"She's a difficult pleasure," I said of my ex-wife. I was standing at the front door of her house, talking to her new partner, Sammy, a woman. My ex-wife, Lily, was not there. We both took in the ... [+]
"This is the last straw," Alma said. She had just opened the mail at the kitchen table.
Sitting opposite, Walter peered over the top of his newspaper. "What straw is that?"
"It's another letter from the town council."
"What's he complained about this time?"
Alma clicked her tongue. "A frog in our fish pond."
"I didn't know we had a frog."
"Well, apparently we do, and it wakes him at night. We've been asked to remove it."
Alma and Walter had lived in their cottage since their marriage fifty years earlier. There were ten other houses in the street. It was a harmonio