Lies and Other Acts of Love Read online

  I leaned into Ben’s side and said, “There’s nothing to fight about. You’ve already won.”

  I looked at Lovey, expecting her to say something. But she had that faraway look in her eye, the one that was becoming increasingly familiar. I understood her reasons—no matter how silly they might have seemed to others—for not wanting to dwell on the past. But, even still, though she might not have talked about her memories, I could tell that now, more and more, Lovey was with us in body. But her mind was wandering to a happier time, with D-daddy, when life was simpler and the world was a little less of a fight.

  Lovey

  Proper or Fitting

  April 1945

  Spring is so beautiful because that’s when our Lord rose from the dead. From then on, Momma said, God made the chicks hatch and the birds chirp and those azaleas all around the church burst into bloom to remind us of the Resurrection.

  That must be why spring has always been my favorite season in Bath. Walking barefoot down the dusty dirt road to my white clapboard church, sitting cross-legged by the river, dreaming about falling in love. I’d been in love once. Well, Momma said it was puppy love. I was just a little girl, she’d said, too young to know what real love was. I had been just a girl, far from the woman of nineteen that I was now. But I knew what it was to feel like every day was the first day of spring. The boy that made me feel that way might have moved away when his daddy was transferred to another parish. But I knew I’d always hold him in my memory, he’d be the yardstick against which I’d measure any other. No matter how far and wide the world took me, I’d never let him out of my heart.

  Of course, the world hadn’t flung me too far and wide yet. I’d never even left North Carolina, and I’d scarcely been out of the county. Daddy was a small-town farmer through and through, and, by all accounts, he expected me to marry a boot-wearing, tractor-driving vestige of himself who could take over the tobacco business.

  But, from the time I was small enough to sit on his lap, dozing on his chest between stories about the trouble he got into on this, the very land he grew up on, I knew that I was destined for bigger things. I grabbed every last opportunity like a momma does a child too near the stairs, gripping it tight as I could so it couldn’t slip away from me.

  So, when I heard Daddy telling Momma over coffee, before they knew I was awake, “What sorta fool would let his daughter have her pictures taken like that? Splattered all over the newspaper for the world to see like some sorta harlot,” my interest was piqued.

  I peered around the corner, inhaling the smell of fresh bacon and coffee that had floated all the way to the tip-top of the fifteen-foot ceilings in my bedroom, just in time to see Momma shake her head. “I’d never let my Lynn do something like that. Doesn’t seem proper or fitting.”

  How a large cosmetics company chose a backwoods map dot that no one had ever heard of as one of the towns where it would host a makeover contest, I’ll never know. But it wasn’t really my business to find out. All I knew was that it was advertised right there smack in the middle of the front page of that paper. I’d never in my life counted on being pretty to buy my bus ticket out of town. But I sure wasn’t above trying it.

  I’d never dreamed, like some girls do, of becoming a glamorous movie star, of seeing my picture on the cover of a magazine or flashing across a big screen. But when Daddy whistled and said, “Three whole weeks in New York City for the winner,” my ears perked right up.

  New York was a concept so foreign, such a bright and shining pinnacle, that I could scarcely imagine what being there might be like. I didn’t even stop by the breakfast table for my toast that morning. I said, “Morning, Daddy. Morning, Momma,” and skipped right out that kitchen door, the screen slamming behind me in the soothing cadence of near summertime.

  I ran down the dusty street, barefoot as could be, totally outta breath, until I got to Katie Jo’s house. Katie Jo was my best friend, and, for every buttoned-up, straitlaced, rule-following thing I did, Katie Jo did the most eye-widening, unladylike, derelict thing you could conceive. She smoked cigarettes and swished whiskey and did things with boys that made me blush just hearing about them. I liked living vicariously through her, imagining myself being that free.

