Lauren Takes Leave by Julie Gerstenblatt

his fortieth birthday,” she begins. “I didn’t want him to know about
it, but that was a problem because I didn’t actually have any money to
pay for the party. So, I thought: Jodi, how are you going to get money without
Lee noticing?”
    This part of the story has me more than slightly worried,
but since she is smiling, I smile right back at her.
    She digs through her bag for some lip gloss and starts
applying, leaving me hanging.
    “ Anyway .” She moves over to look at her reflection
in a nearby mirror. “I was standing in the checkout line at Target when the
solution came to me: cash back! You know how the bill at places like Target is
always huge? Like two hundred dollars?” She doesn’t wait for my response.
“Well, I figured I could easily tack on a little cash back and Lee would never
know! So whenever I shopped at places like that—the supermarket, Costco, Trader
Joe’s, whatever—I asked for cash back at checkout. I got forty bucks here, and
sixty bucks there, and that money, combined with what I get from Claudine,
added up pretty fast!”
    She smacks her shiny lips together in satisfaction.
    “Wait a minute,” I begin, trying to get my mind to catch
up with her story. “You just gave me so much to think about!”
    “I know!” she agrees.
    “I don’t think you do, since I’m being sarcastic. But, first
off, what money do you get from Claudine?”
    “Oh, I tell Lee that I pay her four hundred dollars a week
for babysitting and housework, but I actually only pay her three hundred.” She
takes out her phone and scrolls through e-mails while talking.
    “And the rest?”
    “Is for me. My salary, for making sure that
Claudine does what she’s supposed to do, for driving carpool, for, you know,
being a mommy.”
    “That is so twisted.” I laugh at the absurdity of it.
    “No, it isn’t.”
    “It’s wrong, Jo,” I try to emphasize. “You’re stealing
from Lee. From yourself!”
    “Nu-huh!” she responds, sounding like one of my students.
“Plus, remember, I was doing this for Lee. To throw him a party!”
    “Only, I don’t recall a fortieth birthday party for Lee,”
I counter.
    “Well.” Here she pauses and puts her phone down on the
countertop. “Turns out, he didn’t want one.” We let that sit between us for a
moment. “So, suddenly I found myself with, like, a thousand dollars in cash
that Lee didn’t know about. And I couldn’t tell him, because he’d be furious.”
    “Why would he be mad?” I ask pseudo-innocently. “You
weren’t stealing , after all. You were doing it for him .”
    “It’s hard to explain,” she says, trying to look serious.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
    “That you’re full of shit? Oh, I understand, Jo. I love
you dearly, but I know you’re completely full of shit.”
    Just then, the saleswoman emerges with some shopping bags
and tissue paper in hand. As the items are wrapped, Jodi explains the rest of
her sordid tale. You see, she decided, the best thing to do with the money was
to get rid of it. By spending it. On herself. And then, she got used to having
that money and spending it on herself. So, now, almost a full year later, she
routinely asks for cash back pretty much everywhere she goes. And then she takes
that money and shops. Like right this minute, at Neiman Marcus.
    “That’s stealing!” I call to her from a pile of jeans that
I’m flipping through. “Why don’t they ever have my size?”
    “I prefer to think of it as embezzlement,” Jodi says
matter-of-factly. “Which I learned from an expert named Lee Moncrieff.”
    See? So hard to argue with her logic.
    “Not to mention, you’re involved now, too,” Jodi adds.
    “Me?” I ask, looking through a pile of short-sleeved T-shirts
for a white scoop-necked Splendid in medium.
    “How did we pay for lunch?” she asks, coming closer.
    I stop what I’m doing to give her craziness my full
attention. “Um. You paid with a credit card and I gave you my half in cash.”