Mom always accuses me of having a man “waiting in the wings,” of dating one but having my backup plan all lined up and ready for when that relationship inevitably ripped at the creases. That was how I knew Ben was the one. I didn’t have a backup plan. At least, I didn’t think I did.
That propensity to always have another man lined up has earned me some flak in my life. “You need to learn how to be alone,” one friend would say. “You need to find yourself to find happiness.”
All I knew was that my self was much happier when she had a man doting on her.
I looked down at my phone. I may have married Ben for love. Mad, passionate, can’t-bear-to-blink-without-you love. I had married for love, and look where it had gotten me. Miserable. Disgusted. Living with a man I knew I had to let go of. But I knew that, once I did let go, all of those Cinderella dreams I had had since childhood would be over. It was in that moment, when I texted back, I think that would be nice, that I realized that, more than rushing home to attend to Lovey in her time of need, I didn’t confront Ben and Laura Anne that day when she was climbing out of the golf bag, because I had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them squirm in their disgusting lie; it was that, if I didn’t have Ben, I didn’t know who I was.
Where?
I could practically taste a latte but realized that I couldn’t drink caffeine. And I certainly couldn’t risk being seen in public with Holden. Of course, my husband didn’t have much of a leg to stand on if he found out, but I didn’t want to embarrass my family by gallivanting around town with an ex when I was, presumably, happily married.
Your house.
His response was so uncharacteristic I laughed out loud:
A few minutes later, lying on my back beside my childhood swing set, wondering if my son or daughter would like playing on it one day, looking up at the clearest blue sky, trying to decide what I wanted to achieve out of this meeting with Holden, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Mom was on a meditation kick, and I knew I shouldn’t interrupt the “oms” floating around in her head. But I couldn’t help it. I was hoping that she knew all about what that adoption box meant and that I wasn’t going to have to live the rest of my life walking around hiding something from her. “Did you ever figure out who made the mistake with the whole blood type thing?” I asked. “That could be kind of a big deal in an emergency.”
She barely turned her head, squinted one eye at me and said, “Momma said I was wrong about Daddy’s.”
She turned back and closed her eyes again, but I had a feeling that I had disrupted her chi with my question. I wanted to keep prodding. But she must have believed Lovey’s lie. And I guessed that was okay.
Sleepy and finally relaxed in the fresh air, I closed my eyes, the sun feeling warm and soothing on my tired skin. As I opened them again, a thin cloud was floating across the acres of blue, a wispy layer that took me back to my childhood, to D-daddy’s office. To the truth.
I was rolling an iron car back and forth in front of the mahogany desk that was hyperbolically huge, reserved for mob men in the movies. A puff of smoke that looked precisely like the cloud floating above my head ascended from D-daddy’s cigar. Perhaps it’s because smell is most closely related to memory, but that warm, woodsy scent of tobacco always relaxes me and puts me back into the safety of D-daddy’s office, into the lap of a man too big and strong to ever fail.
Louise was sitting across from him, her legs up on the desk. She was babysitting me that weekend, and we had just finished having lunch with D-daddy and Lovey.
How they got on the topic I couldn’t tell you, but D-daddy was saying, “One of Truman’s advisors made a speech in South Carolina at the end of the war about how the fighting might be over but not to be fooled: We were in the midst of a cold war.” He paused, chewing on the end of that sweet-smelling stick. “It must have been 1946—no, 1947—and our mayor, who had been at the speech, decided then and there that the town had to snap into action.” I remember D-daddy laughing here, his blue eyes gleaming in that way that made you remember how unstoppably good-looking he had been in his youth. “Kooky fellow, that old mayor . . . Anyway, instead of making emergency kits or building bomb shelters, he used city funds to tattoo blood types onto the entire town. That way, if we were hit, and people were running around in the midst of blown-off arms and burning buildings, the rescue crews would know which transfusions to give right off the bat.”
