Lies and Other Acts of Love Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY

  Lies and Other Acts of Love

  “Lies and Other Acts of Love establishes Kristy Woodson Harvey as a major new voice in Southern fiction. This book stirred mighty emotions in me, yet left me with a sense of peace. A truly delightful read.”

  —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of The Rumor

  “A richly detailed, intergenerational tale of love, loss and loyalty. Harvey pulls the reader into the hearts and souls of her characters.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

  “Winsome and wise, Lies and Other Acts of Love shows us that true, strong marriages are forged as much out of pain as passion. Kristy Woodson Harvey treats both Annabelle, the young, naive heroine, and Lovey, the formidable matriarch, with skillful tenderness. Fans of Southern fiction, especially book clubs, will flock to this engaging, heartfelt story.”

  —Sonja Yoerg, author of House Broken and The Middle of Somewhere

  “Richly drawn Southern characters . . . A story so perfectly detailed that we could imagine ourselves on a wraparound porch in the South with a tall glass of sweet tea. Lies and Other Acts of Love will grab you by the heartstrings and pull hard. A perfect story about the lies we tell and the secrets we keep—all in the name of love.”

  —Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, authors of Your Perfect Life and The Status of All Things

  Dear Carolina

  “Kristy Woodson Harvey weaves a story around characters with rich, complicated lives we all identify with . . . Beautifully shows how a family comes to be. Not only by blood, but also by choice.”

  —Jodi Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Betting the Rainbow

  “Southern fiction at its best. [Dear Carolina] shows us that love is not without sacrifice, and there’s little in life that doesn’t go down easier with a spoonful of jam. Beautifully written.”

  —Eileen Goudge, New York Times bestselling author of The Replacement Wife

  “Dear Carolina is like the Southern women within its pages and those who will love this book: sweet as sweet tea on the outside and strong as steel on the inside . . . Woodson Harvey is a natural.”

  —Ann Garvin, author of On Maggie’s Watch and The Dog Year

  “Southern to the bone and full of engaging characters . . . Captures your heart and doesn’t let go; [Woodson Harvey’s] keen insights into a mother’s love will stay with you long after the last page.”

  —Kim Boykin, author of Palmetto Moon

  TITLES BY KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY

  Dear Carolina

  Lies and Other Acts of Love

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Copyright © 2016 by Kristy Woodson Harvey.

  Readers Guide copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC.

  Excerpt from Dear Carolina by Kristy Woodson Harvey copyright © 2015.

  Excerpt from Slightly South of Simple copyright © 2017 by Kristy Woodson Harvey.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® and the “B” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-98707-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woodson Harvey, Kristy.

  Lies and other acts of love / Kristy Woodson Harvey.—Berkley trade paperback edition.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-98706-3

  1. Family secrets—Fiction. 2. Matrilineal kinship—Fiction. 3. Life-change events—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.O6785L54 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015018199

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / April 2016

  Cover photo © Rafa Elias / Getty Images.

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_3

  For my grandparents, Joe and Ola Rutledge, a living example of true, forever love

  Acknowledgments

  If a first novel is a dream come true, a second novel is a dream taking hold. Thank you to Katherine Pelz for choosing me for this unimaginably wonderful adventure. Life should come with an editor like you. To everyone at Berkley: You are phenomenal, and you make me look good. Thanks for all your hard work.

  Bob Diforio, agent extraordinaire, thank you for your constant support and belief in me. It means the absolute world.

  A million thanks to my Tall Poppy Writer friends who are not only absurdly talented but also unfailingly generous with their time, advice and support. You ladies prove that this is not a competition; it is a sisterhood.

  Roxanne Jones, Julie Schoerke, Chuck Gold, Holley Pearce and Cindy Jackson, thank you for letting me do what I love. None of this happens without you, and you are so very appreciated every single day.

  My mom, Beth Woodson, perhaps works as hard on my books as I do. Thank you for the hours upon hours you put in helping me in every imaginable way, and for reading—and loving—every single draft. My dad, Paul Woodson, thanks for always believing in me, even when I was down 0-5 in the second set. I love you both so very much!

  My grandparents, Ola and Joe Rutledge, really are an example of what a lifetime of love should look like. Thank you for showing us all the way and for being the start of this wonderful family that I’m so proud to be a part of.

  Penn Peninger, thank you for sharing your stories, for knowing that my asking which fabric you liked better as a toddler would lead to something, and for making the world’s best peanut butter crackers.

  Elizabeth Cook, thank you for giving a seventeen-year-old a newspaper column and making her realize that nothing felt better than stringing words together on a page.

  Thank you to my two Wills for making every day amazing, for reminding me what matters and for celebrating the little things as if they are the big ones. You two are, quite simply, everything.

