“You’re married?”

“No.”

“Engaged?”

“No.”

“Living with someone?”

I shook my head.

Joe was quiet for a few seconds, staring at me as if I were a puzzle he wanted to solve. “I’ll see you later,” he said eventually. “And in the meantime… I’m going to figure out how to get a ‘yes’ out of you.”

Two

Feeling somewhat dazed after the encounter with Joe Travis, I went to the main house and found my sister in the office. Sofia was beautiful and dark-haired, her eyes a rich hazel green. She had a curvy figure like me, but she dressed with flair, having no reservations about flaunting her hourglass shape.

“The dove handler just called back,” Sofia said triumphantly. “The birds are confirmed.” She gave me a concerned glance. “Your face is red. Are you dehydrated?” She handed me a bottle of water. “Here.”

“I just met someone,” I said after a few gulps.

“Who? What happened?”

Sofia and I were half-sisters who had been raised apart. She had lived with her mother in San Antonio, while I had lived with mine in Dallas. Although I had been aware of Sofia’s existence, I hadn’t met her until we were both grown. The Crosslin family tree had a few too many branches, thanks to our father Eli’s five failed marriages and prolific affairs.

Eli, a handsome man with golden hair and a blinding smile, had pursued women compulsively. He had loved the emotional and sexual high of conquest. Once the excitement had faded, however, he’d never been able to settle into everyday life with one woman. For that matter, he’d never stayed with one job for more than a year or two.

There had been other children besides Sofia and me, half-siblings and innumerable stepsiblings. All of us had been abandoned by Eli, in turn. After the occasional call or visit, he would disappear for long periods, sometimes a couple of years. And then he would reappear briefly, magnetic and exciting, full of interesting stories and promises that I knew better than to believe.

The first time I met Sofia had been right after Eli had suffered a major stroke, an unexpected event for a man of his age and good physical condition. I had flown down from New York City to find an unfamiliar young woman waiting in his hospital room. Before she had even introduced herself, I had known she was one of Eli’s daughters. Although her coloring – black hair, glowing amber skin – had come from her Hispanic mother’s side of the family, her fine, sculpted features had unmistakably been inherited from our father.

She had given me a cautious but friendly smile. “I’m Sofia.”

“Avery.” I had reached out for an awkward handshake, but she’d moved forward to hug me instead, and I’d found myself reciprocating and thinking, My sister, with a thrill of connection I wouldn’t have expected. I had looked over her shoulder at Eli in the hospital bed, hooked up to machines, and I hadn’t been able to make myself let go. That had been fine with Sofia, who was never the first to end a hug.

In the vast accumulation of Eli’s offspring and exes, Sofia and I were the only ones who had shown up. I didn’t blame any of the others for that: I hadn’t even been sure why I was there. Eli had never read me a bedtime story, or bandaged a skinned knee, or done any of the things fathers were supposed to do. In his self-absorption, there had been no attention to spare for his children. Moreover, the pain and fury of the women he’d abandoned had made it difficult to contact their children, even if he’d wanted to. Eli’s usual method of ending a relationship or a marriage was to have an exit affair, cheating until he was caught and kicked out. My mother had never forgiven him for that.

But Mom had repeated the same pattern, taking up with cheaters, liars, deadbeats, men who wore their red flags on their sleeves. Among the tumult of affairs, she had married and divorced two more times. Love had brought her so little happiness, it was a wonder that she kept searching for it.

In my mother’s mind, the blame lay entirely with my father, the man who had started her on the self-defeating path. As I became older, however, I wondered if the reason Mom hated Eli so much was that they were so similar. I found no small irony in the fact that she was a temp secretary, going from office to office, boss to boss. When she had been offered a permanent position at one of the companies, she had refused. It would become too monotonous, she’d said, doing the same thing every day, always seeing the same people. I had been sixteen at the time, too mouthy to resist pointing out that with that attitude, she probably wouldn’t have stayed married to Eli anyway. That had provoked an argument that had nearly resulted in me getting kicked out of the house. Mom had been so infuriated by my comment that I knew I was right.

From what I’d observed, the kind of love that flared brightest also burned out the fastest. It couldn’t survive after the novelty and excitement had worn off and it was time to match socks from the dryer, or vacuum the dog hair off the sofa, or organize household debris. I wanted nothing to do with that kind of love: I couldn’t see the benefit. Like the slam and fade of a destructive drug, the high never lasted long enough, and the low left you empty and craving more.

As for my father, every woman he’d supposedly loved, even the ones he’d married, had been nothing more than a stop along the way to someone else. He had been a single traveler on his life’s journey, and that was how it had ended. The office manager of Eli’s apartment complex had found him unconscious on the floor of his living room, after he’d failed to show up to renew his lease.