D-daddy had laughed again here, taking another puff of his cigar, the smoke billowing. Through that hearty chortle he had said, “If the Soviets had decided to nuke us, the cockroaches would’ve been lucky to survive.” Then he’d taken off the suit jacket that I never saw him without, pulled his neatly starched and pressed shirt out of his pants and lifted it two inches to reveal a distinctive “A” on milky white skin that hadn’t seen the sun in decades.
“Why we all agreed to that insanity, I’ll never know. But the horrors of war can make men do strange, strange things.”
I remember learning in science class that the more we remember a memory, the more distorted it becomes in our mind. I’d never thought of that black “A.” It was hidden in the recesses of my consciousness, waiting for a moment when I would need it. I wasn’t going to say anything to Mom, of course, but my heart sank all the same.
I closed my eyes, going through it again, picturing the piece of paper in the hospital with Lovey’s “A+” on it, D-daddy’s tattoo of the same. And I could see that Punnett square I’d looked up online, burned into my memory. The possible offspring from two A positive parents were A positive, A negative and O negative or O positive. That was it. No B.
But, on the other hand, one A positive parent, with the help of an AB parent or a B parent could create a B offspring. A B. Like my mom.
Everything I had known about Lovey, everything I had thought, how I had revered the way she stood by D-daddy through thick and thin, the way she had taken care of him tirelessly for the years he was confined to that chair had changed now. Because theirs hadn’t been true love at all. It had been a marriage of deception, a relationship filled with lies, affairs and an illegitimate daughter. It hit me all at once that the man I had thought nearest to God wasn’t even my biological grandfather. And, like that tattoo needle, the thought seared into me, making a permanent impression.
Lovey
A Souvenir
August 1951
“Honeymoon” is the most beautiful word in the English language. I figured Momma must have been right when she said that because as Dan and I boarded the plane in New York, where we had stopped over for a couple of days, I could scarcely contain myself. Imagine, I thought, me, on a Pan Am flight to Cuba of all things. We were dressed in our daytime finest for the occasion. I was wearing my best traveling suit complete with a wide-brimmed hat with a thick, satin bow tied around it. I could still practically see in my mind’s eye the beautifully wrapped package with the colorful poster inside. “Fly to Cuba via Pan American World Airways System.” That could only mean one thing: I was officially a world traveler.
I had been on a plane before, I reminded myself, walking a little taller through the airplane’s corridor, Montaldo’s hatbox firmly in hand, purse draped casually over my arm. But that had been TWA.
“Imagine,” I whispered to Dan. “Getting to fly on a real-life, double-decker airplane.”
Dan squeezed my gloved hand as a flight attendant in her gray-blue suit, hat perched jauntily atop her head, walked by. “This will be the first of many, many flights like this one. Don’t you worry, my beauty.”
I sat down in my spacious leather seat the color of fresh cream, opened my ashtray and lit a cigarette, my husband leaning over to kiss me. I hadn’t smoked before our wedding, but Dan had picked up the habit during the war, and I thought I was unfathomably glamorous, puffing and exhaling in long, slow drags. Dan and his father had gone on and on about real Cuban cigars, f
rom Havana, no less. And I couldn’t wait to see Dan, fedora atop his head, lounging by the private beach that the flyer touted, puffing on a real Cuban cigar.
“What do you think it will be like?”
“What do I think what will be like?”
I smiled and tapped him on the arm. “Cuba, of course.”
“My parents said that the Hotel Nacional is absolutely splendid,” Dan said.
It was a generous gift, especially for in-laws who were less than thrilled with not only their son’s elopement but also his choice in brides. But I would win them over one day, I reassured myself often. And, if not, so be it. I had Dan now, and that was all the approval I needed.
My parents, on the other hand, as soon as they had been invited to Dan’s family’s sweeping Victorian in the heart of New Bern’s downtown, situated right on the Neuse River, had forgotten all about their thwarted plans to marry me off to Ernest Wake. They wanted me to have money, sure. But if I could have money and love? Well then, so much the better.