  Dottie Harvey, Nancy Sanders, Cathy Singer and Anne O’Berry, thank you for (im)patiently waiting to read my next manuscripts and always making them better.

  To the bloggers, bookstore owners, fellow authors, reporters and media pros who have embraced my books and me so fully, I wish I could name you all here, but I trust that you know who you are. Humbled does not even begin to describe how I feel at the way you have supported me. Thank you from the very, very deepest part of my heart for sharing this work I love so much with the world. You are at the top of the list of people I’m grateful for every day.

  All of you readers are who I think of when I sit down at the computer. Those of you who have e-mailed me, written reviews, commented on my blogs, come to my events . . . There aren’t enough thank-yous. Your kindness always came at just the right moment and is appreciated
more than you can possibly imagine. You are helping me live my dream every single day. I hope something in these pages inspires you to live yours too.

  Contents

  Praise for the novels of Kristy Woodson Harvey

  Titles by Kristy Woodson Harvey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Annabelle: Storm Chasers

  Lovey: The Light

  Annabelle: Fanfare

  Lovey: Proper or Fitting

  Annabelle: Fading into Him

  Lovey: Bring Her Back Up

  Annabelle: Full-Throttle

  Lovey: Chance

  Annabelle: Exactly What He Wants

  Lovey: My Best Friend’s Gumption

  Annabelle: Per-fect

  Lovey: The Best Gift in Life

  Annabelle: Be Like Lovey

  Lovey: A Thing About Marriage

  Annabelle: We’re Living

  Lovey: Grounded

  Annabelle: Perfect Seeds

  Lovey: The Nicest Boy

  Annabelle: A Special Place

  Lovey: Little Lies

  Annabelle: In Your Head

  Lovey: Rather Serious

  Annabelle: A Dot on the Radar Screen

  Lovey: The Exact Man

  Annabelle: Mad Game

  Lovey: Old School

  Annabelle: Sold Out

  Lovey: Why Men Stray

  Annabelle: Throwback

  Lovey: The Other Road

  Annabelle: So Soon

  Lovey: Uprooted

  Annabelle: Genetic Mutation

  Lovey: A Souvenir

  Annabelle: Ants Marching

  Lovey: One Big Secret

  Annabelle: Feet over Head

  Lovey: Gypsies

  Annabelle: Absolutely Everything

  Lovey: Weight

  Annabelle: Drowning

  Lovey: All of Our Prayers

  Annabelle: Perfect Families

  Lovey: Safe and Happy

  Annabelle: Invisible Hand

  Lovey: Lies That Matter

  Readers Guide

  Special Excerpt from Dear Carolina

  Excerpt from Slightly South of Simple

  Annabelle

  Storm Chasers

  My grandmother, Lovey, says that there are two types of people in the world: the kind who flee to the shelters at the first threat of a hurricane, and the kind who wait it out, hovering over their possessions as if their fragile lives offer any protection against a natural mother that can take them out of the world as quickly as she brought them into it.

  I come from a long line of the hovering kind.

  As I sit across from my grandmother in her stately living room, the dimmed bulbs of the chandeliers reflecting off the scotch that I most certainly will not drink, I laugh as she says, “Well, why wouldn’t I go to the beach? I’ve ridden out every other hurricane of the last half century there. Haven’t blown away yet.”

  Her accent, Southern, proper, moneyed and with that particular Eastern North Carolina flair, is one that you rarely hear anymore. And I would listen to it forever. It is the voice in my head, imparting her wisdom, and I know it will remain so for the rest of my life.

  She pushes the stylish bangs of her silver hair, cut increasingly shorter as the years have gone by, and I can’t help but see that glimmer in her eye, the one of her mother, a grand lady whom I met only a handful of times but whose presence is stamped in my memory like the check endorser at my daddy’s office. It is the same glimmer of my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt, one of those sturdy forces that, during the Second World War, moved with her war correspondent husband. While the bombs rained down on London every night, she refused to flee or even gather her children into the bomb shelters under the street. Instead, she bathed her small sons, scrubbed their dinner plates, laid her damp dischcloth over the sink and steeled her jaw against the Germans attempting to take her right to parent as usual. She sealed her fate by signing every letter to my great-grandmother, “I’ll write you in the morning.”

  My own mom, nearly a foot taller yet lacking those long, thin, graceful features of my grandmother’s, chimes in, “Mother, that is absolutely ridiculous. You will stay right here. There’s nothing you can do if a storm comes, and I’m not going to sit around here wringing my hands that you’re floating down the street in the rushing floodwaters.”

  I smile into my buttery scotch, as my mother has never been one to flee from the storm. At least once a day the city manager she handpicked to advise her on all political dealings will say, Mayor, I suggest you refuse to comment on that matter.