  Her vibrancy, the way she loved living her life, made her beautiful to me. So, when she came to the front door, her blunt, cropped hair with the split ends, her wide-set eyes and general tomboy appearance caught me by surprise. They weren’t the features of great models by any stretch of the imagination. But, nevertheless, I exhaled, “They’re having a modeling contest at Town Hall tomorrow. We have to go!”

  Katie Jo sat down on a rocker on the front porch, and I sat down beside her. “Sweetie pie,” she said, putting her fingernail up to her mouth, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but—how should I say this?—I don’t photograph so well.”

  I smiled. “Well, they’re giving makeovers first, silly.” I gave her my most enthusiastic grin, using the tone she was always using to trick me into one of her schemes. “Come on, Katie Jo! You gonna let something little like makeup keep you from getting to go to New York for three whole weeks?”

  “New York City?”

  I nodded, that grin popping up on my face like the daffodils on the first warm day. Wasn’t a thing in this world I could do to stop it.

  Katie Jo pumped her fist like those Rosie the Riveter posters down at the post office and said, “Well then, let’s get our faces painted and our hair curled!”

  The next morning, I snuck out before the sun. I’d told Momma and Daddy the night before that Katie Jo and I were going to take the bus to New Bern to catch a matinee. There was no point in getting them all worked up about this contest if nothing was going to come of it. Which it almost certainly wasn’t. Katie Jo was waiting at the end of the dirt road. When she saw me, she started singing, “New York, New York, a helluva town, the Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down . . .”

  There’d been talk about changing the curse word in the song but I think it felt sweet coming off Katie Jo’s lips, like the muscadine wine her grandmomma made in those big oak barrels in the tractor barn.

  “There’s no censoring you, is there, Katie Jo?”

  She whistled. “There’s no censoring you either. Pretty thing like you, you’re gonna win for sure!”

  Looking back, I know good as gold I was the poorest hick that crew had ever seen standing in that line—doesn’t matter that by Bath standards we were right well off. They put me in a chair and applied my makeup and curled my hair and stood me in front of a man with a camera. I’d never had my picture taken by a professional before. Daddy had gotten Momma a Kodak 35, with Kodachrome film and all, so she could take a photo on Easter and Christmas. But that was only for special occasions. I tried to act comfortable, mimicking the laid-back way I’d seen the actresses smile and bat their eyelashes.

  “You’re a natural!” the photographer called, right before he shouted, “Next!”

  The only thing I knew I was a natural at was picking corn, so I didn’t give the contest a whole lot more thought. A month later, standing at the mailbox, the cool air starting to turn to the creeping warmth that, in another month, would scald, the mosquitoes could have flown right in my mouth it was hanging open so wide. I’ll have to get them to teach me how to put on all this new makeup I won, was my very first thought. It was a ridiculous idea, that one, completely beside the point. I knew standing at that mailbox that there wasn’t any way on God’s green earth my daddy was letting me tear off to New York City of all places by myself.

  All the same, I had never won anything in my life besides the English award. And it was like Edison discovering electricity. The light was on. And I didn’t ever want to go back to the dark.

  When my daddy got home that night, dirt under his fingernails and overalls covered with dusty straw and manure, I handed him the letter.

  He curled his fist and
said, “If you think I’m letting my nineteen-year-old daughter fly in some tin can across the country and fall in love with a damn Yankee, you’ve got another think coming.”

  “It’s not across the country, Daddy,” I replied. I had suddenly, in the moments after winning the contest, gone from a high school–educated farm girl to a worldly socialite. “It’s just a couple of states away.”

  “I don’t care where it is,” Momma said, her voice high and tight, “you’re not going.”

  “That’s final,” Daddy added.

  I guess, looking back now, that burying my brother so young and losing those two babies she tried to carry afterward made Momma and Daddy cling to my older sister and me a little tighter than some other parents. It had changed things for me too. I had longed for a sibling to grow up with, but Lib was already eleven by the time I was born. I would see the other kids with their brothers and sisters, playing and running. And I’d beg Lib to play with me too. By the time I was old enough to be of any interest to her whatsoever, Lib was already off at Women’s College. It broke Momma and Daddy’s hearts that she was leaving them, leaving Bath, going out to make a bigger life for herself.

