Never Too Old to Lie
The members of the Garden Club Gang don’t set out to get into trouble; but it seems as though they find it in the most unlikely places. Jean Sullivan is 67 and she want to get back into the dating pool. She had a loveless marriage for 42 years and, even after the death of her husband (it’s no spoiler alert to say she waited a hour to call the paramedics after she found him dead in his recliner), she was bound for a further five years by a punitive trust that kept her in near poverty.
Now, though, she’s free and surprisingly well off. She ready to meet someone and, to that end, she uses a website called ‘Me&YouAfter62’ that seemed tailored the task. All it takes is an essay, which she crafts with the help of her friends. And, together, they sift through the responses. They pick out the ones that seem promising. There’s Larry: his wife left him… for another woman. And there’s Michael: his wife died of cancer last year and he’s making a new start of things in Boston, where he brought his wife for medical treatment. There are other dates that don’t go so well, but these two are the winners. “It’s raining men!” says Jean’s friend, Alice.
Michael, though, is up to no good. He and his brothers travel the country, landing in the places where well-to-do widows and divorcees gather. He’s handsome, thoughtful, and a perfect gentleman. Best of all, he doesn’t want anything except to find a soul-mate after the sad loss of his long-time spouse.
Michael and his three brothers have come up with the perfect con; one so good you don’t realize you’ve been taken even after the brothers have left town. In fact, you may want to keep on giving. But even the best woven tales have loose threads. The Gang figures it out and, when they do, it’s only natural they’ll come after the Miller brothers. These guys, though, won’t be taken easily. They’re resourceful, they’ve done nothing illegal, and… oh, one of them has a vicious streak.
Never Too Old to Lie is the Garden Club Gang at their best. These are strong, independent women who know how to take care of themselves. Better still, they’ve accumulated some interesting friends along the way (including the resourceful insurance investigator, Samantha Ayers) who can pull strings on their behalf. Be prepared to laugh, be ready to hang on for a wild ride. This is a fun story that zigs and zags toward an unpredictable finish line.
Here are the first few chapters to whet your appetite:
NEVER TOO OLD TO LIE
Chapter One
Jean Sullivan stepped into the sunshine and, with her eyes closed and head back, took a deep breath. She was 67 years old and, for the first time since the age of 25, she was a free woman.
Behind her was the Norfolk County Superior Court building in Dedham, Massachusetts; a drab, aging civic structure most people passed without as much as a glance. Jean now looked back at it and felt tears in her eyes.
Today is the third of May, she thought. This is my Independence Day and I will celebrate it.
Jean was accompanied by her attorney who spoke in animated tones and gestured with her free hand. Jean was not listening. Instead, she luxuriated in the memory of the words of a judge who had read a one-page decree formally dissolving the Alan P. Sullivan Trust and disbursing its now-unencumbered assets.
When Judge J. Penrod Toles finished reading the document, he put it down and glanced over at his assistant. “I’d like a few words in private with Mrs. Sullivan in my chambers,” he said.
In a small, cluttered office behind the courtroom, Judge Toles, a man in his early seventies with silver hair and a kindly face behind steel-rimmed glasses, said, “Mrs. Sullivan, this conversation can’t be part of the formal proceeding, but the legal profession owes you an apology. I see a lot of trust documents every week, most of which are cut and dried. They express the intent of a decedent and lay out a road map for the trustee to manage the person’s estate.”
Judge Toles sat not behind his desk but, rather, in a chair opposite the one he had indicated Jean should take. He now took her hands in his. “The document your husband had drawn up ought never to have survived scrutiny and the attorney who followed your husband’s wishes ought to be horsewhipped. It was created with malicious intent for reasons I can only guess and don’t want to know. Your attorney should have challenged it five years ago because no reasonable person on the bench would have allowed it to go into force.”
“I had no lawyer back then,” Jean said. “I didn’t know I needed one.”
Judge Toles shook his head and sighed. “You did. But it doesn’t excuse the poor scrutiny at the time on everyone else’s part. I can’t make amends for those five years. I can only make it right going forward.”
