Lies and Other Acts of Love

by Kristy Woodson Harvey

  “Yeah.” Jean laughed. “Because I think we all know it could easily have gone the other way.”

  She grabbed a handful of Hershey’s Kisses and placed them in front of her feet, where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Then she handed the bowl to Martha, who was sitting beside her in the semicircle, flanking the chairs where Dan and I were sitting.

  “Hey, Daddy,” Martha said, like he was going to answer. “Do you remember that time that Bobby Franco came to pick me up in his T-Bird convertible and didn’t get out of the car to open my door?’

  “Oh, yeah,” Lauren said. “He beeped the horn, didn’t he?”

  Martha nodded. “And Daddy flew out of that house and told him he better get the hell out of his driveway and never come around his daughters again until he had learned some damn manners.”

  We all laughed, and I felt that familiar mix of pride and sorrow that so often filled me these days. We had had so much life together. It burned like turpentine for it to be gone, but I was so grateful it had happened. My Dan had been a lot of things in his life, but, without fail, the constant was that he was a complete gentleman. From our first date to the last time I saw him on his feet, he opened my door, pulled out my chair, stood when I left the table and always treated me with respect. Well, almost always.

  “Could we please stay on task, girls?”

  Jean exhaled sharply. “Momma, none of us cares what we get. Just pick who you want to give everything to.”

  “I call the ring!” Sally and Louise shouted at the same time.

  Then Sally added, “For sentimental reasons, of course.”

  Dan had bought me a five-carat diamond after Jean was born, one carat for each daughter. It was a mea culpa for putting me through so much.

  And I well, well deserved it.

  I wouldn’t say to them that day—or any day—that Jean was getting that ring. It symbolized so much more than she would ever realize, and, as much as it had been a carat for each girl, that ring was really about Jean. And I wanted her to have it.

  Jean shook her head. “I’m not talking about this anymore, so let’s talk about something else or let me get back to writing campaign contribution thank-you notes.”

  I smiled at her, internally musing at the irony that she was by far the most attached to me, the most horrified by the thoughts of my being gone.

  Trying to change the subject, never wanting these family moments to be too fleeting, Louise said, “Can you imagine if you had married Ernest Wake, Momma? None of this would be happening right now.”

  Lauren looked up at Dan, who had been fiddling for ten minutes with an old letter we had handed him. I had no idea what he was doing, but I would have bet the cases of gold coins he kept in the credenza beside him that it wasn’t reading.

  “Daddy, you made short work of that old Ernest, didn’t you?”

  To my surprise, he looked at her, smiled and said, “Yeah.”

  I put my head in my hands. “Oh, girls, if you could have been on a dinner date with him.” I rolled my eyes. “The way he sent his food back, and talked down to the waiters. I was beyond mortified. It was so dreadful.”

  “So why didn’t you just refuse to go?” Lauren asked.

  I smiled and shrugged, thinking of my parents, of how hard they worked for everything they had, of the way they scrimped and saved and sacrificed to make sure that my sister and I had as many advantages as we could. I would wrap myself in my bedclothes during the most frigid winter nights, huddling by the roaring fire in my room, the heat rising rapidly through the tall ceilings that were our only reprieve from the scalding summer heat. “It made my momma and daddy so proud that I was dating Ernest Wake. Plus,” I added, looking over in Dan’s direction, “Dan had been called back to the service, and it wasn’t like we had e-mail and cell phones. I didn’t have any good way of knowing where he was going or when or if he was coming back.” I swallowed hard, realizing that it wasn’t all that different now. “At my age, I didn’t have too many good prospects, and I knew that Ernest and I would have a nice life together if, God forbid, Dan didn’t come back.”

  “God, that’s depressing,” Louise said. “Hence the reason I’m not married.”

  “Well, it was a different time, Louise,” I said. “You know that. An unmarried woman didn’t have a lot of good options. Sometimes marrying for love wasn’t in the cards.”