  I’ll never forget my momma and daddy’s faces the day Lib came home and told them she was moving to London. “He’s my husband,” she was saying, bordering on hysteria, when I walked through the door from school. “This is the chance of a lifetime for him. Reporting on the war? This is something that country folks like us don’t get to do.”

  Momma and Daddy were sitting across from Lib at our wooden kitchen table, Momma leaning on Daddy, sobbing into his chest. “She’ll never make it back,” she was saying over and over again.

  Daddy didn’t say a word, but you could tell by his eyes that he was terrified. I, on the other hand, thought Lib was impossibly brave. She was going to go off and have an adventure. She was going to a war, in another country. This was what living was all about. I didn’t realize yet the supreme danger that she would be in. I didn’t know what was happening in London. I didn’t know how her days would consist of praying that she and her sons and her husband would make it through another night.

  But I knew how Momma cried when she got those letters from Lib. And I knew how she cried even harder on the days those letters didn’t come. And I knew Momma and Daddy’s tightening grip on me was palpable, almost suffocating.

  I blamed my sister that day. Why couldn’t she have stayed home with Momma and Daddy? Why did she have to be the one to go off? If she had stayed, maybe they would have let me have a life for myself.

  I was too young to understand my parents. Too young to sympathize. I only thought they were trying to keep me from being happy by keeping me at home. And I had some living and some mistake making in me.

  So I did what anyone in my position would do. I grabbed all the money I’d saved from under my feather mattress, packed my curlers, my best pumps and a few clean pairs of cotton underwear, the ones with the little line of lace trim around the top, and climbed down the drain spout before the sun came out. I left a note, just in case it wasn’t obvious right off where I’d gone. My intention was not to kill my poor parents with grief and worry. I just kept thinking about Katie Jo. She wouldn’t let a silly little thing like a “no” from her parents let her miss out on the trip of a lifetime. I was making my own decisions for a change.

  With the gas and rubber rations, Momma and Daddy couldn’t have driven to find me even if they’d wanted. And they would’ve had to dig up all those mason jars of cash buried around the yard to have bought plane tickets to follow me. And so, for the next three weeks, until I came home and they chained me to the fence post, I was going to be my own woman.

  In 1945, the Waldorf Astoria was glorious. It was heaven on earth. Movie stars and presidents floated down the halls in the finest fashions, ate off of gold-rimmed china and danced to the best orchestras in the world. But I didn’t know all that. I’d only ever seen Mrs. Bonner’s boardinghouse in Bath with the one shared bathroom and the migrant workers in for picking season stealing a few hours of gritty sleep before getting back to it.

  So those flyers with the black-and-white sketches couldn’t have prepared me for walking into one of the grandest lobbies in the world. The Waldorf even smelled rich. Like perfume, flowers and hundred-dollar bills. My hair curled like Ginger Rogers’s, with soft skin, full lips and the petite figure that youth allows, I didn’t quite look like New York City high society. But I’d been primped, dressed, primed and educated by my chaperone, which was nearly as good.

  “Your dinner is waiting in the dining room, Miss Hensley,” the man behind the counter in the freshly pressed suit said. “Allow me to escort you.”

  I was so busy taking in the marble lobby and the women flitting about in sequined gowns that I hardly even noticed the orchestra playing and the couples dancing merrily. I grew up on a farm eating butterbeans and pork chops, so to slide my pristine pumps underneath a white tablecloth and eat lobster thermidor and foie gras, crown of strawberries and Key West turtle soup . . . No words do it justice.

  In the midst of the finest food I’d ever tasted, I could tell a commotion of sorts was beginning. But I figured what I considered an excited rumble might be ordinary in New York City.

