“In Sun City.” Greg nodded. “We had a week in between gigs so I drove here from California to see him. He said to say hi, by the way.”

“Did he?” Carl had never liked me. He felt I wasn’t sexy enough to keep Greg interested, which he told me the very first time I met him, and it was galling to have him proven right two years later. Although Greg swore it wasn’t his lack of attraction to me that had driven him to cheat, his father’s words still chafed.

“Be sure to tell him I said I hope he chokes on Meredith’s cooking,” I retorted.

Greg burst out laughing. “He’d love that. He always admired your spunk. Unfortunately, he’s no longer married to Meredith.”

“What?” I gestured for him to come in, closing the door after us. “She was his fifth wife. I thought for sure he’d found his soul mate there.”

“You have to have a soul to find a soul mate,” Greg said. It was clear he still had father issues.

I made a sympathetic noise. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the evening unboxing Greg and his father. “Has he remarried?”

“No,” he said. “He’s discovered that in assisted care, the ratio of women to men is so unbalanced that he now has a roster of Bettys.”

“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.”