There are dozens of names with accompanying score marks from all over the country. Frankie, along with the help of her best friend Mona, embark on a road trip to find as many of these women as they can and interview them to learn more about her grandfather. But there’s another question festering inside Frankie, whose parents are divorced and has experienced her own fair share of heartache: Are the Golds cursed in matters of the heart?
Their lascivious road trip takes them across the entirety of the United States, from the deserts of the Southwest all the way to New England. While the book contains dozens of names, Mona and Frankie are only able to locate and contact four: Sandra, a housewife; Janice, a party animal; and Nancy, a girlboss and Charlie’s old high school sweetheart. All three women describe very different Charlie Golds. To Sandra, he is shy and even inexperienced. To Janice, he’s a sexual firecracker. Both, however, make note of his emotional faithfulness to his family. That all changes when they meet Nancy, the woman Charlie wanted to leave his wife for.
After his kids had grown up, Charlie proposed, declaring that Nancy was the woman “he respected” (implying that he did not respect his wife and the mother of their children). Charlie Gold was no longer just an adulterer in search of physical satisfaction: he was the man who tried—unsuccessfully—to end his marriage, and then settled to stay with his wife. Frankie becomes more and more convinced that her family’s love life is stuck under a dark cloud. She believes that her father’s high school girlfriend, the one he left for her grandmother, held the answers she sought. But after the heartbreak of Nancy, can Frankie face yet another truth?
