“Why would she be with me?” Clary tries to leave the sneer out of her voice, but it’s still there, squatting inside her mind beside the anger that has simmered ever since the moment she hung up on her cousin.
“This could’ve been avoided, you know,” she’d said to Annie before she’d hung up. “Pastor Melton would’ve done just fine to perform the ceremony. But oh no, you just had to get Travis the Superstar to come riding back into town.”
Annie had spoken firmly, but lovingly, in response to Clary, as if she were the patient parent and Clary the stubborn, petulant child. Clary hates when she does that.
“Travis and I are old friends,” Annie explained, as if Clary didn’t know that, as if Clary wasn’t Travis’s friend way before Annie ever deigned to talk to him. “He’s a very popular preacher, and it’s an honor that he’s coming back here to do this for us.” Then she’d added, “He has more than a million Instagram followers.” That was when Clary had hung up on her, an exclamation point at the end of Annie’s sentence.
Faye snaps her fingers in Clary’s face, bringing her back to the present. “Clary!” she says. “You’re not paying a bit of attention! We are in crisis mode here!”
“When are we not in crisis mode, Mom?” Clary asks with a deep sigh. She is already bone weary of this wedding, and it hasn’t even started yet. She drops her purse on the table in the foyer and heads toward the kitchen at the back of the house. She points to the glass still clasped in Faye’s hand. “Is there more of that?” she asks. Her mother doesn’t usually keep alcohol in the house, so she’s going to take advantage of this while she can. She could use a drink.
“Clary!” Faye says, her voice rising louder. “Now is not the time to be making jokes!”
Clary hears the desperation in her mother’s voice, that voice that says, Make sure your seat belts are buckled and you know where the oxygen masks are located, because this is no longer normal turbulence. She stops walking and turns to look back at her mother.
“What?” she asks.
“No one can find her,” Faye says. “Best we can tell, no one’s heard from her since yesterday afternoon.” Yesterday afternoon was when Clary had hung up on Annie.
“Tracy,” she says, a memory of what Annie had said coming to her. “She’s with Tracy.” She’d been glad Annie would be out of her hair for the night.
Faye shakes her head grimly. “She lied,” she says. Now she is the one who sounds bone weary.
“Lied?” Clary asks. “Why in the world—”
Faye shakes her head harder. “We don’t know.”
Clary narrows her eyes at her mother. “Who is ‘we’?”
Faye shrugs. “Tracy. Scott. Hal.”
“You called Hal York?” Clary asks, looking around as if Hal is there, and she has somehow overlooked him.
“Of course I did!” Faye says. She is gesturing with the champagne glass, and Clary fears the liquid is going to slosh right out. “Annie is missing and that jackwad is out of prison and she’s about to get married and . . . I had to!”
Clary feels the need to take charge. “Mom,” she says, keeping her voice level. “I’m sure she’s just fine. She’s probably taking some time for herself. You know, getting ready for her big day.”
She’s surprised at herself. Her voice sounds so gentle and rational. She’s not usually the calm one. “Is Hal going to talk to Cordell Lewis?” she asks.
“He said not yet, that there’s no reason to suspect him.” Faye sniffs. “He said it would be pretty dumb of Lewis to do something like that so soon after getting out of prison. But I say, maybe he just snapped.” Faye eyes Clary. “People do snap, you know.”
Clary takes in the look on Faye’s face and wonders if her mother isn’t close to snapping herself. When they do find Annie, she’s going to tell her how selfish it was of her to put Faye through this. She could’ve called. It would’ve saved them all a lot of needless stress and drama. She wonders if this is somehow Annie’s way of punishing her for hanging up on her. But that seems extreme even for Annie.
“What does Scott say?” Clary asks, thinking perhaps she should talk to him even though Faye already has. Maybe there’s something he’s not telling Faye. Faye is not Annie’s mother, but she’s the closest thing she’s got. And there are things you don’t tell parents. Maybe he and Annie spent the night together, and Annie lied about it. And now maybe Scott is lying, too. Is Scott a good liar? She doesn’t know. In her mind, Scott is a cardboard cutout of a man, placed in the spot in Annie’s life that said Groom Goes Here. It was time for Annie to get married, and he appeared. Clary never asked many questions. Maybe she should have. It occurs to her that she barely knows Scott Hanson.
