Read Online Bulls Island by Dorothea Benton Frank - Free Book Online

but the McGees had no appetite for anything but their own grief.
    They were inconsolable. Vaughn blamed himself, telling anyone who would listen that if he had been better able to drive or if they had stayed at my parents’ house—as my father had asked him to do, however insincerely—the accident would never have happened. Joanie was whispering and sneaking around the rooms, blaming Betts, saying she should have known the Langleys were a curse. Betts said little or nothing, but I knew she blamed my mother, thinking she was the worst kind of person there could be—disingenuous, manipulative, and rude to the point of indecency. Finally, when everyone was almost gone, Betts spoke.
    “Why would anyone even want to know her?” she asked.
    Her voice was weak, like someone who had cried so much that she barely had the strength left to speak. She wasn’t accusatory. It was how she truly felt.
    “Because she gives lots of money to charity,” I said. “And that’s the long and short of my mother’s magnetism.”
    It was the worst damn day of my life.
    The last time I touched Betts was when she removed the ring and put it in my hand, folding my fingers over it. Then she backed away from me and cried. I told her I understood and that I would never stop loving her. She said the same. At that point I believed that our families were truly cursed.
    Until Valerie came along, I kept thinking that somehow we—that is, Betts and I—might find a way to get away from all the anger and be together again. Valerie. I looked over at her unconscious body, bouncing a little with every bump in the road. Valerie was a good-looking woman, no doubt about it. But she had been offered up like a turkey on a platter and I guess I had been hungry enough to go for her.
    I had to hand it to old Louisa. Looking back, my meeting Valerie was another of her subtle “orchestrations.” At least Mother had the manners to wait until the Christmas holidays to debut someone she thought was a suitable date for me, someone she deemed close to being worthy of the Langley name.
    Betts was long gone to New York by then, a choice I never quite understood, but then volumes could be filled with the things about the fair sex that eluded the likes of me. Anyway, my parents were throwing a huge holiday cocktail bash to celebrate the Christmasseason. I was in no frame of mind for a party, having just spent my first semester of law school studying all the time and moaning over the state of my personal life.
    That fall I had lived in the condo that had been meant to be our home. Out of deference to my extreme misery, I had refused to do more than barely furnish it. There was a mattress and box spring on the floor of the bedroom with some cheap chest of drawers and an end table that I picked up at a yard sale. I had taken a desk and a chair with a lamp from a departing student. I never bought a sofa, just a recliner chair and a television that I put on a stand. If there had not been built-in bookcases already, my books would have been stacked against a wall.
    Mother was appalled by the way I was living. It was a good thing she bought out the local Belks, or I never would have had a pot or a drinking glass. I just accepted whatever she brought to the condo and said thank you in the most civil tone I could manage. Throwing worldly possessions in my direction did not compensate for the evil of what she had done. Living like a bum and having the most minimal conversation with her as possible was my revenge.
    The only thing I was happy about was that I was out of my mother’s house. I didn’t have to look at her face every day and constantly be reminded of what she had stolen from me. But there seemed to be no escaping Louisa. I would come home from classes and find her there, unpacking and putting away whatever she thought I couldn’t live without. A wine rack. A wall clock. An area rug. She would make the effort to begin a conversation, but soon every word between us was