My friend Hildy has decided that our former friend Lulu Slaphammer is a con artist because she and her husband used us for our friendship and then dumped us. In my case it was so Lulu's husband, Floyd, could get free fishing on my property rather than going through the fishing club and paying for it. That's how I met them - she came with him one time he came fishing.

They would call ahead to make sure there were no club fishermen here and she'd come for a visit while he fished, at least once a week, saving him at least $45 a time. I would make some soup, and she'd bring some cookies (Schwann's frozen cookie dough) or produce from their garden. I loved their dogs, and sometimes the dogs stayed here while Lulu and Floyd were out of town, and one time I kept a cat for her while they were out of town. It was an outdoor cat but had to stay inside my house, and wasn't house trained, just so you know the sacrifice on this end.

Lulu seemed delighted to have me as a friend, said she'd never had many women friends, and they reciprocated by having me to their house for a meal, and always wanted me to come stay overnight, for no special reason, just to visit. I went to their house for Thanksgiving one year, but that's another story.

Lulu is a joiner - she signs up for everything on the Internet - facebook, Twitter, even MyBloggers for one post, encourages all her friends to join along with her, and then fades out, leaving us with all these login IDs and passwords we never wanted. And she joined a lot of book clubs as well as a service organization called Philo that has a scholarship program for deserving adult learners and its own book club for socializing.

That's where she met Hildy, and one year the two couples came up and stayed in my rental cabin next door. Floyd gave Hildy some fly fishing instruction while Lulu and I chatted with Hildy's hard-of-hearing husband Dennis. They weren't the kind of friends who take long car trips together, but friends enough.

The Slaphammers are well-off - made at least $200,000 a year each as university professors, retired with huge pensions and fancy health care insurance, and don't live overly lavishly, but comfortably. They also go around giving speeches about their area of expertise and she is an expert witness in criminal trials. They don't keep up with the Joneses for the sake of it, and don't buy excess stuff, but have nice things and appreciate them. They like to dine out with friends and neighbors: nice restaurants, one check, everyone splitting the bill, even if not everyone ordered a cocktail, the most expensive thing, or had the appetizer and dessert (I learned this the hard way). Hildy is more their sort of people, I’m the pot-luck at my house, lets go sit on the bridge and watch the fish type.

I think Lulu struggles to adjust to retirement because now she is just another housewife living in a neighborhood. Nobody cares what she used to do for a career, they take her at face value, and so many of her neighbors were just the little woman keeping house for the well-paid executive husband, they don't really understand or care that she had what she sees as a high-powered career in a world of men. And when she tries to act like she's still important, it wears thin on people and they are not impressed.

Last year Lulu Slaphammer sent this letter to the Philo book club president, copied to Hildy and another woman, begging to be allowed to not have to participate in most of the Philo doings (she really screwed up running the annual golf tournament so resigned from the club, told them she was now going to focus her considerable skills on the local food bank) but could she please, please, please continue to come to the Philo book club? "Because life without seeing my dear friends Hildy M__ and Charlotte Something just isn't worth living." Hildy is just floored by this 'dear friend' crap, and we laugh about it a lot, even though deep-down she's hurt by the hypocrisy.

For a while I thought maybe Lulu wanted me to be a more suitable friend for her oddball daughter Wanda, married to the slacker Buster, whom Lulu hates. It could have been the sort of relationship we have with someone 10 or 20 years older than us where we have things in common but get a different perspective - roughly what Lulu and I would have, and would have I bridged the gap between the two of them. I got the impression that Wanda and Buster’s best friends their age do drugs and drink a lot.

Wanda is a case of arrested development. She is close to 40, but has the attitudes of a spoiled 17 year old. I wasn't surprised to find out she is adopted because she is nothing like her parents - she's got a raucous bar-room voice and a belligerent, irreverent way about her. Her IQ cannot be very high. Supposedly she is a trained paralegal but has never held a job. She and her husband Buster were doing okay operating a liquor store for his father Jose, but Jose didn't pay the taxes and it was confiscated by the state and sold at auction, leaving them without a means of support. Buster sometimes works as a roofer, but he's an out-of-shape 40 year-old beer drinking smoker, so can't keep up with it physically. The parents, Lulu and Floyd, had to buy Wanda and Buster's house to keep it out of foreclosure. They pay the taxes and maintenance, buy all their cars, pay for tires and maintenance of the cars, pay for the kid to go to private school, paid for Buster's kid from another marriage to go to college, pay for all their vacations, etc.

Here is an example of how Wanda talks: Little Pugsley was on a hockey team and they traveled to Wyoming for a game. After the game the parents took the kids out to eat. Wanda: "Pugsley wanted a big steak. Those other kids were having pizza, but he wanted a steak. The parents looked at me like I was spoiling him, but I said fuck them, if my son wants a steak, he's having the biggest steak on the menu, and I'm having one, too. I don't care if those other people can't afford to buy steak for all their kids, that's their problem."

And Lulu sort of draws up like she wishes she could sink through the floor.