  “So you may as well marry for money,” Martha said, laughing.

  I made all my girls smile with one of my trademark phrases: “It’s as easy to love a rich man as it is a poor one.”

  “Speaking of,” Lauren said, “I’ve been meaning to tell y’all about the new man that I’m dating.”

  “Oh my goodness, who?” Sally asked.

  Lauren smiled, and I could sense just a hint of that maliciousness in her getting ready to escape. My stomach gripped like I’d had too much Metamucil just about the time she said, “Kyle Jenkins.”

  All eyes turned instantly to Sally, as Kyle Jenkins had been the man we thought she would marry. She had dated him for five years and then, one night, after he had asked Dan’s permission to marry her, he dumped her with no explanation whatsoever. He tried to get her back, but she had already met Doug. Sally had decided that, while brilliant, good-looking and destined for the kind of fortune that girls dream of, all she really wanted in a partner was someone who would be kind, steady and would never hurt her like that again.

  I braced myself for the reaction of my other girls, and it didn’t surprise me one bit when Louise said, “Don’t you sort of feel like he’s using you? Like you’re the Sally replacement?”

  Sally shook her head and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I think it’s great.”

  But you didn’t have to be trained in reading body language to realize she didn’t think it was so great.

  “He is so wonderful,” Lauren said, as though none of her sisters had even spoken. “He’s smart and charming and so, so funny.”

  “He’s a great dancer too,” Sally added.

  “Lauren, that’s so weird,” Jean chimed in. “He’s never even gotten married. You have to know that he’s been in love with Sally his entire life.”

  She waved her hand. “I think that’s absurd. When we saw each other at the club over the summer, we really hit it off.” She smiled. “It’s so difficult to find a man who can really take care of you these days.”

  It was the tiniest jab at her sister, a reminder that Sally’s stay-at-home husband had rarely held down a job for more than a few months over the course of their marriage. But, as a stay-at-home wife, I thought they diminished Doug’s role in the family way too easily. He was a good man, and they were happy. Who could ask for more than that?

  I always defended Lauren when the other girls ganged up against her, but, this time, there was little to defend. She had made her choice, they had formed their opinion, and that was all there was to it. It had to have bothered Sally that her sister was dating the man I always suspected was the love of her life. But she was as cool and calm as I’d ever seen her, and, if it bothered her, she didn’t let on.

  “Okay, then,” Lauren said, glancing at the diamond Tiffany watch she had inherited when her former mother-in-law died. “Kyle and I are meeting for dinner in Chapel Hill tonight, so I better go home and get beautiful.”

  Jean rolled her eyes at Martha, Lauren kissed her daddy and me, and, just like that, she was out the door and on the elevator. It was as if she wanted to make sure we were talking about her when she was gone.

  “She is such a bitch!” Jean said, as soon as Lauren had closed the door.

  “Jean,” I scolded, trying not to smile. “Don’t say that word and especially not about your own sister.”

  Louise nodded her head, taking a sip of the kombucha mess that she was rarely without. She was always trying to get Dan and me to drink it to improve our
immunity and gut flora. But I liked my gut flora the way it was, thank you very much. “Momma, I don’t know how you can defend her all the time. She is such a hideous person. How did you raise her and all of us in the same family?”

  “Now, girls . . .”

  I looked over at Sally. She hadn’t said a word, but she was whiter than Ernest used to be in his swim trunks on the first day of summer. For someone who had held it together so beautifully while Lauren was in the room, her countenance immediately shifted when her sister walked away. “I can’t believe that he would actually do this to me,” Sally whispered.

  “He?” Martha asked. “What about your wicked witch of a sister?”

  And I didn’t need to hear any more to know that, sometimes, no matter how good a girl seems, all of us, from top to bottom, need to use our little lies every now and then.

