Free The Last Original Wife by Dorothea Benton Frank Page B

leaving until the eleventh of June. So I’m thinking of giving myself a bon voyage party. Why don’t you come down and spend the weekend? And maybe Miss Jo would like to see her auntie?”
    Miss Jo, my niece in question, was a three-year-old female Havanese with more personality and spirit than you would ever expect to find in a dog that was not in the entertainment business. She had an elaborate bed in every room of Harlan’s house and a wardrobe to suit every occasion. With accessories. Harlan and Miss Jo went everywhere together. She probably would be desolate with him gone for a month. If I actually went to his party, maybe I could bring her back to Atlanta with me. Holly would adore having a little dog to play with.
    â€œWell, we’ll see,” I said. “Let me know when your plans are all set.”
    Harlan and I hung up, and I walked around the house like a zombie. It dawned on me that I hadn’t dusted in a while. My conscience was rattled a little by that so I went to the kitchen and took out my bucket of cleaning supplies, even though my arm was still in a cast and a sling. I wondered what Wes would say if I wanted to go to Italy with Harlan? What would he do if I was gone for a month? He could hire a full-time housekeeper, but would she know to rotate his undies? The towels? The dishes? I didn’t know whether to laugh imagining Wes’s frustration or cry my eyes out because this was my life.
    After I gave the living room a straightening up as best I could, I wandered into his study with a dust cloth intending to put a spritz of lemon wax on his bookshelves and desk. I was dusting away when I noticed that one of his lower cabinets was unlocked. They held his personal files, and for whatever his stupid reason was, he kept those cabinets bolted like Fort Knox. Part of me was curious to see what was in there and another part of me—the she-devil who lives in all women—wanted to see if he was hiding anything. I mean, why were the doors always locked?
    I pulled out a folder from the crammed drawers. Its contents were articles he had clipped from various magazines and newspapers regarding different golf courses, golf clubs, and golf pros. On the one hand I thought, He really ought to widen his horizons—you know, what about taking a wine-tasting course or something? What about sports cars? And on the other hand I thought, Well, at least he knows what he likes.
    I replaced that file and thumbed through another huge one. This one was from our bank where we had various accounts, and it held statements going back to 1988. Boring, I thought, but for some inexplicable reason, I pulled out the most recent one and opened it carefully.
    How are we doing, Wes? I thought.
    For decades Wes had been tucking away money for our retirement, even though his company offered generous retirement benefits. Every year his company gave him stock options and he’d been exercising them and then telling me he wouldn’t sell any stock, not one share, because you never knew what horrors we might find in old age. It was true that 80 percent of the average person’s health-care expenses were spent in the last eighteen months of the individual’s life. At least that was what Wes said and I believed him. Back in the eighties, every now and then he would say to me, Oh , by the way , I took my bonus money and bought Apple in the IPO for practically nothing a share . Or he’d mention, I snagged a huge block of Microsoft today in a killing! Or Motorola, or Nokia, or Pfizer.
    Whatever, I’d think, and I’d diaper a baby or drag a garbage can to the curb or defrost a pot roast. He may as well have been speaking Chinese.
    Wes was always very prudent, and not that I had much of a choice, I supported it. Who could argue with prudence? Besides, until I had my accident, I could not have cared less what he did with his money, even though there was barely enough to go around. I recognized