Holy Cow

33 PENNY WISE, POUND FOOLISH

First up was Tom’s gate, 11. We said goodbye to the shepherd. He zoomed off in the cart, a new dog. Shalom and I walked Tom right up to the gate.

“Well, I guess this is goodbye,” Tom said. “How can I ever thank you? Let me see which is my ticket here.” He pulled the tickets out. “Uh-oh,” he said as he flipped from ticket to ticket.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I knew that was too good a deal to be true! Dammit! I shouldn’t have used Groupon!” He showed me the tickets. “I saw that I could get a deal on three tickets, a great deal, but I guess I got us three tickets all on the same flight. It’s my father’s fault-he had money issues.”

“What?” shouted Shalom. “How am I gonna get to Israel?”

“We can get you a connecting flight from Turkey, it’s not that far.”

“Don’t you travel agent me, you jive turkey! I gotta get to the Promised Land!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “This was a mistake. A really stupid, really bad-”

“But frugal,” offered Tom. “A really bad, really stupid, but frugal mistake. Perhaps because of a dearth of love from my mother, I have a permanent sense of lack, of not being enough, and this extends to money and miserliness.”

“I thought you said your father was the problem,” I said.

“Father, mother-see how bad I had it?”

“Please, shut your gob,” said Shalom.

“But then again,” Tom gathered himself, “maybe it’s fate that we shouldn’t split up yet. Maybe we’re meant to stick together to the end. We all have tickets to Turkey, we all wanna get the hell out. I know I don’t wanna end up being dinner tonight and Shalom doesn’t wanna be some police dog’s bee-yotch-so let’s do it. Let’s go: Turkey!”

The pig reluctantly nodded his assent. What other option did we have? We headed to give the agent our boarding passes.

“I’d be on my way to Tel Aviv tonight,” Shalom grunted at Tom as we made our way down the tunnel to the plane, “if you weren’t such a schnorrer.”