A month until Christmas. Plenty of time.
She'd set aside money for a while, whatever part of her paycheck didn't go toward food, house payments, or school loans was withdrawn as cash and tucked into a book on the bottom shelf of her bedroom's sparse bookcase populated mostly by tales of whimsy she hadn't had time to read or nonfiction books on finances, small-businesses, and self-motivation she couldn't motivate herself to open. There was no Christmas bonus at work, she was sure the doctors all got bonuses, and she even heard the RNs talking about theirs. Nothing for the nursing interns, though. No child support checks lately, either.
No matter, though, she had the extra $300 she wanted. Enough to buy the one thing her daughter wanted for Christmas: the whimsically named 'Wii,' a video game console by Nintendo.
Her daughter, Jessica, had seen the commercials over a year ago when she was just 10. She hadn't made much of a fuss, but her mother knew how badly she wanted one, whatever it was. She had tried to find one that Christmas, but they were impossible to find and too much money. This year she would be prepared, though. She'd tucked the money inside that book. This year Jessica would get her Wii, she would be happy again.
They were $250 still, she saw in a Target flier recently. For her $300, then, she could get the system and still have enough to get one game -- she wasn't sure which one, whatever a salesman recommended. Perhaps a Mario Brothers game, if they still made those.
She had to work on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, but she asked Gail, a friend of hers who was going sale-hunting to see if she could find a Wii on sale with the promise she'd pay her back. No luck. A few stores had them, but they were all gone within minutes.
Shoot. She'd hoped that the shortage from last year would have been sorted out by now. They usually are, the Ticke-Me-Elmos and Furbies were never a problem to find after the initial craze, her friends had told her.
Since then, she'd swiped the sales fliers from the Sunday newspaper each week, careful not to let Jessica see her pouring over each one, looking for a hint that the video game system would be in stock or, even better, on sale. The games were always there, brightly colored boxes priced between $30 and $50, but never any mention of the Wii being in stock.
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The New York Times has caught on to the fact that the Wii has been out for a year now and they're still impossible to get without waiting in a line or bruising your scruples on eBay.
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