Faye shakes her head again. “He’s as clueless as we are.”
Clary racks her brain for anything Annie might’ve said recently, any clue as to where she could be. She thinks of the silence between them after she hung up. Usually Annie would wait a few hours and then call her back, ostensibly just to pester her some more but mostly to make sure they were going to be okay. She never could stand for there to be friction between them. Clary could let it drag on far longer, but Annie was compelled to fix things. It’s not like Annie to stay out of Clary’s hair for this long. The fact that she has is concerning, now that she thinks about it.
“Scott said, ‘If she was going to tell anyone, she’d have told you.’” Faye rolls her eyes. “Like I said, he’s clueless. Neither of you girls tell me a blessed thing.”
Faye is correct, but Clary doesn’t say so. Instead she says, “Mom, she’s just been spacey lately. This isn’t the first time she’s gone missing. I mean, the day Mica went missing, no one could find her the whole day. And she never told anyone what that was about.” As she thinks about Mica going missing, she recalls Annie volunteering to drive Minnie for her so she could look for him, which makes her feel worse about having hung up on her. Even if Annie was trying to strong-arm her into having a conversation with her ex she never intended to have.
“Maybe,” she says hopefully to Faye, “she’s got a secret lover. Maybe she’s thinking about calling off the wedding.”
Faye shoves her, but lightly. “Clary, stop it,” she says.
“Well, think about it, Mom. She’s out to lunch half the time. She avoids eye contact sometimes. She keeps mysteriously going missing with no explanation. I mean, it could be.”
“She’s just caught up with her wedding. It can be all-consuming. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Gee, thanks, Mom.”
“Oh, honey, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry.” She reaches for Clary with her free hand, her other hand still clutching that glass of champagne.
“It’s fine,” Clary says, even though the comment does sting. Mostly because Faye is right. Clary doesn’t understand. And she is starting to think she never will. Not that it matters, she tells herself. She doesn’t need a man to be happy. She isn’t a Disney princess who needs to be rescued. She’s a strong, capable woman who can take care of herself.
“The truth is,” Faye says, “if she were going to tell someone the truth, it would be you.”
Clary considers this. Annie certainly knows her secrets, but does Clary really know Annie’s? She feels Faye’s eyes upon her and comes up with an answer quickly, one that she hopes will calm Faye’s nerves some. “I doubt Annie has any secrets, Mom. Her life’s a pretty open book. She’s everyone’s darling. She’s overcome her hard past. And now she’s getting married.”
Faye looks dubious.
“She is! Annie is getting married in three days.” She reaches for the glass in her mother’s hand and takes it from her. Faye watches as she turns it up, tossing back the last of the champagne. Though it has gone warm and flat in Faye’s anxious grip, Clary swallows it all.
Kenny
He is walking the mile and a half home from Hops Haven. Well, weaving would be a better term for what he is doing. He is trying to sober up, hoping the walk will help him. His girl
friend will be there when he gets to his apartment. She has texted him to say she’s back from her trip and what should they do for dinner. She can’t wait to see him. But she doesn’t know what she is saying. When she sees him, she will be angry. She will take one look at him and know he is drunk. She will ask him why he was drinking on a Wednesday afternoon. On a workday. To his girlfriend, workdays are sacred.
He cannot tell her it is because of Annie, because of what happened last night. He was supposed to work from home today, but he couldn’t be there, alone with the memories and regret. Somehow he ended up at Hops Haven, sitting at a table with his laptop open as if he was working but drinking beer after beer instead. He just sat there thinking. And drinking. He cannot tell his girlfriend the truth about any of it. He has made a promise. Annie is his secret best friend. Even now, after everything that has happened. He cannot tell anyone the truth.
He walks along the familiar streets of the town of Ludlow, angry that he is still walking them all these years later. It is not his hometown; he was not born here like most of the other Ludlow residents. But he has been here since the seventh grade when his parents divorced and his mom relocated them. Long enough to call it home.
