Bette and Tina decided to have some water and walk out to their deck and talk a little.

Bette:  You are getting attached to Suzanne, aren’t you?

Tina:  I do like her. She reminds me of me at her age. She has lived with conservative parents, who held middle class values, middle class jobs.  She has younger siblings where I had older siblings. She knows what she wants to do in life and that’s pretty good. She’s smart and she’s nice. Yeah, I like her.

Bette:  I like her too. I just feel like I want to help her sometimes. But I am doing all I can to remind myself that she is not my child.

Tina:  I want to help her out too. I just don’t want to mess her up by doing something which makes it appear we are trying to buy her friendship or inviting her to forsake her family. And I have to remind myself that she is an adult. She is making her way into her own future. And I do not want to intrude on her private life.

Bette:  Yeah, now that is what it felt like when Helena arrived on the scene when you and I were having our problems. I felt like she was trying to buy you away from me.

Tina:  Yeah, I can see that. But that was not where my mind was at the time. And as you see, it didn’t work. I cannot be bought.

Bette:  Well, it was the first time I was faced with that situation and I didn’t know how it would go. It was just one more item which I knew I could not compete. So, if you were attracted to her and that was one of the factors in the plus column for her, she would win in that competition. Nothing I could do.

Tina: Well, in the end, I won. I got the woman and the family of my dreams. But I can see that the Hales would be pretty much be at a disadvantage if they thought we were competing with us for their daughter.

Bette: Well, the truth is that I want help her with her college expenses. She’s got a gap between what she has and what she needs to have a stress-free education. And if things go the way they appear, she may the get the money through loans and then pay them off over the next twenty years. I’m sure her profession will be rather lucrative. But she will have a couple hundred thousand of debt by the time she graduates. And with every holiday, she has to sweat whether she can go home or not because she doesn’t have the funds to travel. And when something like an opportunity to go to Scotland for a summer break or Florida for spring break, well, she is simply out of luck.