Stand-In Groom bob-1

by Kaye Dacus

  “You can’t worry about what some reporters might or might not do. You just have to make sure that your life is straightened out. If you don’t talk with him, if you don’t forgive him, how will you ever be happy moving forward in a relationship with George? That bitterness you hold inside of you toward Cliff will always be there, keeping you from fully giving your heart to George. Cliff will own you more fully than he did when you went into debt to support him back then.”

  “I know. I’ve gone through all of the arguments in my head. I know I have to talk to him.”

  “Knowing in your head isn’t enough.” Meredith set down her fork and reached across the table to grasp Anne’s hand. “You have to know it in your heart, too. You have to ask God to break through those walls you’ve built up—whether from the teasing you got in school about being an orphan or losing your parents or finding out Cliff never really wanted to marry you. God can heal your hurts, but He can only do so if you choose to trust Him and forgive.”

  Tears burned the rims of Anne’s eyes. No sermon could have come to a more laser-honed point. All her life, Anne had allowed every hurtful thing that happened to pile up like so much garbage in her soul. Then whenever someone came along and tried to get through to her vulnerabilities, she assumed she would be hurt again and turned away, isolating herself and blaming those who’d hurt her in the past.

  “I’m not sure how to start,” she whispered.

  “You just did.” Meredith squeezed her hand. “If you really want my opinion, I think that before you talk to Cliff, you should start with forgiving your parents.”

  “My parents?” Anne shook her head. “What do they have to do with George and me?”

  “Everything if you’re going to have a healthy relationship with him. Annie, every time we’re with any of our relatives who have kids, I can see the hurt in your eyes. You think you hide it, but I know you better than most.”

  Not wanting to have an emotional breakdown in the middle of a restaurant, Anne gathered her wits—and defenses—took a deep breath, and dabbed the corners of her eyes with her napkin. “How did you get so smart?”

  “Well, I do have a master’s degree in art history, even though I don’t use it most of the time. That’s almost as good as a professional therapist, right?” Meredith grinned and took out some cash and laid it on top of the tray with the check. “I know this is a lot to handle over lunch on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And I didn’t mean to push you so hard. But I also don’t want to see you lose the best thing that could ever happen to you. So please, if you need help with any of this, come talk to me. You know I’m at your disposal twenty-four-seven.”

  “I know. Thanks.” Anne put her money down, too. She hugged Meredith and kept her arm around her cousin as they left the restaurant.

  Half an hour later, alone in her apartment, Anne pulled several storage boxes out of the large hall closet until she found the particular one she sought. Stacking the rest neatly in place, she heaved the large plastic bin into the living room, set it in front of the ottoman, and sat with it between her feet.

  She stared at the blue plastic. Could she do this? She hadn’t looked in this box since she’d given up hope on Cliff. Steeling herself—and rising to pull a box of tissues closer—she popped the clasps and laid the lid aside.

  Like wild creatures released from captivity, memories ravished her as she recognized the items at the top of the container. The notebook she’d put together for the very first wedding she’d ever completely planned—her own. Inside the plastic front cover, a photo of her with Cliff—she smiling and looking like nothing would ever go wrong, and he practicing the smile that would grace the front of every entertainment magazine and supermarket tabloid for the next ten years.

  Today wasn’t the day to deal with that particular part of her past. She put it aside, along with the album of photos of the two of them during their nearly six-year relationship—well, more pictures of him in his various stage roles through those years than actual shots of them together. The one in the front of the notebook was one of the few when he wasn’t hamming it up.

  Next, she pulled out the scrapbook Meredith had created for her college graduation. Nostalgia and regret mingled as she set it down on the floor. The high school graduation scrapbook went on top of that.

  Now she was getting down to it. She pulled out a red photo album with a brass spiral spine and gingerly lifted the cover. In her bad teenaged penmanship on the title page she read, Trip to Baton Rouge and State Capitol Building. Anne Elaine Hawthorne, Freshman Civics Class, Acadiana High School. One of the better memories from her earlier years. She closed it and added it to the stack beside her right foot.

