Wanda wrinkled her nose. “Those child-care places with cutesy names are always the worst. What was that last place you’d enrolled Gabby? The one with an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease? It had a cutesy name, too.”

  “It’s called Little Cherub Child Care,” Chiffon said wearily. “And it was hand, mouth, and foot disease, Mama. Children don’t have hoofs.”

  Chiffon had taken Gabby out of Little Cherub because they’d raised their rates to seventy-five dollars a week for an infant. Wee World only wanted fifty-five.

  “What does it matter, Chiffon? Those places are petri dishes for infections. Every time I see those youngsters of yours, their noses are running like faucets.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “And I guess you’re not going to tell me what happened at work.”

  Obviously Wanda was winding up for another go-round. The first sermon had just been a warm-up.

  “Not that it was much of a job anyway,” she continued. “Maybe now you’ll consider coming aboard with Mary Kay. I’ll even pay for your starter kit. With your nice looks, you’ll attract all kinds of customers. Of course it’d help if you lost some of those extra pounds you’ve been lugging around.”

  “Mama,” she protested with one foot edging into the hallway. If Wanda started on her weight, Chiffon would be here clear into next month.

  “Are you using that overnight cream I gave you? Your complexion looks like it’s going to hell in a hand basket.”

  “Gotta go, Mama,” Chiffon said, dashing out of the kitchen before her mother had a chance to attack the condition of her hair, nails, or God knows what else.

  She slowed her pace when she came to a wall in Wanda’s hallway, displaying photographs from Chiffon’s beauty-queen days. Chiffon had held so many titles as a young woman, she couldn’t keep track. Most of them didn’t amount to much: Yam Queen, Miss Cayboo Creek, Pine Straw Princess, Miss Catfish Stomp of 1989. Her biggest accomplishment had been first runner-up to Miss South Carolina. There was a framed shot of Chiffon tearfully hugging the newly crowned Miss South Carolina, Eurlene Struthers. In the picture, she looked happy for Eurlene, when in reality Chiffon wanted to punch her in the stomach.

  The title should have gone to Chiffon, but Eurlene gained the sympathy vote of the judges because she had a facial tic. During the interview portion of the pageant, Eurlene rambled on about her “struggles” with her tic, trying to make herself appear as brave and afflicted as Helen Keller. In reality, all the tic did was cause her mouth to twitch a little at each side. As a result, Eurlene walked away with the crown, even though her ankles were thick as fence posts.

  The one award that Chiffon had truly been proud of was absent from Wanda’s wall of fame. During her senior year in high school, Chiffon had won the blue ribbon at the Cayboo Creek fair for photography. But since photography took time away from the pageant circuit, Wanda pooh-poohed it, and Chiffon eventually gave it up.

  “You gotta make your mark on this world, girls.”

  She could hear her mother’s voice in her ears. After Chiffon’s daddy had left the family when she was four and Chenille was eight, Wanda poured all her energy into her two daughters, driving them toward success.

  “Second place is just a nice way of saying ‘loser,’” she’d constantly remind them, and both Chiffon and Chenille responded with tireless efforts to
please her. Chenille had been named valedictorian in high school, and Chiffon had worn more tiaras than the queen of England, but after years of trying to please their mother, the two sisters fizzled out. There were no more photos or awards to hang on the hall of fame. Newspaper articles on the girls’ achievements yellowed in Wanda’s scrapbook.

  “It isn’t like I didn’t try, Mama,” Chiffon whispered as she walked out of the house to her car. After high school, Chiffon discovered the hard way that a Yam Queen title or even first runner-up to Miss South Carolina didn’t amount to much. She hadn’t concentrated on her studies in high school, so she wasn’t able to get into college. After graduation, she’d drifted around, collecting more obscure beauty titles and trying to find fashion work, but she was too short and curvy to be a model. Finally she got married, had babies, and went to work as a waitress.

  She took one last look at the photos on the wall and sighed. Making her mark on this world was like trying to scratch a diamond with a toothpick. It just wasn’t going happen.

  Three

  Metaphors be with you.