  As all the diners started running for the lobby, my heart dropped into my stomach because there was no arguing that something was wrong. And I had the horrifying thought that the last thing I would ever do to my parents was disobey them.

  Annabelle

  Fading into Him

  True love is something you have to fight for. Lovey has been telling me that since I was a little girl. Sometimes you fight harder, and sometimes the person you love fights harder but, whatever the circumstances, if it isn’t a love worth fighting for, it isn’t worth having.

  I realized that Holden still thought we were worth fighting for, as Ben said, “So you want to give me a little insight as to why I was punched out today?” Ben was lounging on our bed, towel around his waist, a frozen New York strip over his eye.

  I grinned coquettishly, hoping he wouldn’t be angry with me, though, truth be told, he was very seldom angry. “I just wanted you to have a little excitement in your trip is all. I hired that actor to shake things up.”

  Ben raised one eyebrow. “Uh-huh. Right.”

  “Well, you knew I was engaged. That was my engagee.”

  “That’s all?”

  I wanted to say something more, but in truth, there was nothing more to say. “Those sentences literally just summed up our relationship.” I crawled up onto the bed, straddling Ben’s waist and rubbing his chest. “It was nothing like us.”

  I wouldn’t say that I fell in love with Ben so much as he consumed me. From the very first moment I laid eyes on him, I began fading into him, staining his skin with mine like new denim on a white cotton T-shirt in the wash.

  He smiled and looked at me with that adoring smile. “TL,” he said, “you are stupid beautiful.”

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head, leaning over to kiss him.

  He exhaled deeply and said, “So, I have kind of a big question.”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. “I’ll marry you!”

  He smiled. “How would you feel about moving to Salisbury?”

  Salisbury was Ben’s hometown, where his parents still lived. It was quaint and charming. But you didn’t have to be a real estate agent to realize that quaint and charming equated to small. It meant settling down and living a regular life.

  “Um,” I started, not quite knowing how I felt but fully aware that I had taken vows that necessitated following my husband’s passions, however crazy they seemed. “I thought you wanted to go on tour for another year.”

  I had never planned on going on tour. I had never planned on marrying a musician. And I had certainly never planned on living in an RV. Hell, I’d never planned on stepping foot in one. But I had d
one it.

  In less than a week after I met Ben, I had gone from a swanky condo-owning woman engaged to a very eligible bachelor to a married, jobless groupie living in an RV. And I had never been happier.

  I had always been the responsible one. I drove my drunken friends to parties and always went to class. I made good grades, accepted invitations from suitable boys and had a fractional share of the sexual activity of even my most prudish friends. So maybe that’s why my time came all at once like that.

  When I look back on my life, I think I’ll always remember those months living in the back of that RV with fondness. Ben and I would lie there at night, his head on my stomach. “Oh I can’t wait until there’s a little Benabelle in there,” he would say. Then he would look up at me anxiously. “Do you think?”

  I would have been a young mother, much younger than I had ever imagined. But I was so swept up in that breathtaking love that the only thing that could possibly make it better was for another human being to come out of it. It’s so unlike me, but I never once worried about raising a baby in an RV. That was the effect Ben had on me. For the first time in my life, I was glass half full. I knew it would all work out.

  That’s when Ben said, “I did want to go on tour for another year. But my dad needs me at the firm.”

  “Really?” Ben and his father were both CPAs, a totally strange job for my hippy-dippy, adventure-loving husband. But his idiosyncrasies were probably my favorite thing about him. “Doesn’t he have like two other partners?”

  “Three actually. But . . .” He trailed off. “But, it’s bad.”

  I could feel my eyes widen as I got out of bed and arranged the sheets into some semblance of a made-up fashion. “Is someone sick or something?”

  He cocked his head to the side.

  I rolled my eyes. “Just spit it out.” Then I put my hand to my mouth. “Oh, God. Your dad’s not sick, is he?”