He thinks of his younger self, with all his plans and dreams. The sky was his limit, as his guidance counselor told him in high school. He could go to college; he was plenty smart enough. That wasn’t bragging, just a fact about him, the same as the fact that he has brown hair and hazel eyes and a metabolism that lets him eat just about anything he wants and not gain weight. After college, he would go somewhere where no one knew him, where no one decided things about him like the people here had.
But he hadn’t done any of those things. He’d stayed right here. He kicks at a tuft of grass growing within the sidewalk cracks, angry at it for being a tuft of grass in this town, on this sidewalk. But his balance is off because of the beers, and the kicking action causes him to stumble.
He reaches out to steady himself, but there is nothing around but air. He staggers but eventually rights himself. He stands on the sidewalk and takes a few deep breaths, his hands braced on his knees as he studies the cracks in the sidewalk. Step on a crack, he thinks, break your mama’s back. That’s it, right there, he thinks. The reason he won’t leave this town even with Annie gone.
Forget breaking your mama’s back—his leaving would break his mama’s heart. And he can’t bear to do so. He is all she has left. So he stays. He changes her light bulbs so she doesn’t have to climb on a stepladder to do it. He takes her to get a barbecue sandwich for supper at Brooks’ Barbecue once a week. He comes over in time to have breakfast with her on Christmas morning and buys her a corsage, which she proudly wears to church, on Mother’s Day. He takes her car in for servicing. And he sits beside her in church on Sundays while her aging friends cluck about what a good son he is and how they wish their sons were so attentive.
That he has found a girl who puts up with his relationship with his mom is nothing short of a miracle. A pretty girl, a girl who has a good job, also in IT, so they have that in common. A girl who actually understands what he does and doesn’t just nod vacantly when he tries to explain about a problem he had with siphoning data off a back-end database. A girl who doesn’t gripe about the times when he is silent, who doesn’t insist he constantly share how he feels. A girl who knows what it is to feel awkward around other people, because she is sometimes awkward herself. A girl who thinks that his devotion as a son is an indicator of what his devotion as a husband will be. And yet he has not asked her to marry him. He hasn’t put a ring on it, as the song says.
Like Annie intends to do.
His mind goes back to last night, even though he has spent the better part of the day trying to keep it from doing so. He recalls the look on her face, that one that made her look like everyone else and not the girl he loves. He feels the rage that welled up inside him, unbidden and uncontrolled. She saw it at the same time he felt it. Then he sees her running away from him.
Now she does not answer his calls. And the clock is ticking until she gets married and they can’t be secret best friends, or anything else, anymore. He fears that last night was actually the end for them, that their longtime friendship is over sooner than he expected it to be. He thought he had more time. But isn’t that what everyone always thinks?
A car goes by, and he looks up, feeling caught, feeling guilty, an old feeling he’s spent his adult life trying to outrun. But he isn’t that fast. He never was. He blinks as he watches Hal York’s truck drive slowly past him. York spots him, and Kenny does his best to stand up straight and meet the sheriff’s eyes until he is all the way past him. “Just look people in the eye,” Annie used to say to him. “I know you’re shy, but people don’t know that. They think you’re hiding something. Can you do that? For me?” She’d made him promise he would. She was always asking him to do hard things. And now she’s asking him to do the hardest thing he’s ever done, to let her go.
When Hal’s truck disappears, Kenny begins walking again, thinking that perhaps he will suggest to his girlfriend that they leave town. He can’t stay around to witness the festivities, the arrivals, the talk around town. He thinks of where they could go. Somewhere pretty and romantic like Charleston, with enough trappings to distract them both. He has the money to go most anywhere. He doesn’t spend much because he’s been saving for a life he will never have. It is long past time to let that life go and try to find a new one. He will tell his girlfriend it will be a getaway. Which is exactly what it is. He will get away from all this. He will get away and try his best not to look back.