  Three more albums joined it until she finally got to what she was looking for. The padded cover had a faux wood-grain finish with a large script H engraved in a metal plate shaped like a shield in the middle. Her skin tingled when she opened it to see her mother’s handwriting on the first page. Hawthorne Family Photos. Copyright Lilly Guidry-Hawthorne and Albert Michael Hawthorne. Amateur photos by Anne Elaine Hawthorne.

  Her mother had written the beginning date—Anne’s fifth birthday. Anne had written the ending date—the one-year anniversary of the plane crash four years later. Her throat tightened. She hadn’t looked at these pictures since then, as her grandmother had become visibly upset every time she caught Anne looking at photographs of her parents the year she’d lived with them. And she hadn’t wanted Aunt Maggie and Uncle Errol to think her ungrateful by making herself sad looking at them.

  Like an old-fashioned television warming up, Anne’s memory slowly faded in as she flipped through the album. She remembered her mother and father with cameras in front of their faces most of the time. Not little ones, but big black monstrous ones that made the most wonderful whirring and clicking noises. Her gaze rested on a photo of her father teaching her all the different parts of the camera. She couldn’t have been more than six years old but knew all of the terminology—from f-stop to parallax to field flattener. Her first few attempts at taking pictures with the cameras she could barely lift followed on the next few pages. She’d helped her mother develop them in the converted-garage darkroom. For her birthday that year, she’d received her mother’s first camera—a 1958 Kodak Signet 35mm—and twenty rolls of film. Her grandmother had taken a picture of her with her parents at the New Orleans airport before they left for some exotic locale like Bora-Bora, Nepal, or Taureg. Their parting instructions were to use all twenty rolls of film in the four months they’d be gone.

  Apparently she hadn’t had a precocious talent at it, as the scene when they sat down to critique her work popped into her mind with picture-perfect clarity. Only ten photos—out of the hundreds she’d helped her mom develop—made it into the album. After that session, seeing the disappointment in her mother’s beautiful face and her father’s bright blue eyes, Anne had carried the camera with her everywhere—until her first grade teacher confiscated it because she wasn’t doing her schoolwork. When her grandmother gave it back to her after a week without it, Anne spent all of her free hours trying to practice what they’d taught her about focus, light saturation, contrast, and composition so that when they came back from taking photos sure to win them more national and international recognition, they wouldn’t be disappointed again.

  Examples of her “much better” work followed—a close-up shot of ladybugs on a leaf. The branch of an old oak tree dipping down into the creek behind Mamere and Papere’s farmhouse. Uncle Lawson teaching Forbes to play chess. A wide shot of the entire family—except Lilly and Albert—eating Sunday dinner.

  She flipped the next page and something slipped out. She caught it before it hit the floor, and her heart lurched. She unfolded the newsprint. There, on the front page, above the fold. A photo of the skeleton framework of the “tallest building ever to be built in Bonneterre” with which she’d won the newspaper’s amateur photography contest. She had to admit, the composition was pretty spectacular, taken from the ro
of of a nearby office building. Maybe now my parents will see that they can stay in Bonneterre to take pictures and still have them printed, she had thought when she had found out about winning the contest.

  The adult Anne snorted. At thirty-five, she knew why her parents had to leave to do their work. The child within her still wanted to know why they loved doing it more than being with their daughter.

  Of course, they’d been thrilled. Had bought her a new camera. Had taken her out to dinner to celebrate.

  Then the Smithsonian called. They wanted to display her parents’ photography in a special exhibit in the months leading up to the announcements of the Pulitzer prize, which everyone in the country was sure her parents would win for their photo essay on a flood that ravaged a previously unknown village in the Appalachians. They wanted Lilly and Albert to be there for the opening.