It was created with malicious intent. Oh, certainly it was, she thought. Jean had met Al when she was three years out of MassBay Community College and working at the cosmetics counter at Jordan Marsh in Downtown Crossing. He was three years her senior, an established outside salesman for an office equipment company, and the owner of a jet-black Porsche 911. They were married after a nine-month courtship during which Jean was plied with weekends at resorts on the Cape and dinners at white-tablecloth restaurants.
The wedding was the last good time she could associate with Al, because as soon as they returned from their honeymoon in the Bahamas (which he had won as a prize for selling the most copiers, as Jean would subsequently learn), everything changed. A new Al Sullivan emerged, brimming with suspicion his attractive pixie of a wife might leave him for another man; and controlling of Jean’s every moment outside of the house.
To ensure she made no secret side trips, Al checked the odometer before and after every trip she made. Jean’s name appeared on no checking or savings account. She was not on the deed of the home Al would buy nor the cars parked in their garage. She never went back to work, carried no credit cards, and had only the money Al doled out to her each week for groceries. Upon her return from shopping, receipts were examined for amounts and times. She was continually told she was ignorant and too stupid to manage money.
Jean’s lone joy was the arrival, when she was 30, of her daughter, Emily. There would be no more children because Al seemed unprepared for fatherhood and ambivalent toward having to provide for another mouth.
By the time they had been married 25 years, Al’s two-pack-a-day habit of Benson & Hedges 100s began to take its toll. His smoker’s hack became full-blown emphysema, and the partial removal of a lung a decade later ended Al’s sales career.
Two years after his retirement and a week after their 37th anniversary, Jean came in from working in her garden to find her husband in their living room, dead of an apparent stroke. He was in his Lay-Z-Boy in front of the television where a meaningless football game blared. Through she could find no pulse; Jean did not want any chance of a miraculous revival. She went back to pulling weeds for another hour before returning to the house. Only when she found Al’s skin had turned a pinkish gray did she call paramedics.
She thought Al’s death would bring a new beginning. Jean was 62 but her women friends (and she had only women friends) unvaryingly said she looked at least a decade younger. She still had her figure and, now, a new outlook on life.
Al, though, had thoroughly planned Jean’s widowhood. Upon his death his assets reverted to a trust. Jean had no prior knowledge of its existence. The trust paid the property taxes and utility bills. Jean had not worked long enough to qualify for Social Security on her own, but she was entitled to a portion of Al’s meager benefits (which reflected Al’s chronic underreporting of income). The Alan P. Sullivan Trust – Jean had no idea of its size – paid her a small, fixed sum each month.
The combined Social Security and trust stipend left no leeway for luxuries like home repair or a replacement auto. As a result, only the periodic sale of household goods stood between Jean and genteel poverty. She began with Al’s high-end-brand-name sports equipment but, within two years, Jean was reduced to selling her mother’s jewelry. She could, of course, remarry. The terms of the trust, however, were iron clad. All assets would immediately revert to the grandchildren. Both Al’s Social Security and payments from the trust, scant though they were, would terminate immediately.
The trust could not stop Jean from socializing and she joined groups, including the Hardington Garden Club. There, she met new friends and, especially, three women members of the club. As a result of those friendships, on a hot July afternoon a year earlier, Jean had found herself willingly enmeshed in the planning of the robbery of the Brookfield Fair, a major regional fair held annually in a town west of Boston. The heist’s intricate planning was a tonic; its execution a few weeks later thrilling. The aftermath was both frightening and eminently satisfying.
That autumn, Jean used a part of her share of the proceeds to take a Caribbean singles cruise where she hoped to meet ‘Mr. Right’. She discovered the men on such cruises were looking for women at least a decade younger than themselves… or for an unpaid caregiver. The cruise had one enormous benefit, though: Jean met women like herself. And, one of them listened to her tale of being bound by Al’s trust and counseled her to ‘get a specialized lawyer who knows how to break those things.’
It had taken six months and two hearings, but now she was free. Moreover, she was unexpectedly flush with money. After dividing the trust proceeds with her daughter and the two grandchildren, Jean had nearly a million dollars, all tax-free, and much of it a product of Al’s decades of hiding income from the Internal Revenue Service.
In those intervening months, though, other events had transpired. She and her garden club friends – they called themselves ‘the Garden Club Gang’ – had, in rapid succession, taken down a crooked automobile empire, unmasked a serial killer in a nursing home, and broken up a reverse mortgage scheme preying on the elderly. Several of those activities resulted in insurance company payments.