  But she, like the women before her, is incapable of turning the other way, of snuggling warmly in the cellar until the tornado passes.

  “Have you forgotten who’s the mother and who’s the child here?” Lovey asks.

  It is then that I begin to wonder: Am I a storm chaser too? Would I walk to the market in spite of the shrapnel? Now I know. Sometimes it’s best not to ask the questions if you’d rather not learn the answers.

  Lovey

  The Light

  My momma always told me that honesty was the most important thing in life. But I’ve never understood why people are so hell-bent on honesty. It’s not the truth that sets you free. The truth is the thing that destroys lives, that shatters the mirror. The truth is selfish and shameful, and better kept to oneself. In fact, I’m quite sure that the only things that paper-clip any of our lives together are the white lies. They are the defibrillators that bring us back when we were on the brink of succumbing to the light.

  As I lie in my four-poster mahogany bed with the giant canopy, the one I made love to my husband in for decades, I raise myself onto my elbows and study his features across the room as the moonbeams stream through the crack in the curtains, pouring into the open, snoring mouth, revealing the secret that the teeth seen in the daylight are only another ruse, that time has taken yet another one of my husband’s rights; the confinement to the hospital bed is not the only indignity.

  He startles awake and, as so often happens in the middle of the night, turns his head from side to side, almost frantically, searching for me, the one who has been beside him since he was scarcely more than a boy. It is a clear reminder that, though I have always perceived myself as completely dependent on him, the leaning goes both ways. “Lovey,” he says, in his almost devastatingly lucid middle-of-the-night voice.

  “Yes, my darling.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  I smile the heartbreaking smile of a master who knows she should put the dog down, allow it some peace. But the bile soars at the thought of him being gone from me, and I steel myself once again. “Not a thing, sweetheart. Are you all right?”

  “As long as you’re here, I’m perfect.”

  As he settles back down to sleep, to the snoring that is my morning rainfall, I remember the last time he whispered that in my ear, only days before the stroke, as we danced slow and close in the kitchen after a nightcap on the patio.

  Short-term memories, I remind myself, not letting my mind wander back to those early years together, to the days we met, to the nights I knew I’d found my true love. Living in the past, I’ve always thought, is a sign of dementia. Slipping into those old memories, dwelling on the “what was” instead of the “what could be” means that it’s almost over. And so I will myself to stay in the here and now, though it becomes harder and harder.

  Tomorrow, I remind myself, we have an appointment with that new neurologist. He’ll have some answers. He’ll have a cure.

  And as I relax back into a pile of down pillows, the thought, though I have willed it not to, crosses my mind: The lies that m
atter most are the ones we tell ourselves.

  Annabelle

  Fanfare

  My Lovey is the one who gave me my name. Annabelle. When she gave birth to my oldest aunt, the first of five daughters, she received Tasha Tudor’s A is for Annabelle as a gift. She had dreams of petticoats and pantaloons and parasols and all of those other prissy “p’s” that a woman dreams she might lose herself in when she is expecting her first child, those fantasies that can only ensue before one has experienced the realities of spit-up and cloth diapers and sleep deprivation of levels that boggle the mind. It became apparent five daughters later that the Annabelle in the story really was nothing more than a beautiful china doll, a representation of something that didn’t exist in her hair-pulling, clothes-stealing, fighting-over-the-bathroom home.

  But when I was born, all of that was going to change, thought my grandmother. I was a bit of a miracle baby, the result of a lot of prayer and some rather primitive, cost-prohibitive fertility treatments. So, this time, Lovey had those Tasha Tudor dreams all over again with a granddaughter that could be free from the burden of sibling rivalry. Lovey dressing me in the finest, most impractical fashion and saying, “‘A’ is for Annabelle, Grandmother’s doll,” is my earliest childhood memory.

  I was telling my husband Ben all of this, lying beside him in our bed at Lovey and D-daddy’s beach house.

  Instead of responding, he turned his head, smiled and said, “We have to get a boat.”

  It was the same thing Ben had said to me every single morning of the beach trip, as we woke, the sun bathing wood-paneled walls, its shadow stretching and spreading like a dog after a nap. I turned over and kissed the rippled chest of my—unbelievably—husband.

  He was so good-looking, so romantic, so unnaturally calm that I couldn’t be ruffled by his only flaw, which is a flaw pretty much anyone would possess: A week with my extended family in my grandparents’ oceanfront Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, home is too much for the man to take. Since Lovey, headstrong as ever, had insisted on veering into the storm, we decided we would all go. Mom, Dad, Lovey, D-daddy, Ben, and Mom’s four sisters. We had visions of giggling over Pictionary in the candlelight. But, as so often happens, the storm passed right over with little fanfare, and we were left with a gloriously beautiful week of lounging.