  Annabelle

  In Your Head

  If you do something you love, you never work a day in your life, according to Lovey. One of the great things about my new job was that, while it put a check in that “employed” box, it was about the furthest thing from work I could imagine. My days were jam-packed with fun activities that, even when they were dreadfully annoying, like that day with Mrs. Taylor, were much more exciting than pushing paper around a desk and intermittently checking Facebook, making sure I didn’t need to hide any more offensive messages from my husband.

  Plus, if I wanted to flit over to Greensboro, the midpoint between Raleigh and Salisbury, for lunch with Mom and Sally, Rob didn’t care one bit. Although my hours indicated otherwise, I was still technically part-time, after all.

  I was practically salivating over the black-eyed-pea cakes that I knew I would order, smiling thinking of how much fun it was going to be to laugh with my family—especially since Ben’s newfound “real” job had him working so much. It was definitely a switch after being together nearly nonstop for a year.

  The minute I saw Sally, though, I felt the day take an unexpected U-turn. I slid into the oversized, mercifully tall booth, sized just right to hide Sally’s pained face. My mind wandered to the first natural place: Lovey and D-daddy. But, when my mom’s face came into view, where she looked at me from beside her sister, I felt the tension dissolve a little. I knew her well enough to know that her expression was out of feeling her sister’s pain, not her own.

  Sally pinned on a fake smile and said, “Well, hi, Annie.”

  I shook my head. “Absolutely not. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Mom said.

  I crossed my arms. “I’m twenty-three years old. You can’t ‘nothing’ me anymore and think I’m going to buy it.”

  Right then, my phone beeped. I looked down expectantly, hoping it was something sweet from my husband. Instead, I sighed and rolled my eyes, setting my phone on the table.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” Mom asked.

  “Holden is what’s up. He won’t freaking leave me alone.”

  As Mom said, “You know I hate that word,” Sally burst into tears like I had just announced that I had received a text from my oncologist. I looked at Mom, stupefied. Sally had always been sensitive, sure. But Holden texting me here and there wasn’t anything to cry about.

  I took a sip of my tea, told the mystified waiter that we might need a minute and said, “Okay. Now ‘nothing’ definitely isn’t going to cut it.”

  “Don’t you dare get involved with him, Annabelle,” Sally sobbed. “If it means changing your phone number and closing your e-mail and moving to a new house, you get away from him.” She pointed her finger at me. “Don’t let him get in your head.”

  I shook my head, feeling my eyes widen. “I’m not,” I said. “I promise. At first I was being mean, but that didn’t work, so now I’m just ignoring him.”

  Sally shook her head. “That’s what I should have done with Kyle.”

  “Kyle?” I mouthed to Mom.

  Then I nodded, remembering Kyle Jenkins, the absurdly handsome man who was always eyeing Sally at the Shoals Club. We all knew that, for him, she was the one that got away, the reason he never married or had a family.

  “Lauren is dating Kyle,” Mom explained.

  I took another sip of my tea, still feeling a little bit confused.

  “No, no,” Sally said, sitting up taller and composing herself. “She should know. Someone should learn from my mistakes.”

  The waiter reappeared, and, at what seemed like a very inconvenient time, we ordered our food. I was literally on the edge of my seat, waiting for these random ingredients to mix in the cocktail shaker and become something cohesive.

  “People like Holden, they get in your head,” Sally said. “You think it’s all well and good, but they wear you down over time.”

  Mom pushed her hair behind her ear and said, “No, Sally. Holden was never like Kyle. If anything, Kyle was more like Ben.”

  That made my breath catch in my throat. I still wasn’t sure how the frames of this film were going to fit together, but I knew unequivocally that I didn’t want Ben to be like Kyle when, as I was starting to see, these tears my aunt was crying were over him.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m so confused. Why is Kyle like Ben?”

  “Kyle was the absolute love of my life,” Sally said. “We had that instant, burning passionate love that you dream about all your life.” She shrugged. “And then he just dumped me.”

