“Bettys?” I asked.
“He calls them all Betty, whether it’s their name or not, and he has them on a schedule, so there’s Monday Betty and Tuesday Betty, etc.”
I gaped at him. Carl DeVane was a bald-headed, potbellied, miserly old man, who frequently smelled like onions. How could he possibly be this much of a Casanova?
“Sometimes the internalized misogyny in women exhausts me,” I said. I held up a beer in question, and he nodded. “Why would any woman put up with that shit?”
Greg shrugged out of his leather jacket and draped it on the back of a stool at the counter. “Because they’re lonely and they were raised at a time when women were taught to believe that their worth was wrapped up in their ability to bag a husband.”
I shook my head. “What a load of horseshit.” I twisted the cap off the bottle and pushed it and a glass at him.
“Says the woman who’s been married twice and is not yet thirty,” he said. He ignored the glass and drank out of the bottle.
“Why does everyone keep reminding me? And . . . ouch,” I retorted. “Did you come all this way to insult me because I can do that myself.”
“No, I know you didn’t get married to prove your womanly worth,” he said. He sent me a sympathetic glance. “You did it to avoid dealing with your mom’s death.”
You didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that, but I thought it spoke well of Greg that he understood I’d been operating out of a place of pain for our whole marriage.
“Yeah, well, that didn’t work with you or Jeremy.”
“Speaking of Jeremy,” he said.
“Are we?” I asked. I heard an alarm bell clanging in my head. Jeremy had hated Greg, while Greg always seemed ambivalent about him. Why now would Greg want to talk about him? It was unsettling. I led Greg into the living room, where we sank onto the couch facing the fireplace, settling in for a nice catch-up.
“We are now,” he said. He took a long sip off his beer. “He called me.”
“What?” I spluttered beer all over myself. Mercifully, I had a cocktail napkin to dab it up with. I hacked until my throat was clear and asked, “Why on earth would he call you?”
“He thought you came back to me,” he said. “As if that would ever happen.”
Was he fishing for a denial? Because he wasn’t going to get one. He was absolutely right. That would never happen.
“Your abrupt departure to Phoenix. He thought it was all too coincidental with my touring schedule being in the Southwest,” Greg said. He rested his arm along the back of the sofa and put his ankle up on his knee. He looked perfectly at home. It was weird but it also grounded me.
“I can’t believe he called you,” I said. I hadn’t spoken to Jeremy since I’d left for Phoenix and was planning to give it a few more months before I reached out to him to see if we could be friends.
“I know, he hates me,” he agreed.
“He doesn’t, okay, yes, he does,” I said.
Greg stared at me for a moment, and I sensed he had a lot more to say, but when he finally did speak, it was short, to the point, and devastating. “You know he’s in love with you, right?”
“He’s not,” I protested.
“He is,” he said. “Or more accurately, he thinks he is.”
I felt my stomach twist into a hard knot. “I feel terrible about how things ended. What did you say to him?”
“That he needed to grow the hell up and stop being such a damn mama’s boy.”
“You didn’t!” I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. How many times had I wanted to say that very thing to Jeremy? “I don’t imagine he liked hearing that.”
“He didn’t. He swore at me. Then he hung up on me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”
He held up his thumb and forefinger, holding them about an inch apart. “Maybe about this much.”
I laughed. “You’re a horrible person.” I kept my voice light so that he’d know I was mostly joking.
He laughed. “At least I know that about myself, and I’m not pretending to be something I’m not. Jeremy pretends he’s a grown-up, but he’s just a child looking for someone to make all of his problems go away, which is why he’s so attached to you. You’re his fixer. It’s what you do.”
I had a flashback of Soph telling me that exact thing that night she called me in Boston to offer me the job. I stared at Greg and took in his long dark hair, his blunt features, the scar that split one of his eyebrows. He was handsome in a knuckle dragger way. He was the guy you wanted at your back in a bar fight or when fleeing the law. He had never needed me the way Jeremy did.
“Why didn’t it work out between us?” I asked.
His eyebrows rose.
“No, I am not looking to start anything here, I’m just curious,” I explained.
“It didn’t work out between us because I wanted a partner, not a mommy,” he said.
The words were harsh and I tried not to cringe. I failed. It was painfully close to what Nick had said to me, and I didn’t like hearing it any better this time.
“Listen, Annabelle, I love you. I always have and I always will, but you were never comfortable with that,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I protested. “I was very comfortable with being loved. I was crazy about you.”
“You tried to manage me,” he said.
“No, I didn’t,” I argued. I was coming in hot. There was no way he was going to blame his infidelity on me.
“Annabelle, as soon as we got married, you became a completely different person,” he said. “You started pestering me not to stay out too late, not to drink too much, you even started packing my lunch when I went into the studio to record.”
“I was worried about you and I thought you might get hungry,” I said. Oh god, Nick had been so right. I was only steps away from cute-shaped sandwiches.
“Annabelle, I am a fully realized adult male who can make himself a sandwich or not if I want one,” he said.
“I was just trying to show you how much I loved you,” I muttered.
“Were you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Once we got married, you stopped painting and all of that creative energy that made you such a free spirit started to fade. You became this Stepford wife who was determined to take care of me whether I liked it or not.”