Jenna Dodgson was attractive by almost any standard. Her jet-black hair was cut sharply at her shoulders and hung in a straight line around her face. The contrast with her light skin and pale blue eyes was striking. At thirty-three she was still trim and fit. She’d played women’s basketball in college, where she received her degree in pediatric nursing.
She sighed as she surveyed her apartment on this sunny Friday morning. It was okay but sparsely furnished. She referred to it as her “new” place even though she’d been living in it for four months.
Five months ago she’d left Anthony, her husband of two years. She counted him as one of her biggest mistakes. Sometimes she thought it was her biggest disappointment, but that gave him more credit than he deserved. He was just a mistake.
Anthony was a flamboyant, self-involved ass. There was no denying he was entertaining, especially when they were first dating, but entertaining couldn’t sustain a relationship. He’d always talked about how their relationship was the most important thing to him. He said they’d always be a team. Somehow, he’d convinced her that he was a man of depth and substance. He wasn’t. He was an ass.
But even being an ass wasn’t necessarily a deal breaker. The deal breaker was that Anthony thought he could threaten her. She could still remember his exact words. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up before I shut you up?”
Just plain nasty.
And not something she would allow him to repeat.
So she had moved out. At first she stayed with a girlfriend, Maria. Anthony tracked her down and whined and complained. He promised he’d never threaten her again. He said he’d really learned his lesson and he was going to get help. When that didn’t work, he told her how he couldn’t live without her. She still wanted no part of him.
After a few weeks at Maria’s she’d found this apartment. It was a great building, right next to Mic Mac Mall in Dartmouth, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She and Anthony had had a house in the south end of Halifax, and she could walk to the children’s hospital where she worked. Now she lived across the harbor. When she’d moved, her commute had changed from a ten-minute walk to a forty-minute bus ride. She hated riding on the bus. She would have driven but knew she wouldn’t be able to park anywhere near the hospital, not without paying an arm and a leg.
And it nagged at her that she lived in Dartmouth. She knew it was silly but there had always been a rivalry between Halifax and Dartmouth. Haligonians, the snobs, always stuck their noses up at the working-class Dartmouth side of the harbor. There was nothing to that old rivalry any longer but it did feel like a drop in status to go from South End Halifax to Dartmouth. She blamed Anthony for that too. The bastard.
She picked up her backpack from beside the bed. Her shift would start soon, so she needed to get to the mall and catch her bus. As she moved through the apartment she stopped to look at a photograph she’d found in a box in the closet the night before.
She held it and smiled. Benicio, her boyfriend from her days at Columbia University. She wondered how he was doing. The idiot had left her to go into the priesthood. That was always a great story to tell her friends — how she’d driven a man to celibacy.
She set the picture on the counter and turned to leave, but the phone rang. For a moment, she debated not answering and then relented. She picked up the cordless receiver and checked the built-in call display. It wasn’t Anthony, it was her friend Maria.
“You’re still coming after work, right?”
“Yes,” Jenna said, rolling her eyes.
“Just making sure,” Maria said. “I don’t want you backing out. We’re just going to the Old Triangle — it’s not the Liquor Dome. You better be there.”
“I will,” Jenna promised.