I had stared so long at the brochure for the hotel that I practically had it memorized. Rendezvous of the Americas, I thought again. The phrase was almost as romantic as Dan’s proposal had been.
I squeezed Dan’s hand over the armrest as we took off, sailing up higher, higher and higher even still until we were cruising, leaving behind our old lives as single people, climbing to heights that I hadn’t yet dreamed of, much less experienced. Two flight attendants wheeled a table, complete with white tablecloth, toward us, popped the top off of a bottle of champagne with much ado, and said, “We hear congratulations are in order, lovebirds.”
I could feel myself blushing, realizing that this whole affair had me feeling like a girl of eighteen again, not the woman of twenty-five that I actually was. “Oh, that looks absolutely marvelous,” I said, realizing that this dream of a trip hadn’t even really started yet, and I was already dreading it being over.
“Did you know,” I said to Dan, “that Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth have stayed at the Nacional?”
He smiled at me adoringly. “The Rockefellers too.”
I sighed. “There’s just no telling who we might spot.”
And though the celebrity sightings were less numerous than I had dreamed, the display of fruit on the chest in our room was like nothing I’d ever seen. At home, fruit was muscadine grapes, strawberries, and an apple and orange here and there. But sitting here, on the dresser in our vibrant room, was practically a harvest of things I’d never heard the names of. Mango, papaya, kiwi. And yet, they had Coca-Cola just like home.
Slipping into a bikini the exact color of those Pan Am uniforms with tiny white print all over, I said, “Oh, Dan, I can’t wait to get down to the pool.” I had already become comfortable undressing in front of my new husband, something that I couldn’t have even dreamed of in the previous months. But the moment we were pronounced husband and wife, we became one flesh, after all. And, free from the misshaping and stretch marks of childbearing as I was, there wasn’t much to hide.
“I suggest that we have cocktails and the biggest lunch we can dream,” Dan said, squeezing my hand.
As we sat down under one of the black umbrellas flanking the pool and admired the glamorous awnings over the cabanas, I couldn’t help but stare through my sunglasses at a conspicuous group of men, in full suits, eating lunch by the pool. They were talking loudly, clearly Americans, and, just by the way their cigars teetered on the edges of their ashtrays between bites, you could tell they were important.
“Dollar-a-year men,” Dan leaned over and whispered to me.
I nodded, trying to be impressed but unable to control the thoughts that dining across from America’s political elite was one thing. Rita Hayworth was quite another.
Our starched server with the thick accent came to the table, and, tossing my menu to the side gaily, I said, “I believe I’ll have a bowl of coconut ice cream.”
“Coconut ice cream?” Dan questioned, laughing. “For lunch?”
“I’m on my honeymoon, darling. It’s hot. And I’d like to have ice cream.” I pulled my sunglasses down so he could see the twinkle in my eyes. “Ice cream has a very special place in my heart, if you’ll remember.”
Dan smiled. “Well then, ice cream it is.”
I had never had coconut ice cream before, but it topped anything I’d ever eaten ten to one. “Fields of white velvet,” I said to Dan, licking my lips and pointing my spoon in the direction of the bowl. “That’s what this ice cream brings to mind. It is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted.”
“Well then, I believe you should have another bowl.”
I heard my momma’s voice in the back of my mind. Lynn, desserts are for special occasions, and then only one.
But this was the most special occasion. So I said, “You know what, my love, I believe I will.”
I thought that that ice cream would remain my most vivid and special remembrance of that trip. That is, until a few weeks later when I realized that Dan and I had brought back a souvenir that we would cherish for the rest of our lives: Sally.
Annabelle
Ants Marching
Sin is rarely hardest on the sinner. I know now that Lovey’s right about that one. Because, while I was up all night, every night wondering, stressing, plotting and planning, Ben slept as soundly as a worriless child in that bed beside me.
How he and Laura Anne snuck around without worrying they’d get caught, I’ll never know. Because, as I pulled into Holden’s driveway that day, my butterflies had butterflies. I wish I could have said that the jitters I was feeling that day were out of love. But they weren’t. They were out of fear and anxiety. They were out of the worry that I would get caught, that someone would see. And I was only drinking coffee, for Lord’s sake—decaf, at that.