  Anne begged to go with them, now that she was an awardwinning photographer herself. They laughed at her earnestness, but she got through to them because after a couple of days, they agreed she could go. They’d take a week and make it a family vacation. So many things for Anne to practice her photography skills on in Washington, DC.

  Never having left Bonneterre before, Anne had been excited but tried to imitate her parents, to whom the trip was nothing out of the ordinary. She kissed Mamere and Papere good-bye at the gate at the Bonneterre airport—then just a small regional outfit—and followed her parents outside and up the steps into the small plane, lugging her heavy camera bag. The commuter jet had two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other. She sat beside her daddy, in the window seat, the thrill of finally getting to go with her parents ready to boil over.

  Her stomach lurched as she remembered the sensation of the plane picking up speed down the runway. She swallowed hard and closed her eyes. She was holding Daddy’s hand, looking out the window at the buildings and trees whipping by. The front of the plane lifted up.

  She swallowed again, cold sweat breaking out on her face. Farther and farther back in her seat the g-force had pressed her as the plane lifted off the tarmac. Daddy pointed out the steeple of Bonneterre Chapel and the tree-shaded campus of the university. There was Town Square and the river.

  The plane gave a sudden loud pop and jerked drunkenly to the right. Other passengers gasped. Daddy’s hand on hers tightened. What was happening? She looked up at Daddy, who wasn’t smiling anymore as he looked across the narrow aisle at Mama. The plane jerked again, and Anne could smell smoke. Something was on fire! A woman behind them started praying, calling Jesus’ name over and over.

  The memories came back so real, so clear; tears streamed down Anne’s face, and she wrapped her arms around her churning stomach.

  With a sickening screech, flames had erupted outside her mother’s window as the engine exploded. Anne remembered screaming. With gathering speed the small plane hurtled toward the woods. Daddy wrapped his arms around her, tucking her head into his chest, whispering, “It’s going to be fine, sugarplum. It’s going to be okay.”

  Smoke filled the cabin; flames backlit her mom. Mama, get away from the fire—you’ll get hurt! Mama!

  Anne leapt off the ottoman and dashed to the bathroom just in time as her stomach emptied all its contents. She collapsed on the cool white tile, sobbing, trembling, her heart racing.

  She’d woken up in the hospital three days later. Lilly had died instantly. Albert lingered a few hours—his chest impaled with a twisted piece of metal, the same piece of burning metal that seared a scar along the left side of Anne’s neck. He’d protected her as best he could during the impact of the crash, shielding her from burning debris, but her injuries had still been extensive: her left foot and ankle crushed by her heavy camera bag, second- and third-degree burns where his hands and arms couldn’t cover her, the gash along her neck into the shoulder muscle.

  Her father had only been thirty-four years old, her mother thirty-two. Still so much life ahead of them.

  Why, God? She pulled herself off the floor and proceeded to brush her teeth. Why did Lilly and Albert have to die? Why did I have to be deprived of my parents growing up? You could have saved them, but You didn’t. I don’t understand.

  She took some Pepto-Bismol to try to calm her stomach.

  God was no more to blame than her parents for their death. Yes, He could have worked a miracle and stopped them from dying. But He hadn’t. Accidents happened. She wasn’t the first child to have lost her parents, and she wouldn’t be the last. But she could take comfort in the knowledge that they’d believed in Him, had accepted that their salvation was only to be found in the blood of Jesus. They had been with Him from the very moment their lives here ended.

  Leaving Anne to have to go on without them. To have the stigma of being the girl who had to depend on the charity of relatives for a place to live. The girl who was teased when changing clothes for gym class in the locker room because of all the burn scars on her back. No boy would ever want to be with a monster like her.

  That legacy followed her through junior high into high school, combined with the fact that she had a burning need to please every adult she came into contact with, including all of her teachers. What other students saw as Anne trying to ingratiate herself by volunteering to help or getting the best grades had been no more than her need for approval by anyone in a pseudo-parental role—at least, that’s what a friend had written in a psych paper about her in college. The teasing had followed her, too. Especially being nearly six feet tall at thirteen with no athletic ability whatsoever.