  “And so you married Doug,” I said. Doug certainly wasn’t a head-turner like Kyle, but he was a good man. He was always there for all of us and the first one to make a joke or lift you up when you were feeling down. I had always thought that Sally and Doug’s marriage was as solid as it got.

  “And Kyle decided he wanted me back. He wrote me letters, called me at work. A time or two, he even showed up at my office.”

  My mom shook her head.

  I leaned back the slightest bit, so the waiter could put those black-eyed-pea cakes I’d been so excited for in front of me. And I wondered again why we would be in the midst of such an emotional crisis in the middle of a restaurant.

  “And then what?” I asked, popping my fork into my mouth, thinking through my anxiety that the food really was tasty.

  “He wore me down,” she whispered.

  “You had an affair?” I whispered back, wide-eyed.

  Mom laughed quietly. “More like a marriage.”

  I glared at her. “That’s mean, Mom. And what does that mean?”

  “We’ve been seeing each other on and off since 1989.”

  I almost spit my black-eyed-pea cake right across the table. I didn’t want to, but I laughed incredulously. “So the reason he looks at you like you’re on fire is because you are on fire.”

  Sally looked down at her hands. “I’m so ashamed.”

  “Does Doug know?”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Doug has known forever.”

  “And he’s okay with it?”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “The whole thing is utterly absurd.”

  I shook my head and put my hand on the table. “Wait a minute. Is that why Doug didn’t come with us to the beach? Because you were sneaking out with Kyle?”

  Sally scrunched her nose in a gesture that revealed everything.

  I stared at her in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that the man you have been seeing on the side since before I even existed—who your husband knows about—is dating your sister?”

  Sally nodded. “Kyle told me that he had had enough and that I had to choose. Of course, I don’t want to break up my marriage, so I chose Doug.” She inhaled. “It has been like living without water, but I chose to stick it out.”

  “So he—very maturely—chose to start ‘dating’ Lauren,” Mom said, making air quotes.

  My phone rang. It was Ben, and, even though I missed him like crazy and wanted to talk to hi
m, this was like one of those really great stories in Us Weekly that you don’t want to read while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store but you can’t possibly resist.

  “How could you even want to be with someone who would do that to you?” Mom asked, shaking her head. “You’re a grown-up, and they’re playing this ridiculously childish game with you.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “Forget wanting to be with him. How could you be married to a man who was okay to sit back and let you have an affair for your entire life together?”

  Sally leaned back heavily on the bench and sighed. As if Mom and I had never even asked her a question, she said, “What if Momma knows?”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Lovey knows everything,” I said.

  Sally gave me a downtrodden look.

  “What?” I asked. “She does. She knows everything; she just has the decency not to say it.”

  Mom gasped. “That comment on the beach!”

  I nodded furiously.

  “Oh, God,” Sally said, laying her head on the table. “About how she was so glad I married Doug and not Kyle.” She sat back up. “I’ve been worrying about Lauren telling her, when, in reality, she has known the entire time.”

  “Wait,” Mom said. “So you think Lauren knows?”

  Sally laughed cruelly. “Hell yeah, she knows. She’s playing the most vicious game of chicken with me that I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Ohhhh,” Mom said knowingly. “So her parading around bragging about how rich and charming and funny he is is her seeing how long it takes to break you.”

  “This is the most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

  I was sort of impressed, though. I mean, here was this squeaky-clean woman that you would never imagine had even had sex were it not for the children to prove it. And yet, here she was, gallivanting all over the state in the midst of a totally torrid affair for decades without anyone being the wiser. I looked at her milky skin, relatively wrinkle-free and, despite the circumstances, generally unworried in appearance. I thought of Ben, of the physical pull my body felt toward his, of the gnawing feeling in the back of my mind I always had knowing that I was away from him. I craved his touch and his attention. And so, in that way, I could relate to what Sally was going through.