Top Producer by Norb Vonnegut Page B

accountant?”
     
Sam shook her head no, and in that instant a more immediate concern struck me. “Where’s your checking account?”
     
“Chase.”
     
“How much do you have?”
     
The question hit a raw nerve. Sam hesitated and said, “Charlie depositedmoney into a house account every week. We used it to pay miscellaneous bills.”
     
“How much, Sam?”
     
“You won’t laugh?” she asked hesitantly.
     
“Of course not. Just tell me how much.”
     
     
     
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
“Six hundred, give or take.”
     
“Okay, then. We can work with that.” Sam had prepped me for a modest number. But not that low. Hopefully, my faint Southern accent hid what I was really thinking.
     
You mean $600,000, right?
     
“Didn’t you hear me, Grove?” she demanded. “All I have is six hundred dollars. That’s it.”
     
Sam could not buy lunch for six hundred dollars. The Kelemens had sallied through life with no pretense of fiscal restraint. A party here meant a $50,000 bauble there, or some modest such trifle. There was always a reason to dine at the most expensive restaurants or decorate Sam in the latest haute couture.
     
“What’s a girl to do without her Birkin?” Charlie once observed, referring to his wife’s five-figure handbag.
     
Don’t get me wrong. Sam never wallowed in Charlie’s benders of conspicuous consumption. Not at first. She endured it. She was, after all, the product of a frugal Yankee childhood. It took years for Charlie to wear her down, years before she stopped resisting every time her husband uncorked his vintage bottles of excess.
     
 
     
     
    ______
     
 
     
“Come on, Sam,” Charlie hollered. “We have to go.” The Kelemens had been married about a year. The four of us were convening inside their apartment before heading to a party in the Hamptons.
     
Moments later Sam appeared in a crisp blue blouse, designer capris cut just right, and espadrilles. It was a simple look, but flattering and fresh and right for the season.
     
“You’re not wearing that,” he declared, somewhat aghast. “Not to a tented lobster picnic, for Chrissakes.”
     
Sam trooped back to her closet and reappeared moments later in a short, almost sheer, safari-style shift, the perfect foil to her runner’s legs. She pirouetted in her bare feet, sarcastically to be sure, but she looked stunning in the wisp of a dress. No doubt, Sam would turn heads.
     
“Better.” Charlie nodded approvingly.
     
“I’d rather wear shorts and a T-shirt,” she said. “Don’t blame me if the claws shoot lobster juice all over my dress.”
     
“What about the shoes?” he asked, ignoring the wisecrack, sending her back to the closet with Evelyn close behind. To me he boasted, “I found that dress at Bergdorf for forty-three hundred dollars.”
     
“You picked it out?”
     
“That and most of the other good stuff in her closet.”
     
After a few minutes Sam returned in a pair of flats that appeared ordinary, nothing special. Charlie believed otherwise. “A woman needs her Chanel,” he crowed.
     
“I’d be so much happier in fuzzy slippers,” she replied, indifferent to the fashion statement on her feet.
     
Charlie ignored the wisecrack. “Come with me,” he told Sam. “I know the perfect pièce de résistance.”
     
The two disappeared. I turned to Evelyn and asked, “What’s the big deal with the flip-flops?”
     
“Those flip-flops,” she explained, “probably cost four figures.”
     
“Are they air-conditioned?”
     
“I love Charlie,” Evelyn confided in a hushed tone, “but he would drive me fucking nuts.” She reconsidered almost immediately. Upon spying thepièce de résistance, Sam’s chunky cord of pearls, Evelyn admitted, “Maybe I could get used to it.”
     
Charlie appraised Sam head to toe—the stylish haircut, the pearls, the $4,300 shift, and the four-figure flip-flops. Approval filled his