I had taken my parents’ extra car to Holden’s. They thought I was on my way to Salisbury, but I was going to make an unexpected pit stop. As Holden’s back door pushed against its springs and slammed shut, I instantly felt more comfortable. It was all the same—in the sunroom, at least. The sofa with the cashmere Ralph Lauren Black Label blanket thrown casually across the back. The bookcase filled with prizewinning, hand-carved decoys and antique guns leaned against the wall. The smell of Old Spice and pine and Labrador mixing together into a cologne of well-bred, moneyed masculinity.
And then there was Holden, in shorts and an oxford with rolled-up sleeves, Gucci loafers and, for a hint of something new, the monogrammed belt buckle had been replaced by Hermès’s signature “H” buckle with an alligator strip running around his taut waist. Holden stepped over the threshold from the kitchen to the sunroom to embrace me. He held me for a long time there and kissed my hair, somehow instinctively knowing that trying for more was too much too soon.
“My house instantly looks better when you walk through the door,” he said.
I smiled, feeling a familiarity about it all that was somewhat comforting.
“Can I get you a drink? Maybe a Veuve Clicquot?”
“What are you doing with Veuve Clicquot lying around?”
He turned, his hand on the refrigerator door and, looking wistfully past me into the space behind my head said, with a prophet’s voice, “I hoped that you would smell it and come back to me.”
We both broke down into a fit of laughter, and, even with my life gone so terribly wrong, it felt so good to laugh. I leaned over the marble island as Holden poured and handed me a wineglass. “No champagne flute?”
He shook his head. “I went to a wine tasting recently and they told me that champagne flutes are made for aerating bad champagne. Good champagne should be enjoyed from a wineglass.”
I thought of Ben, a brand-new guilt surging, a pain stabbing right through me like a shard of glass in a hurricane. I thought of the RV, of the laughter and the love and the simplicity of that life and how I wished that
I could lasso that moment and pull it back to me.
But I can’t, I reminded myself, standing up a little straighter, my shoes tapping on the hardwood floor as I slipped them off and curled up in a chair in the adjoining den, directly across from the piano. Holden sat down at the keys and began to play, periodically looking over his shoulder at me. “So, you know how I feel about you, right?”
I walked over to him and set my glass on the piano, remembering that I couldn’t drink it. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at that business-as-usual comment. “Yes, Holden, I know how you feel about me.”
“So is it forward of me to ask why you’ve come here today?”
I shrugged even though he was focusing on the concerto flying from the keys like a horse jumping over its hurdles. “I’m not really sure,” I said. “I guess I’ve gotten your texts, and I’ve read your e-mails, and I’m wondering what you’re really hoping to gain from all of this.”
His fingers stopped all at once, ten ants marching home to their queen suddenly stomped by a careless human shoe. He turned on the slick, black bench and said quietly, “You. I’m hoping to gain you.”
I sat down on the bench beside him, and he put his arm around me. I could feel the tears coming as I laid my head on his shoulder. His comfortable, predictable, even-keel shoulder. He rested his head on mine. “I want another chance, Annabelle,” he whispered. “No big to-do that you don’t want. No my mother pressuring you into wearing pink seersucker. None of that. I just want you for who you are, and I don’t ever want you to change. I want you to be the mother of my children.”
That simple sentence was all it took for my misting over to become a huge puddle on the floor.
I could see his eyes glazing over, as he whispered, “What’s wrong, Ann? What’s going on?”
I sniffed and composed myself. “I’m pregnant,” I said simply.
His head popped up, and I could see the shock pass over his face. He stood up so quickly I nearly fell over. He began pacing the length of the living room. I figured that being pregnant with another man’s baby was enough to scare him away and that, now, no Ben, no Holden, I was really, truly alone.
Lies and Other Acts of Love Page 21