His girlfriend falls for it, never the wiser. She doesn’t even seem to notice he’s drunk, probably because the sight of Hal York helped sober him up. She claps her hands together and gives him a big kiss, tells him he is the sweetest man she’s ever known and that she’s the luckiest girl in the world. He agrees with her even though it is nowhere near true. Instead he fetches them both a beer and sits beside her on the couch to look together at the computer to see where they should go. He feels happy, relieved. He will get out of here while the getting’s good. His mother will be fine for a weekend. She can go to church with someone else this Sunday. It won’t kill her.
They do decide to go to Charleston, which isn’t far enough away for him, but there isn’t time to arrange much else, and his girlfriend has to be back in time to prepare for the week. He leans over and kisses her when she says that, because she is so responsible, so solid and good. Not like Annie, with her whims and frivolity, always proposing the most preposterous things and expecting him to go along with them. “Let’s drive to Greenville and walk by the river!” she would say, and then expect him to jump up and do it no matter what else he might have going on. She used to love to walk by that river. Now they’ll never get to do that again.
“Let’s go tonight,” he says. He nibbles on her earlobe because he knows that drives her crazy, and he wants to drive her a little bit crazy, keep her distracted and unbalanced. He will keep her busy, take her to do anything her little heart desires. He will make the time pass by in a blur for them both.
But she pulls away and shuts the computer, giving him a sideways glance. “You know I can’t do that,” she says, scolding him like a child. “I’ve got work tomorrow. And besides, I just got home. I’ve got sixty-four emails in my inbox and two reports to write before I can even think of leaving. The earliest I can get away is tomorrow, late afternoon.” She kisses his cheek. “We can both work from home tomorrow morning, though.”
He rubs his hands along his thighs, dries his clammy palms on his shorts. He feels antsy, anxious. He takes a long pull from his beer and feels his girlfriend’s eyes watching him do it. He has to act normal. He sets the beer down and gives her a smile. “Sure, yeah,” he says. “Of course. We’ll leave tomorrow afternoon. Say around four? It’ll be a nice long weekend.”
She smiles back, and he can see she is reassured, that things are fine again. He feels relief
wash over him. They will leave town in less than twenty-four hours, and he will escape all this; he will put Annie Taft out of his mind.
Laurel
As she waits for a reply from Annie Taft’s fiancé, she works on her research into Annie Taft’s mother’s murder. She pulls up the articles from the Ludlow Ledger in the days and months after the murder and pores over each one again and again, curiosity compelling her, losing track of time until she looks up to find she is alone in the office and the sun is making its descent in the sky. She eats stale popcorn at her desk and calls it supper, enjoying the quiet dimness of the office. When the sky becomes full dark, she gives up on hearing from Scott Hanson and goes home, hoping her parents will have turned in for the night. Instead she finds her mother sitting at the kitchen table, dealing herself a hand of solitaire.
The sight makes Laurel feel both sad and afraid at the same time: sad for her mother, whose life seems so lonely, so solitary, even in the midst of her marriage and social standing and various committees she serves on. More than that, she is afraid that her own life will turn out much the same, which seems to be her mother’s sole intent since she arrived home. Glynnis keeps mentioning the few eligible young men in town or friends of friends whose sons live in Greenville and wouldn’t mind meeting a smart, pretty young woman from Ludlow. She could stay at the paper, settle down, and would that be so bad?
Yes, yes, it would, Laurel does not say. She just changes the subject, asks after her grandmother, or acts interested in one of Glynnis’s pet projects, which is usually enough to distract her mother for a while.
When Glynnis sees Laurel, she lays her cards on the table and reaches for today’s paper, folded beside her. She holds it up, pointing at the headline of the article Laurel wrote about the town’s reaction to Cordell Lewis’s release, specifically on the division between those who think he deserves to be released and those who think he deserves worse than he got. Laurel had had to basically threaten to quit if Damon didn’t let her run with the idea. Ludlow doesn’t like calling attention to its conflicts and scandals. She’d done man-on-the-street interviews and enjoyed it, collecting quotes and drawing conclusions. At first she’d used her voice recorder, but when the third person called her “fancy” or “highfalutin,” she’d stowed it in her purse and resorted to pen and paper, frantically scribbling down the words of her fellow citizens.
Only Ever Her Page 9