Refund

Refund (2015) by American writer Karen E. Bender is a collection of thirteen interconnected short stories, mostly about the challenges facing an array of families. Each has appeared in smaller magazines before being collected in Refund.

Its themes include financial and emotional anxiety, familial and romantic love, and religious clashes. In all of the stories, money plays an unusually deterministic role. Some families live in Manhattan or Los Angeles, others live around the U.S., but all express their desires, hopes, and disappointments through their relationship with money. Many characters are in their current city not by choice, but by necessity (bad marriages, failed businesses, etc.).

Set in 2009, “Reunion” follows Anna Green, a middle-aged woman attending her twentieth-year high school reunion. She says she can’t afford the $50 admission price, but she doesn’t focus on the fact she was able to afford seventy business cards she plans to hand out. She runs into an ex-boyfriend who mentions he’s in real estate now. He tells Anna to contact him should she be in the market for property.



Anna is unhappy in her relationship with her husband, Howard. Feeling the need to rebel, she buys some beach property from her ex-boyfriend. She does so on credit. The problem is that none of the property actually exists. Once she realizes she’s been swindled, she also recognizes that she’s rather lucky with her current marriage, and chooses to stay in it.

The next story, “Theft,” is about the unlikely friendship between a recently dumped woman and an eighty-year-old con artist. Veering toward the end of life, the con artist buys a ticket for a cruise ship, and decides that for the next week she will try to form a real friendship with someone—she’ll also do her best to avoid stealing. She reflects on why she has led a life of crime. When she and her sister moved to LA as adolescents—after their father abandoned them without so much as a note—they thought they would be safe with an aunt. It turned out the aunt never existed; their father simply made her up to explain away parts of his history and to make himself feel pride in his past.

“Anything for Money” revolves around the only wealthy characters in the collection. A reality TV executive hears that his granddaughter’s heart has a genetic malfunction. If she is to live beyond twenty-five, she must have a new heart. His granddaughter, who has not spoken to him for years, is placed on a donor transplant list, but it will likely take too long. He tries to use his money to help her situation. It’s unclear if he succeeds.



An overworked single mother is about to have another child in “The Third Child.” The pregnancy is unplanned and not particularly wanted. Despite her stress, one day, when a neighbor’s young girl needs help with her homework, she offers to tutor her. She becomes more than just a tutor, offering emotional support to the girl, as the girl’s larger family seems incapable of doing so. But the girl’s mother does not at all approve. The family is strictly Baptist, and the woman is not.

“Refund,” the title short story, lies in the middle of the collection. It follows a younger, artistic couple in Tribeca who struggle to keep their children mentally sound and financially supported after surviving 9/11. One day, they decide to sublet their apartment. However, in their advertisement, they’re a bit dishonest about what future tenants can expect. When a subletter confronts them about this, they fight her, saying they have children to support and are financially strapped and she should give them a break. She tells them her husband died in 9/11.

“Free Lunch” is about Jewish New Yorkers in North Carolina. Secular Jews, they feel deeply uncomfortable around the Hasidic rabbi who invites them to dinner. They feel equally uncomfortable around Christian people. The question is who (other than themselves) can they develop a real friendship with?



“For What Purpose?” follows a young woman in the aftermath of her parent’s tragic death in a car accident. Someone asks her for what purpose does she want to work at the company. Other than the typical response that she likes the paycheck, she admits to herself that she likes her co-workers, and for the first time since her parents died, she’s starting to gain a semblance of belonging. During this same conversation, she’s informed that the company is under financial duress, and most terminate her position.

Refund ends with “What the Cat Said.” It’s 2 a.m. and a drowsy woman wakes up to her cat walking around her bed, and her young son standing near her bed saying he can’t sleep, he’s hot, and he needs to find his baseball cards. She imagines the cat repeating, “I love you.”

Her son has had a bad day. He learned that he was disinvited to a popular boy’s birthday party. It was baseball themed. The mother feels for him but doesn’t take it as seriously as the child. The child asks when he will die. Neither the mother nor the father can answer that. The child goes back to bed.



The husband and wife talk and make jokes about the cat. It soon becomes clear that both balance emotional openness and emotional opaqueness. They hint at the truth by stray comments made about the cat. Their marriage is complicated, and she often feels trapped. Yet there are certain unexpected acts from her husband that make her recalls her love for him.