Alison and I have been best friends since primary school. She’s so kind and sweet, but I’ve always worried that she has the worst taste in men.
A few years ago, she met Joe. Joe is good-looking, a bit overweight, and very smooth. Alison was head over heels for him, but I had my suspicions about nice he really was. My suspicions were soon confirmed.
One night, Alison tearfully confessed to me that in their first year of being together, Joe had cheated on her with a mutual friend. Alison said that he only cheated because they had an argument, and he had been angry and upset. I told Alison that nothing she had said to him could excuse his betrayal, but she was convinced it was her fault.
After another year they were married, and that’s when Joe revealed his deepest fault — he is the most ungenerous person on the face of the earth. If my boyfriend and I went to a restaurant with Joe and Alison, Joe would always let my boyfriend pay. If nobody else offered to pick up the bill, Joe would go to the restroom so the bill could be settled without him.
Once, I announced at the beginning that tonight’s dinner would be my treat (we were celebrating my new job), and Joe ordered the most expensive items on the menu. Starters, mains, dessert, cheese and coffee, and a $40 bottle of wine. I was disgusted.
Joe’s meanness is the worst at their home. Alison loves to entertain — she loves to have people over for drinks and nibbles. After she married Joe, the drinks became cask wine, and the nibbles were stale no-name biscuits. They were always stale because any biscuits that weren’t eaten one night were put back in the cupboard and served again the next time company called — even if they’d been sitting out on a plate for hours.
Once I commented that the cheese, a well-known brand, tasted different to normal. Alison went pink, and laughed. “Oh, well, it’s a little past its used-by date. But Joe says it’s perfectly fine,” she said.
“Used-by dates are rubbish,” said Joe, being self-righteous. “I can’t stand food waste. Think of all the starving children in Africa.”
What made me furious was that while I was being served mouldy cheese, there was aged port and gourmet food in the cupboards for Joe once the guests had left. He could be really generous, but only to himself — not even to Alison.
The final straw came at Alison’s annual BBQ. It’s a big event, where she has all her friends and family over. Everyone brings lots of food, we eat too much and have a great time. Alison has some gorgeous nephews and nieces, and the kids were running around having lots of fun. One of Alison’s nieces was trying to win the cat’s affection, and she put her sausage in the cat’s dish. The cat refused to eat it, and we all laughed.
Later, when everyone had left the kitchen and was sitting in the backyard, I went back to the kitchen to make some tea. What I saw next was truly shocking. Joe, thinking that he was alone and unwatched, picked the sausage out of the cat’s dish, brushed off the bits of dried fish and pet meat, and put the sausage back on the serving platter.
My stomach turned over, I thought I would throw up. I almost couldn’t believe what I had seen. I was so mad, knowing that Joe wouldn’t eat the filthy sausage himself but would happily let Alison or her guests eat it.
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