One time Wanda told me she tells her mother bad things about Buster because Lulu likes him, so this will make Wanda, the daughter, look good by comparison. I didn't tell her that all it does is make Wanda look bad for taking up with him in the first place.

The last time we got together for lunch, Lulu's treat, Wanda was mind-numbingly boring to listen to, simpering pointlessly on about her husband and her kid because she had nothing else to talk about. All I could think was how sorry I felt for Lulu, the la-di-dah PhD professor who will have to listen to this drivel for the rest of her life.

We got done with that lunch, and went back to Lulu's where she wanted me to teach Wanda how to make a cherry pie, something Wanda was not interested in learning. Wanda's obnoxious black lab had decimated the patio door screen when everyone left because the dogs had been put out in the fenced yard. Then, Buster, the son in law, shows up with this speedboat that someone 'gave' him because they couldn't pay him for a chicken house he’d built for them using materials stolen from a jobsite where Buster worked. Wanda was bragging to me about it, and it sounded more like a case of Buster taking it after physically threatening to punch the guy out for not paying him for the job.

She and Buster were obviously proud that they were going to give everyone a ride on the lake where the Slaphammer house is located - for once this was something they had that Wanda's parents didn't buy for them.

There's Buster putzing about with the boat and trailer parked out on the street, tying a big black inner tube to the front of it, and Wanda is gloating that Buster is going to 'teach Dad all about the boat' and dad Floyd is going around rolling his eyes, rounding up some fishing gear for this expedition on the lake. Wanda grabs up the ruined screen to take home for repair and heads across the lawn to load it in her SUV, and Floyd brings it back because he wants to get it fixed right away, not wait for them to get around to it and meanwhile make excuses why it’s not done.

I have to admit I was giving Lulu a blow-by-blow of what I was seeing, kind of like a gleeful sibling when the other one is trouble. So eventually, Floyd, Buster, Wanda, and Pugsley, the spoiled rotten grandson, drive off to the boat ramp on the other side of the lake and of course we expect to see them cruise up near the house any minute.

I stayed around because I was waiting for pies to bake. At one point Lulu says - that must be them. Well, it obviously wasn't because they would have been waving and coming close. I said "Would they let Pugsley not wear a life vest?" because the people in that boat didn't have on life vests. She had to admit that maybe it wasn't them. I finally left (probably none too soon for her), and found out from her later that they couldn't figure out how to get the motor started. Hildy has her own speed boat and says there is some little switch or something you have to know to flip.

For the last three years the Slaphammers have been going to Florida from January into April or May, renting a house on one of the keys. Various of their neighbors here in town (it's a very tight-knit upscale neighborhood, but not huge mansions) go down there to stay with the Slamphammers for weeks or months at a time, including one couple who drives their fancy motorboat the 2200 miles down there. This saves Floyd the $200 a day to hire a fishing guide with boat or renting a boat for the duration of their stay. Hildy feels like they are using these people like I was used. We don't know what the payment arrangements are with regard to rent and groceries, but I’m sure it not all Slaphammer all the time.

Last fall, Hildy saw Lulu and Floyd in the grocery store buying canning supplies (they still greet her like a long-lost friend), and asked if they were going to their place in Florida before Christmas, and Floyd said no, it's too expensive to fly all the family down. Namely, the son-in-law, his son from his first marriage and the son's girlfriend. So they wait to go until after the holiday and they still fly Wanda and spoiled-rotten grandson down there to go to the Disney parks in Orlando.

There might be an element of jealousy on Hildy's part, that the Slaphammers don't invite her to their winter paradise since she’s supposedly such a dear friend, but Hildy's parents live in Florida and a visit to the keys while she was down seeing them wouldn't be out of the question, so maybe she has a right to feel slighted. And it doesn’t help that she keeps encountering various women with tanned faces in the grocery store, newly returned from a stay with Lulu and Floyd.

The Slaphammers were helpful to me while they were my friends - rides to and from the airport, helped when my battery was dead, fed me meals, invited me to spend the night, gave me produce from their garden, and when there was a forest fire not far from here a couple of summers ago, Lulu called and told me if I needed to evacuate to come there, any time, night or day. But for my part, I fed them many meals and he fished for free. I took care of their dogs (Wanda CAN take the two dogs, but she already has 4 or 5 of her own), took care of that feral cat Lulu was feeding when they went out of town, and patiently listened to all the drama, so I think we were probably even.

The very last time I saw any of the Slaphammers was the year she was organizing the charity golf tournament. He came up here one day with a little container of raspberries out of their garden and asked if he could fish the property if nobody showed up, and I said sure. He acted a little embarrassed and said they'd been very busy all summer. But then someone showed up from the fishing club so he didn't get to fish here after all.

They aren't con artists in the sense that they want money, it's more of an emotional con. Hildy's hurt is that Lulu dumped her but then claimed to be her dear friend in a letter to a third party.

She uses my case as a more tangible example than her own of how they take advantage of people and then move on to new people who have something they want to share the use of. I don't need someone to be outraged on my behalf, can fight my own battles, but I let her go with it because it gives her a hook to hang it on.

And sometimes I wonder if he misses fishing here since he did so much of it.