Also, Jean was now gainfully employed. To get close to the reverse mortgage people, the Garden Club Gang had started an enterprise importing fancy French table linens. On paper, it was a real company; otherwise, it was all fiction; a ruse to have an office and a staff in a particular location. To the Gang’s consternation, it had become a genuine business now employing eighteen women, with Jean charged with shipping and billing for which she had a staff of five part-timers.
In short, in less than a year, Jean had transformed her life. She had a purpose and an identity of her own; one she was proud of.
But she wanted more. She might be 67 now, but she had been in a loveless marriage for 37 of those years. She no longer needed a man to support her. What she wanted was romance on equal terms.
Jean was ready to enter the dating pool.
Chapter Two
“Too dull,” said Alice Beauchamp, shaking her head and handing back Jean’s essay. “No one will ever respond to this. I know I wouldn’t.”
Jean had written:
ME: I’m 67, five feet two inches, in great health, and have been widowed five years. I’m told I look considerably younger than my age and have a terrific sense of humor. I have a wonderful daughter in California and two beautiful grandchildren. I recently helped found a company that imports Provençal fabrics.
YOU: You’re a non-smoker. That’s the only deal-breaker.
It was three days after Jean’s independence, and four women were sitting on comfortable chairs in a sun-filled great room. Two bottles of a sparkling Prosecco were open; one was already empty. Alice, who had just handed back Jean’s draft of her ‘Me&YouAfter62’ essay was, at 72, the oldest person in the room. A lean woman – a product of a lifetime of frugal living and earlier hardship – Alice had curly white hair and steely gray eyes. On first glance, seeing the white hair and hint of osteoporosis, someone might dismiss her as ‘elderly’, but Alice’s mind was sharper than most people a third of her age.
“This isn’t about your children and grandchildren,” Alice explained. “And I’ve never met anyone whose offspring aren’t ‘beautiful’ or ‘wonderful’. In fact, I’d like just once to see someone honestly describe a grandchild as ‘not all that bright” or ‘too chubby for his own good’. This is supposed to be a paragraph about you. What makes you special? Why are you a catch? And, as to what you’re looking for, I’d say narrowing the universe to non-smokers is setting the bar awfully low.”
Eleanor Strong took the sheet of paper from Jean. Eleanor was 62, brown-haired and, frankly, stout though hardly obese. She had lost a beloved husband a few months earlier from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease; his death, after so many decades of a happy marriage, was both a release and blow. She frowned as she read.
“Do these essays have accompanying photos?” Eleanor asked, not looking up from the page.
Jean shook her head. “The website doesn’t want us to use photos or real names. The way they explained it to me is everyone submits snapshots that are ten or fifteen years old, so it’s better for people to meet and see what the other one looks like. And, names allow people to snoop into your personal life, so we all choose screen names until we meet someone we like.”
Eleanor nodded her understanding. “Then I’d keep the physical description but add some juice to the rest of it. ‘Love to dance’, ‘up for tango lessons’, ‘never saw a sunrise I didn’t like’. That sort of thing.” She added, “I’d make the part about our business a little less specific so no one can Google you; and I’d leave in the part about being a widow.”
“I can’t remember the last time I went dancing,” Jean said with a rueful tone to her voice. “Al hated it, even before his lungs gave out.”
“This isn’t about the last time you went dancing,” Eleanor replied. “It’s saying you’re up for dancing. You’re not sitting in some overstuffed chair with four cats on your lap and Wheel of Fortune on television.”
It was Paula Winters’ turn to review the sheet of paper. At 52, Paula was the youngest of the group. This was also her home. Four years earlier, Paula’s husband had left her for a woman just a few years older than their daughter. Thin and attractive with wavy chestnut hair, she did not look or sound like a woman who had endured two bouts of breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. Now in remission, she was also the one member of the Garden Club Gang with a man in her life.
“I understand why anyone with any intelligence would avoid those ‘swipe left/swipe right’ applications,” Paula said, addressing Jean. “They’re scary and they don’t exactly promote long-term relationships. But aren’t there services that do actual matchmaking – screening people for compatibility and setting up luncheons or dinners?”
