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Show All the Variables & Other Love Stories 15 womanizer, and child-beater. She said Dad didn't marry her so much because he thought he owed it to her as because he didn't want his son to grow up without a father. Mom must've been doing something right, though, because I would still catch Dad singing "In- A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and frying eggs in his boxer shorts on Sunday mornings. As the wedding day neared it became increasingly clear what a travesty the whole thing would be, and not just the wedding, but every day for the rest of Brandon's natural life, or at least until he couldn't take it anymore and abandoned her. Clean through it was a bad situation. Sheila's family was one of the oldest in the Salt Lake Valley. Her great-greatgrandfather had had fourteen wives and nearly a hundred children. Her father was a minor official in the Mormon Church. Her parents were a sharp couple and looked a decade younger than they were. Both of Sheila's sisters were beautiful, and all of her brothers were more handsome than Brandon and I combined. She was a fallen girl, marrying a non-believer outside the Mormon Temple to compensate for her shame. She existed now in disappointment's eye, and that Brandon was willing to marry her was hardly a reason for celebration; it just kept a bad situation from being worse. No one in her family liked Brandon, and he came home dejected every time he went over there. I knew a Mormon girl at school who got pregnant when she was seventeen. They wouldn't let her attend public school once she started to show. The father was a missionary from Scotland or South Africa or something. He got sent home and the family said they wouldn't press statutory rape charges if he came back and married her. I haven't seen her since but I heard from someone that the baby was a dirty secret, the |