  She returned to the living room and started replacing items in the box. The trip to Baton Rouge in ninth grade had been great because only the kids with the top grades—other nerds, geeks, and social outcasts like herself—had gone. No one had teased her about her height, her grades, her lack of “real” parents.

  She cracked open her high school scrapbook. A photo of her with her “older brothers” and Forbes slipped out. Maggie and Errol’s three older sons, Whit, Andre, and David, along with Forbes had done their best to protect Anne from the worst of the teasing. But they’d had their own lives and couldn’t be around all the time.

  Tucking the photo back into the book, she continued flipping through. She stopped in the pages representing her junior year. A piece of paper with purple ditto-machine ink glared back at her:

  ACADIANA HIGH SCHOOL

  NOMINEES FOR JUNIOR PROM COURT

  As a joke, someone had nominated her for prom court. She’d tried to make light of it, not to take it seriously. That was hard when Aunt Maggie heard, though. Since Maggie had no daughter of her own, she and Anne had a strong relationship. But Aunt Maggie couldn’t understand why Anne wasn’t excited about being nominated, until Anne finally confessed that she didn’t have a date for the dance and knew no one would ask her to go.

  Maggie had suggested Anne ask one of her cousins to go as her date. It was the only major argument she and Aunt Maggie ever got into. Anne won but felt terrible for disappointing her mother’s sister, who’d been so kind as to take her into her home to live.

  Once the flyers had been passed out among the junior class, the teasing intensified and started getting nasty when the chess team, chemistry club, and honor society started campaigning for her.

  She could remember that worst day like yesterday. Three of the cheerleaders had cornered her outside the gym on her way out of PE—one of them was her cousin David’s girlfriend. They threatened her with all sorts of retribution stolen straight from the Molly Ringwald movies they’d seen too many times. She was doing her best to get away when a masculine voice rang across the hall.

  “Leave her alone!”

  The three cheerleaders had squeaked and spun around.

  Cliff Ballantine—tall, slender, and well liked, with dark hair and brooding good looks—stood over the three twits like an avenging angel. She’d only seen him in the school plays or across the room at assemblies. The cheerleaders scurried away, and Cliff had escorted her to her next class.


  Anne didn’t go to junior prom by her own choice. By the end of the school year, Cliff was working for Aunt Maggie part-time, and Anne was helping him with his English homework so he could graduate.

  Maggie had taken every opportunity that summer to have the two of them work together. Although with every appearance of being outgoing and happy-go-lucky, Cliff let only a few people, including Anne, see his vulnerable, somewhat introverted side. She was the only girl at school who knew he lived with his mom in a trailer park on the edge of town instead of at his deceased grandparents’ address that he used to be in the Acadiana High district—the school with the best drama program in town. He was the only person outside the family she ever told all of the details of the plane crash to. She also recognized that he used his good looks and charm to get people to do what he wanted. She’d confronted him about it the year before he graduated from college, but he just laughed, patted her cheek, and asked her if she could go to the library and find him some books for a sociology research paper he had to write.

  She put the scrapbooks, the wedding plan book, and everything else back into the box and snapped the lid on.

  If Cliff hadn’t really wanted to marry her, why had he asked in the first place? They’d never really been “boyfriend and girlfriend”— he’d gone on dates with other girls in college. But when he moved away to California, he’d seemed to cling to her like a lifeline—and, of course, a constant source of money when he quit whatever part-time job he was willing to take on.

  Ask him.

  She lugged the box back to the closet and returned to the bathroom to start getting ready for her date. She stared at herself in the mirror as a slow smile spread across her face. After all these years, she’d finally figured out how to talk to Cliff. She’d make an appointment with his personal assistant, George.