Jean nodded her understanding. “There are many such services. And I did my research. I read a lot of articles about them; not just the feel-good testimonials on their websites. The newspaper and magazine articles say the ratio of women to men for those services is something like twenty to one. One story quoted a woman saying she spent $5,000 and, in a year, had exactly two lunch dates to show for it. That’s almost as much as I spent on my cruise, and at least I got some great advice for my money.”
“Me&YouAfter62 is exactly what it says,” Jean continued. “It’s a service for singles over 62, with sites specific to about a dozen metropolitan areas, including Boston. You write an essay of no more than 130 words telling who you are, and describing the kind of person you’re looking for. There’s no form to fill out, no personality test, and no up-front fee.”
Jean added, “I especially liked the idea that I use my own words…” She looked sheepishly about the circle of women. “…Or at least my words with a little help from my friends, to say who I am and who I’m looking for.”
“Then, how do you describe the man you’d like to meet?” Paula asked. “And please don’t say ‘non-smoker’.”
“Someone who doesn’t remind me in any way of Al,” Jean replied quickly. “And, I’m serious. I would be physically ill if someone showed up who looked or acted like him.”
“But you need to give a guy something to go on,” Paula pressed, leaning toward Jean. “Something they can relate to, and that makes them want to get to know you.”
“How about, ‘You smile a lot and you’re quick to laugh’,” Eleanor offered.
Alice offered, “You don’t have anything to prove to the world, or to me. You’ve led a life you’re proud of.”
Eleanor and Paula both nodded their approval. “That’s what I was getting at,” Paula said.
Fifteen minutes later, Jean’s essay read:
ME: I’m five feet two, in terrific health, and widowed. I’m told I look considerably younger than 67 and have a great sense of humor. I’m up for drinks and dancing, travel, and getting to know someone very well. And I’m hardly the retiring type: this spring I helped start, and currently co-manage, a rapidly growing web-based business.
YOU: You’ve got a lot of living still to do, but you’re tired of being alone. You’re proud of what you’ve accomplished so far and you’ve got at least one more act in you. You have a great smile and an infectious laugh. If you enjoy gardening, that’s a plus. Oh, and you’re a non-smoker.
Everyone looked at the sheet and nodded their agreement with its content.
“Now, all we need is a screen name,” Jean said. “I was thinking of ‘SweepMeOffMyFeet’.”
“Wow,” Paula said, sounding dubious. “Isn’t that asking a lot on a first date?”
“I’ve read some of the screen names women use,” Jean replied. “They’re awful. Think, ‘Thumbelina’, ‘PerkyBabe’, or ‘HotGranny’.”
“Eew,” Eleanor said. “I think they should have gotten some peer input.”
“If there’s a ‘Mr. Right’ out there,” Alice said. “He’s going to take one look at this and fall all over himself writing back. This is you.”
Paula poured the balance of the Prosecco into everyone’s glasses. “A toast to Jean getting back into the dating game,” she said.
Glasses clinked and everyone smiled and laughed. “To the man of her dreams, wherever he may be,” Eleanor said.
Chapter Three
In a pleasant and spacious one-bedroom waterfront apartment on Tuck Point in Salem, Massachusetts, four men gathered around a small dining table. They, too, had drinks in front of them, though their choice of beverage ran to craft beers.
And they, too, passed around a draft copy of a Me&YouAfter62 application. It read:
ME: I lost my wife due to illness. Her oft-stated wish was that I find someone to share my life, but it took me three years to realize she was right. I’m in my late 60s and financially secure. Earlier this year I finished second in my age class in a half-marathon, so I must be reasonably healthy. And I love to have reasons to smile.
YOU: You are young at heart. You remember hearing the Beatles for the first time and knowing Paul was your soul mate. Maybe you were at Suffolk Downs in 1966 to see them in person (I was there). You’ve never forgotten what it was like to experience life for the first time, and you’re not ready just yet to ride off into the sunset.
“Why do you lead with the dead wife?” Sam Miller asked. “It sends the signal, ‘I’m still in love with her.’”
