I raised my eyebrows. “Well, since you all failed miserably at granting Lovey’s lifelong Episcopal priest marriage wish, someone had to step up.”
“You never know,” Louise said, “it might not be too late for me.”
We all started down the hall, I think collectively relieved to never be returning to this place that, while stylish, had equaled death in all of our minds. “You might be a little too Buddhist for that,” Sally said.
Louise shrugged. “Ah, so close.”
“Maybe I’ll go after a priest too,” Lauren said.
“Oh,” Mom interjected, “so not Doug or John or maybe my husband?”
“That phase over?” Martha asked.
“I think I’ll stick to the single ones,” Lauren said. “In fact this new guy I’m dating—”
We all laughed, interrupting her sentence, and, as I slammed my car trunk shut and listened to the women remaining in my life banter with each other, I knew that Louise was right: Lovey and D-daddy were absolutely everywhere.
Lovey
Lies That Matter
February 1960
My momma always said that the snow can bury secrets, but, at some point, the frost thaws, the spring comes, and whatever you were hiding comes to light. But sometimes, the truth comes out while the snow is still falling all around you.
“She died,” Dan said.
Those two simple words made that panic rise to the surface briskly and painfully enough that I completely ignored the fact that my husband was standing at our back door, at our house in Bath, breath blowing in the winter air, with a whimpering, swaddled child, who, from the sound of it, couldn’t have been more than a few hours old. My mind catapulted to my girls, vomit rising in the back of my throat.
But that’s impossible, I thought. You just checked on them.
Feeling my heart come back into my chest from where it had been racing around the solar system, I stilled my breath and asked, “Who? Who died?”
“Her mother,” Dan said, as though that was supposed to clear up anything at all.
The baby began to wail loudly as he shouted over her noise, “Can we keep her?”
“For God’s sake, Dan, she’s not a kitten.” But it registered that I also sounded like I was referring to a stray pet when I said, “I’m sure we can find her a good home.”
I took the baby from him and turned to go inside. I sat down beside the hearth in the kitchen, feeling the roaring flames return the heat to my body as he said, “She must be starving. I don’t think she’s eaten at all.”
I looked around the kitchen helplessly, knowing we didn’t have any formula or anything else appropriate for a baby to eat. I looked into that beautiful, red, wailing face, and that maternal pull, the tug in your loins that makes mothering feel so right, got the better of me. I knew in the instant I saw that beautiful face, despite what I said, that this little girl belonged to me too, that she would slide seamlessly into the staircase of pigtails that I was raising.
And, without even thinking about it, I did something that was as natural to me as making the beds and boiling the coffee. I opened my shirt and fed this helpless thing that was completely alone in the world save Dan and me.
“Can you do that?” Dan asked.
“Well, I’m still nursing Louise, so, yes, milk is milk, I presume. I don’t know what other option we have in the middle of the night in the middle of a farm.”
Louise was only ten months old then, and I had breastfed her longer than the other girls, confident that she would be my last child, wanting to savor those fleeting seconds of babyhood, that deep connection that sharing your body with another can bring, while I could.
“So, could you please explain why I’m nursing someone else’s child in the middle of the night?”
Dan sat down in a chair beside me, put his head in his hands, and, a moment later, I realized that he was crying. “I was going to lie to you,” he said. “But you have to know the truth. You have to forgive me, Lynn.”
I looked down at the heavy eyelids beside my breast and, more than my curiosity or the sinking feeling that what was coming next was an explanation that I wasn’t going to want to hear, it occurred to me how much things change. When Dan and I had reconnected again and again, our love for each other was like the fire in the hearth. It was intense, passionate, heated. But, over the years, through childbirth and diapers, scrimping and saving, getting promotions and losing jobs, the person beside you in the church pew morphs from the object of your near-addictive love obsession into something more akin to the sterling silver service on the sideboard. You can always count on it being there even though you don’t really use it in the same way you once did. And that burning love you had for another person reshapes itself into the love you have for your family, that united front against the world that you have become with him at the helm.
And so I made a command decision. Where I had had four daughters moments earlier, I now had five. “Get the suitcases and clear as many of the girls’ things as you possibly can into them,” I said, stroking the cheek of the now-sleeping baby in my arms.
He looked up from where his head had been in his hands and asked, “What?”
“Well, we have to move, obviously. There’s no way on earth I can explain this if we’re still living in the same town. We’ll move on, start over, and people will just assume we had these five little girls the whole time.”
Dan kissed me hurriedly and ran toward the door, like a child on his way for ice cream, afraid that Mother would change her mind. “Wait,” he said. “Couldn’t we just say she was adopted?”
“Adopted,” I spat. “She’s your child, for heaven’s sake.”
Dan was crumbling fast. And I think that’s how you know that you’re really meant for a person. When, in the trail of their crumbling, you can be upright and unwavering.
