prettier, me or your mother?"
"That's a really stupid question."
"Oh, is that so? Why is it stupid? Because you
can't appreciate any other woman? Is that the reason?" "No!" I screamed at her. "1 can't!"
She looked shocked. I hadn't meant to say that
like that and she could never understand what it was I
was saying anyway. How could she understand why I
couldn't appreciate any other woman the way she
expected I should?
"You are sick," she said, wagging her head and stepping back. "I'm getting out of here soon, getting away from all of you. You'll see. You'll all see and you can have Daddy to yourselves." She turned and
marched back to the house.
Good riddance. I thought. The sooner you
leave, the better it will be. I had no doubt she would
leave and soon, but not before she was to wreak some
more havoc on what her father had hoped would be a
happy home, a new start.
It came first with the news that she had
managed to get failing grades in every subject in
which she had enrolled at the community college. My
assistance in math hadn't helped her with the class
because she didn't understand or try to understand any
of the homework I had done. Her teacher knew pretty
quickly that she was having someone else do the
work, and like every other time she was exposed as a
liar or a deceiver, she simply shrugged it off or made
it look and sound like nothing of any importance. Dave got the news first from one of her
teachers at the college who came to his pharmacy for
medication, and then he learned about her failures
from the official college mailing that he read. His
confrontation with Betsy over it came to a head in a