Jerry Miller pressed the tips of his fingers together and grinned. “Because it answers the first question every woman wants to know: ‘never married, divorced, or widowed?’ The first answer means you’re a mama’s boy or you’re gay – or both – and they want nothing to do with you. The second answer opens the floodgate for all the questions about who left whom and why, with the lady’s radar looking for any hint that you were sneaking around and were found out. The third answer is the only one that automatically gets you in the door, and you have already established that you took the ‘in sickness and in health’ seriously. You start with their approval – and their sympathy.”
“And, to answer your second question,” Jerry continued, “waiting three years means you were in mourning.”
“One year is better,” interjected Tom Miller. “Longer makes you sound too much like a saint. Women will read ‘three years’ and assume you’ve got too much emotional baggage to be worth bothering with. We want them to hear, ‘I loved her, but I’m also getting on with my life’.”
The other two men nodded their concurrence. Jerry crossed out ‘three years’ and wrote in ‘a year’.
“Late 60s,” said Michael. “Why be coy? Men don’t give a damn how old they are. It sounds like you’re hiding something.”
Jerry nodded. “The site says ’62 and over’. I want each of us to be within a year of the woman’s age. Trust me, it hasn’t been a red flag in the past.”
“And ‘financially secure’ is bragging,” Michael added. “You need to say something different.”
“I’ve got 130 words and this is 131,” Jerry countered. “’Retired successful Fortune 500 corporate executive’ uses four more words, raises more questions, and can be found to be a phony claim by anyone with enough computer skills.”
“ʻFinancially secure’ is fine,” Sam said. “It means whatever we want it to mean and we can tailor it to each woman. What I want to know is whether each of us can pass for having just run thirteen miles.” He looked around the table and stopped at Michael, who carried at least fifteen extra pounds.
“I’m at the gym every day,” Michael protested. “By the time I’m on my first date, I’ll be down to my weight.”
Sam shook his head. “What do you say we stick to ‘5K’. It’s still impressive and those kinds of races are run every weekend somewhere. Half-marathons are sufficiently uncommon it might cause someone to go looking at published results.”
Jerry dutifully crossed out ‘half-marathon’ and wrote in ‘5K road race’, silently swearing that his count was now two words over the limit.
“You’re our wordsmith,” Sam said to Jerry, “but I don’t get the whole bottom part. We’ve never used anything like that before.”
Jerry smiled. “It’s an appeal to vanity and we’re casting the net as wide as possible. Every teenage girl loved Paul McCartney. I want the 68-year-old version of that teenager to send me her name and contact information.”
“I assume you checked the Suffolk Downs reference,” Tom said.
“Thursday, August 18, 1966 at 8:30 p.m.,” Jerry replied, reciting the information from memory. “I can get you a set list, warm-up bands, whatever you need.”
“Nice,” Tom countered, “but that means I have to be from Boston. Where did I go to high school? I’m always from somewhere else, so I can make it up as I go along.”
Michael broke in. “Tom’s right. Lose the ‘I was there’ reference. I don’t want any of us getting tripped up by not knowing every cultural touchstone.” Michael saw the smile on Tom’s face. To Jerry, he added, “And I saved you three words.”
“I can save you some more words,” Tom said. “Whittle down the ‘experience life for the first time’ and replace it with some magical phrase that translates to ‘you’re fixed financially for the rest of your life’. I don’t need a thousand responses from women living in their daughter’s spare bedroom. I’d rather have a hundred qualified responses I can do something with.”
“No,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Let’s give Jerry his free rein on this. We tweak the length of the race, the mourning period, and the ‘I was there’ reference. We’ll know a lot about them by their address and we’ll feel them out for watchful children. We’re on a deadline and we need to start raising awareness for our brother, ‘Ted’.”
Sam went to the refrigerator, brought out four bottles, snapped off the caps, and handed one to each brother. “In four months, each of us will have taken at least five ladies for fifty thousand each. That’s a neat, tax-free million for the Boston cycle.”
“And the beauty of it,” Sam continued, raising his bottle to Michael, “is that, thanks to Michael’s genius of an idea, the ladies will never know they’ve been swindled. Life doesn’t get any better than that.”
Michael nodded, acknowledging the rare expression of appreciation from his eldest brother. Then, he asked, “Jerry, what about a screen name?”
Jerry grinned. “I have that covered. We’re going to be, ‘NeverTooOldToLove’.”