  ~ Poster hanging in Chenille Grace’s English composition classroom

  Chenille watched from her classroom window as Mrs. Schmatt waddled to her pickup truck for a cigarette break. Once she was certain the woman was out of sight, Chenille scurried to the blackboard to correct all of the spelling errors her teaching assistant had made while writing down instructions for the sixth-period grammar and composition class.

  Mrs. Schmatt was Chenille’s brand-new “para-facilitator,” a show-offish word for someone who was supposed to help out with grading papers and other routine classroom duties. The term certainly didn’t seem to fit Mrs. Schmatt, who, with her frizzy, bleached-out hair and Day-Glo spandex pants, looked more like a female wrestler.

  Chenille had been assigned a para-facilitator ever since she’d started teaching remedial English at Bible Grove High School. Her classes were large and she taught second-year freshmen, so she was entitled to extra help.

  For the past ten years her assistant (Chenille’s tongue tripped over the word “para-facilitator”) had been Mrs. Birchfield, a lovely, grandmotherly woman whom Chenille had grown to adore. Every Monday morning Mrs. Birchfield brought a loaf of homemade Amish friendship bread to share with Chenille. She also carried a big appliqué bag brimming with multicolored skeins of yarns for the afghans she knitted between classroom duties. How soothing it was for Chenille to hear the steady click of knitting needles during classes! And how jarring it was to have such a reassuring sound replaced by the ceaseless smacking of Mrs. Schmatt’s lips chewing her gum!

  Oh, it was a dreadful day when her assistant retired. Just before her departure, Mrs. Birchfield pressed the faded recipe for the friendship bread in Chenille’s hand, saying, “This has been in my family for generations. You’re the first person I’ve ever given it to.”

  The gesture made Chenille cry, even though she knew she’d never bake the bread herself. The kitchen in her condominium was the size of a broom closet, and she didn’t even own a bread pan, but never mind, she was overwhelmed by Mrs. Birchfield’s heartfelt gift. She’d scarcely had a week to mourn her beloved assistant’s departure when Mrs. Schmatt appeared on the scene.

  One morning Chenille entered her classroom and saw a wide lime-green rear end poking out of her supply closet.

  “May I help you?” Chenille asked.

  The woman turned to face her and revealed a front side more alarming than her caboose. Vivid blue shadow ringed eyes the size of caraway seeds. Heavy orange-tinted foundation settled into the pockmarked terrain of her face. Hair the color and texture of yellow Easter grass sprang from her scalp.

  “Your supply closet is a pigsty,” the stranger declared.

  The woman’s voice sounded like a fork being chewed up in a garbage disposal. For a moment Chenille thought she might have wandered into the wrong classroom.

  “I’m Mrs. Schmatt, your new para-facilitator, and I don’t do bulletin boards,” she said.

  Mrs. Schmatt arrived at the start of the semester just as Chenille was getting a brand-new group of students in her classes. Chenille always held out hope that the incoming batch of adolescents would be more well-mannered and motivated than their predecessors, and the first couple of days of winter semester fulfilled that promise. Her new students raised their hands for questions and listened attentively as Chenille discussed instances of allegory in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  But by the third day, the whiffs of anarchy began with a ripple of fidgeting and whispering spreading across the classroom, and by the fourth day, the ripple had swelled into a roar and Chenille could scarcely be heard over the din. After the dismissal of a particularly boisterous class, Mrs. Schmatt eyed Chenille from her roost behind her desk.

  “You gonna let them kids walk all over you every day?” she asked.

  Chenille blushed. Despite much shushing and finger-wagging on her part, classroom discipline had never been her strong point.

  “I ask them to be quiet, but they don’t listen,” she said with a resigned shrug.

  Mrs. Schmatt sighed. Chenille had noticed the woman sighed a lot, and she took each exhale of Mrs. Schmatt’s breath personally. The sighs seemed to say, “Why did they assign me to such an idiotic teacher?”

  When Mrs. Schmatt wasn’t sighing, she was questioning Chenille’s way of doing things, from the color of chalk she used on the board (yellow is easier on the students’ eyes than white, she claimed) to the haphazard way Chenille handed out papers.

