Chapter 1

Penny stirred the mixture of grated soap and water in the little saucepan that she had picked up for two dollars for just this project. The bar soap was called Fels Naptha and was advertised as Heavy Duty Laundry Bar Soap. It certainly seemed heavy enough.

The bar was yellowish, wrapped in a relatively plain wrapper with pink stripes and white lettering over a green banner. The whole package had an almost old-timey feel to it. She had grated one third of the huge bar into the waiting saucepan with a dollar-store cheese grater and added six cups of water. Presently she had brought it to a boil and was letting the soap dissolve into the frothy water.

After a few minutes of stirring, she added the half-cup of borax and half-cup of washing soda. Once thoroughly convinced that the mix was completely mixed and dissolved together she would pour it into the bucket where four cups of steaming hot water was waiting. The boiled down mixture, plus the four cups of water would be stirred and mixed until homogenized, then another gallon and six cups cold water added and stirred. The completed mix would sit overnight and form a gel. After that, the two gallons of home-made laundry soap would be doled out half a cup at a time for a total of 64 loads worth of soap.

Penny smiled at the economy of the stuff. The entire batch had cost her seventy seven cents, which divided down to about one and a quarter cents per load.

Eat that Tide, she thought to herself.

She walked through the motions of her exercise in frugality, washed up the pan and grater that she stored in the laundry room, and took the still-warm bucket back there as well. She had another bucket just like it next to the washing machine, and the supplies from her recipe were stored above the dryer in an overhead cabinet. She noted with satisfaction that there was probably a three year supply stored up there.

She leaned against the agitating washing machine and looked out the back door toward the yard. The grass was beginning to green and the maple tree in the back corner looked to be budding out. Spring had arrived.

"April fools to me," she said aloud, having noted that it was April 1^st on a nearby wall calendar. "Seven months."

It had been seven months to the day when Penny had been transformed from the most productive but highest paid associate in the consulting firm that she had joined just out of college, to housewife; another statistic of the depleted economy. She smiled bitterly thinking of what she had gone through to push herself up there. From Boardroom Barbie ... er ... Penny, to House-Wife Penny.

Her marriage to Mark had suffered as she had put in long hours, and been so worn out by the time that she got home that the passion they had once shared seemed to take a back seat. Now since she had become unemployed, the rift between them had become horribly apparent to her. Sadly she had no idea how to repair it.

Penny had tried to seduce him a time or two, but he seemed very down these days, so intent on keeping them afloat that he barely seemed to notice her. She felt terribly inadequate herself, not because of physical self-image. She still turned heads in public often enough, but the years of corporate politics and cutthroat boardroom antics had apparently taken her toll and she had forgotten what it meant to really be sexy.

She felt totally out of place without the power of business behind her, and that translated to an awkward self-consciousness that she had not had since junior high. And worst yet, she feared that Mark didn't desire her anymore because she had lost her persona as a business-woman. So she had done what she knew best and revamped their finances, organized the house and cut their living expenses in half. Still he didn't seem to notice.

She laughed aloud for a moment, a bitter throaty laugh. "Here I am, twenty-eight years old and going through my midlife crisis," she mused with only a hint of humor. "What the hell happened to me?"

Her mind went back a decade to her freshman year of college in an instant.

It had been homecoming week. She couldn't remember what day precisely, but there had been a party. During homecoming it wasn't hard to find a party no matter what night of the week. And there had been alcohol: horrible barely palatable beer and fruit punch so strong you could light a flame to it. She smiled at the thought.

And there he was; the guy that caught her eye. He was tall, probably at least six-foot-three. He had on Khaki shorts and sandals, a polo shirt that showed the definition of his chest and shoulder muscles very plainly, and sunglasses pushed up into his wavy brown hair.