“What will we tell our parents?” he practically cried, sitting down again. “Won’t they be a little suspicious when we arrive with this child we never told them about?”
I put my finger up to my chin. “We’ll tell them the doctor thought the baby was sick, that she wouldn’t survive to term. We didn’t want them to be hurt by the news, so we never told them.”
He looked up at me, his elbows on his knees. “Will they believe that?”
I shrugged. “They don’t really have a choice because neither of us is ever, ever going to stray from that story.” I raised my eyebrows. “Right?”
“But her birth certificate . . .” Dan trailed off.
“Well, we’ll have to get her a new one,” I heard myself snap. I took a deep breath and whispered, “I’ll have to adopt her, I suppose.”
“You would . . .” Dan stood up and wrapped me in the most sincere hug of his life, the tears in his throat choking him, keeping him from finishing a question that didn’t need an answer. He already knew the answer because he knew me.
He pulled back and looked at me. “How can I ever deserve you again?”
“You really can’t,” I said. And I meant it. “But I damn well expect you to spend the rest of your life trying.”
And I can truly say that he stood by that promise.
That night is, I believe, the crux of my life. Knowing that my husband had strayed from me broke something inside me. But maybe it was something that needed to be broken. Walking away from the life we had built never even occurred to me. Raising Jean as my own was the best decision I ever made and perhaps the easiest. But those hard decisions, the big ones, the ones that really matter, have always come easily to me, especially in a crisis. I make a decision and I stand by it. Period.
And so, leaving behind most of our worldly possessions, we piled in the car before sunrise and left Bath in the dust, heading up the road toward Raleigh to take the job that the heavens had so benevolently opened for Dan two weeks prior. We had no place to live, n
o furniture and no idea what the future held. But we had the hurtful, shameful, family-destroying truth to hide. And we had another daughter to raise, a little white lie, a secret that would thread the seven of us together like pearls on a string forever. And, though my husband had once been the one that had made me feel that love like cream rising to the surface, it was my girls now.
And that, as it goes without saying, was more than enough.
I told myself riding into the sunrise that early morning, Jean warm and fast asleep in my arms, that Dan and I could get back to that place of love and trust where we had once resided. After the secrets were buried and a new truth was formed in the lives of our family members, we would repair that fissure and become as strong as we once were. I looked back at my four other little angels, their eyes closed, snoring in the backseat, and then I looked at Dan’s profile, the way the sun seemed to radiate off of him less glowingly than it once had. And the thought, though I willed it not to, crossed my mind: The lies that matter most are the ones we tell ourselves.
Readers Guide for
Lies and Other Acts of Love
BY KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY
Discussion Questions
Throughout the novel, Lovey and Annabelle reflect on the wisdom and life views observed and obtained from the women in their lives. How does this knowledge inform the way both women approach their various personal relationships? How do Lovey and Annabelle relate and differ in this regard?
As soon as Ben set his eyes on Annabelle, he immediately believed he had met his wife. Have you ever been this instantly sure of something? Do you believe in love at first sight?
Do you think that Ben and Annabelle’s whirlwind marriage was an easy escape for her from her previous engagement? If you were Annabelle’s friend, would you have tried to talk her out of making this quick decision, or would you advise her to live in the moment?
Between college, the war and the disapproval of their parents, Lovey and Dan had to wait a long time until they could be together. Did the wait end up strengthening or weakening their bond? Do you know any other couples that had to delay their relationships because life was in the way?
Annabelle notes: “Whether you’ve been married one year and have just moved to your husband’s hometown or you’ve been married well over half a century and think something is going to unlock the vault of your husband’s brain again, it’s really the same thing that keeps you going: hope.” Do you think that hope sometimes leads people away from reality? What are some examples of how a character’s hope was validated in the novel?
Annabelle describes her emotions just after meeting Ben: “I’d never felt so totally out of control. I’d never done something so unplanned. And it felt so good I didn’t want it to ever stop.” At what point, if at all, did you expect the buzz of their relationship to die down? Did you think things would continue indefinitely as Annabelle and Ben believed?
Was Annabelle a sympathetic character, or were you frustrated by her choices? Why do you think she jumps into relationships? Could she have benefited from having some time alone?
What were your views on Holden’s insistence that he and Annabelle belonged together? Did you believe it to be true? At what point, if at all, did you expect Annabelle to respond and agree to see him?
Each chapter in the novel begins with a lesson or observation that serves as a theme. Which themes or passage(s) strike you as the most insightful? What lessons or attitudes have been passed down in your family?
What does Annabelle’s friendship with Rob symbolize, and what does his role as a priest play in their relationship? Do you think that they would have befriended each other if they had met elsewhere?
For those who are fortunate, life often presents a choice. Were you surprised that Annabelle and Holden did not end up together? If you were Annabelle, would you have taken the road less familiar, or settled for contentment with Holden?