  During these confrontations, Chenille longed for Mrs. Birchfield, who had praised her at every turn.

  “That gerund presentation was compelling, my dear,” she’d coo, or “I think the Bard himself would have been delighted with your keen analysis of Macbeth.”

  Sometimes she’d applaud after a truly inspired lesson, causing Chenille to blush. When the students were disruptive, she never questioned Chenille’s leadership abilities, but blamed the children instead, saying, “Those young people must have been raised by orangutans.”

  But now, instead of a beaming and benevolent Mrs. Birchfield, Chenille was stuck with a squat-bodied Mrs. Schmatt glaring at her with barely disguised contempt from the top of her Dell Horoscope magazine.

  Day after day, Mrs. Schmatt continued to rattle her. Chenille made it a strict policy to leave work matters behind at the end of the school day, but sometimes while watching Law and Order, her dog, Walter, on her lap, instead of concentrating on what was going on in the Special Victims Unit, she’d think of ways to placate Mrs. Schmatt.

  Maybe if I got her a little gift of some sort. Chenille wasn’t sure what type of present a person of Mrs. Schmatt’s ilk might appreciate. A set of fuzzy dice? A black-light portrait of Elvis? On the other hand, Mrs. Schmatt might regard her kindness as a sign of weakness and redouble her bullying behaviors. It was probably safest to do nothing at all, Chenille decided, hoping Mrs. Schmatt would blow over like a bad odor. Or maybe she’d catch some lengthy but essentially harmless illness like mononucleosis and have to stay out for the rest of the school year. Chenille could only hope.

  One afternoon during an especially rambunctious sixth-period class, someone, Chenille wasn’t sure who (but she suspected the foul-mouthed Steven McPhee), was throwing wads of paper at her back while she wrote vocabulary words on the board. The class thought it was hysterical that she was unable to catch the offender, and Mrs. Schmatt, who could easily have kept an eye on the class while Chenille was stationed at the chalkboard, didn’t bother looking up from her magazine.

  By the time Chenille had written the entire list of words on the board, there were at least ten balls of paper at her feet. She was near tears. Mrs. Schmatt wasn’t helping, and in fact seemed oblivious to what was going on.

  “You can look up those words in the dictionary now,” Chenille sai
d to her class in a huffy voice, not caring if they did the work or not. She sat and stared down at her desktop calendar, willing herself not to cry. When the bell mercifully rang and students dashed out the door, Chenille glowered at Mrs. Schmatt, who was licking her fingers as she turned the pages of her magazine.

  “Mrs. Schmatt,” Chenille said in a chagrined tone. “Why did you allow students to throw paper at me while I was at the board? Did it ever occur to you that I could have used your assistance during this class?”

  Mrs. Schmatt glanced up. “No,” she said curtly, her eyes returning to her reading material.

  Chenille stared at Mrs. Schmatt with openmouthed surprise. She was accustomed to insubordination from the students, but she’d never before experienced it in an adult. Didn’t Mrs. Schmatt care about her job? Didn’t she know that Chenille could report her to the principal?

  Mrs. Schmatt glanced up once again, defiance tugging her mouth into a grin. Chenille immediately understood the message contained in the woman’s self-satisfied smile. Mrs. Schmatt was betting she wouldn’t say a single word to the principal. She’d learned that Chenille would rather endure Chinese water torture than become involved in a face-off.

  “Excuse me. I have to run off some worksheets,” Chenille said, her eyes cast to the floor. She intended to sequester herself in a bathroom stall in the teachers’ lounge with a handful of Kleenex.

  Mrs. Schmatt heaved herself up and put her hands on her ample hips. “All you have to do is ask,” she said in her ragged voice. “But since you’re such a control freak, I was afraid to get in the middle of things.”

  “Control freak?” Chenille stammered. “I’m not a—”

  “Insisting on using white chalk instead of yellow even though I told you yellow is better. Never listening to a single one of my ideas. I’ve made at least a half a dozen suggestions. You haven’t used a one.”