Free Bulls Island by Dorothea Benton Frank Page B

thinking—desperately hoping, actually—that Betts would tell me to come to New York, we would get married, and just screw what our families thought. But I soon learned that her number had been disconnected and there was no forwarding number. I didn’t have the gumption to go to Sela again, so I took this as a sign and married Valerie, knowing that in my heart I was still in love with Betts.
    But that was eons ago and here I was at forty, rolling down Highway 17, with this pulchritudinous female who, I was almost sure, drank and self-medicated, and in whom I had almost no interest.
    I pulled into our garage and gave Valerie a nudge.
    “Come on, Val, time to wake up.”
    She stirred and then yawned loudly. “Golly! I must’ve dozed off!”
    Dozed off. Sure. Call it what you want.
    A few days later, Valerie and I were walking down King Street when I spotted Betts’s sister, Joanie, coming toward us, half a block away. She was literally being dragged along by four of the ugliest dogs I had ever seen in my life. Giraffe-necked, bulging-eyed, flapping-tongued, crazy-faced dogs, loved no doubt for the first time in their lives, by someone with no career and no prospects of a future except for a modern-day version of Life with Father . She was, that is to say, still living at home with Vaughn, ostensibly in order to see about his care, but the truth was that Joanie had grown into a dumpy, angry, middle-aged woman with a negative opinion about everything. Who wanted to take that to bed? Not me, that was for sure. I remembered reading in the Post & Courier that she was raising money for a local animal rescue operation. It appeared she was taking the business to heart.
    The closer she got, the fewer seconds remained for us to cross the street to avoid her. Naturally, as the demons of fate would have it, that was not meant to be. Valerie stepped into Stella Nova for her monthly fix of exotic hair products and soaps, the cosmic buzzer on their door went off with what sounded like a guffaw, and Joanie’s menagerie all but knocked me down.
    “Whoa, fella!” I said, and pushed the large wolfhound–slash–Heinz 57 dog’s paws down from my shoulders. “Hi, Joanie. How’re you?”
    “Ugh,” she said, as though she had just encountered a leper with open sores. “J.D.?”
    Was that a rhetorical question or some kind of a half-assed greeting?
    “How are you?” I repeated.
    “How am I?” She cocked her head, which was as close as she was coming to one, and yanked her dogs to make them stay. “How am I? I am wondering why you bother to speak one word to me when you know how I feel about you.”
    “Jeez, Joanie. How many times am I supposed to apologize for something I didn’t do?” I leaned down to scratch the basset-hound-slash-who-knows-what behind the ears.
    “There are some things, J.D., that can be forgiven but should not be forgotten.”
    “How’s your dad?”
    “The same. Dementia. Worse all the time. He needs me.”
    “Well, I’m sorry to hear it. How’s Betts?”
    “That would be none of your beeswax, sir.” Even Joanie knew that this was too rude, so she added, “Like I would know anyway? We haven’t heard from Her Majesty in ages.”
    “Oh,” I said, realizing that Joanie justified her otherwise meaningless existence by pretending that Vaughn was an invalid, and martyr that she was, she was sacrificing all prospects of finding a husband to act as her father’s caretaker. Like there was a line of men carrying little velvet boxes extending from her front door all the way down the street to the Battery? Not. And where was Betts? Shirking her responsibilities to her father, that’s what Joanie liked to think and say. Loudly. For years, according to the local gossip, Joanie railed against Betts at every opportunity.
    At that moment Valerie stepped out of the store.
    “Well, hello, Joanie. Don’t you look, um, nice?”
    Of course Joanie was dressed like a pioneer from the Oregon Trail and Valerie was