The title of this novel is Lies and Other Acts of Love. What are some of the big lies that were told in this book? Do you think that lies must be a part of a relationship in order to keep things afloat, or do you believe that the truth always finds its way?
In what ways did both Annabelle and Lovey change by the end of the novel? What are some of the biggest lessons each of these characters learned?
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Dear Carolina
BY KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY
AVAILABLE FROM BERKLEY BOOKS
Khaki
Salad Greens
I designed a special scrapbook for each of my children. A custom-made blue or pink album with white polka dots and a fat bow tied down the side, the front center proudly displaying a monogram that was given to each of you. I take those books out every now and then. Sometimes I add a new photo or memento. Other times I gaze at the pictures and marvel at how quickly the eyes-closed-to-the-world phase of infancy morphs into the headfirst-plunging alacrity of toddlerhood.
Other times, like tonight, with your book in particular, my sweet Carolina, I sit on the floor of our family room overlooking my favorite field of corn and simply stare at the cover, running my finger across the scrolling monogram. It’s only a name, we have been reminded since middle school in what has now become perhaps the most cliché of Shakespeare’s musings. But, in what is certainly not the first exception to a Shakespearean rule, that name means more than the house your daddy built in this field where we spent so much time falling in love or the sterling silver service that has been in our family for generations.
It means more because that name wasn’t always yours. And you weren’t always ours.
I was, just like a mother should be, the first person to hold you when you were born. Your birth mother, after thirty hours of labor, fainted when she saw you, perfect and round and red as a fresh-picked apple. I felt like holding you first would be like stealing money from the offering plate. But as soon as the misty-eyed nurse placed you in the nest of my arms, you quit crying, opened your eyes, and locked your gaze with mine. That instant of serendipity was fleeting because it wasn’t more than a few seconds that your birth mother was out.
When she came to, and I was there, cuddling this lighter-than-air you that she had grown inside herself for nine long months, I begged for forgiveness. But she said, “I’m glad you got to hold her first. You’ve been here this whole dern time too.”
I had given birth myself before, and that teary first introduction to a new life after a forty-week hormone roller coaster was fresh in my mind, still damp like the coat of paint on the wall in your nursery. But I’d never been on my feet, outside the bed, when four were breathing the air and then, with one tiny cry, there were five. To experience that kind of wonder is like being born again.
Even in that resurrection moment, I couldn’t have known that one day, I would get to hold you, swaddled and warm, all the time. But I did swear that I would do everything in my power to protect you, love you, and make sure you grew up good and slow as salad greens.
And so, my love, if you ever look at your book and think maybe it’s a little thicker than your sister’s and your brother’s, it’s only because instead of having one mother to save snapshots and write letters and remind you how much she loves you, you have two: the one who brought you into the world and the one who brought you up in it. And if you ever start feeling like maybe you got dealt a bad hand, that having a mother who raised you and a mother who birthed you is too tough, just remember this: You can never have too many people who love you.
Jodi
Jam Left on Too Long
Some things in life, they don’t even seem right. Like how you can preserve something grown right there in your own backyard and have it sitting on your pantry shelf ’til your kids have kids. And how them women down at the flea mall can write a whole Bible verse on one of them little grains of rice. And then there’s the thing I know right good: how ripping-y
our-finger-off-in-the-combine awful it is for a momma to have to give up her baby.
I think you already got to realizing, looking at me right now, messin’ in your momma and daddy’s white, shiny kitchen, that I ain’t just your daddy’s cousin. ’Course, you’re still so little now, you cain’t know how I grew you in me, how I birthed you, how I loved you and still do. But you give me that same crooked smile my daddy had and squeeze my finger real tight—and it’s like you know it all. Whenever I say that to your momma, she says back, “Of course she knows. Babies know everything.”
It’s a right simple thing to say. And simple is who I am and what I’ve been knowing my whole life. I cain’t say a lot of fancy things, and I don’t believe in making excuses as to why I’m not doing your raisin’. So here’s the boiled-down-lower-than-jam-left-on-too-long truth: I gave you up ’cause I loved you more than me. I gave you up ’cause I wanted you to have more. I gave you up ’cause, in some murky way, like that river that runs right through town, my heart knew that it’d take giving you up for us to really be family. I used to tell your momma I was scared that being in your life was gonna hurt you. But then she’d tell me, right simple: You can never have too many people who love you.
Khaki
Other Plans
My favorite interior design clients have always been those who approach me with file folders with magazine clippings seeping over the edges like overfilled cream puffs. They like the feel of this room, the light of this one. They can’t live another day without a chaise precisely like that.
I’d always been like one of those clients, totally in touch with what I wanted. So when your daddy Graham and I got married, I knew we’d have lots of babies. I already had your brother, Alex, of course. But when he was born, it was different. I was a very young widow living in Manhattan full-time, my design business and antiques store taking off. In short, I was busier than a Waffle House waitress when third shift let out.
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