her hands splayed in a posture of both pleading and exasperation “—he’ll be old enough to be their grandfather.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there aren’t any young men left anymore,” Anne-Marie answered coolly. “And the last thing I want is to raise some brat on my own while my husband gets his head blown off overseas.”
Her aunt had opened and closed her mouth like a fish choking on air.
Finally, in an effort to impart some good on the proceedings, her uncle had asked Anne-Marie if she truly loved this man; if she was ready to spend the rest of her life with him, until death do they part, and, more importantly, if she really knew what this meant. She had leaned back in her chair and sighed, then looked at him with such tired contempt that when she dropped her head and turned away he had not dared to press her for an answer. For the very first time he had seen her naked in expression and suddenly he had an overwhelming desire to get the girl out of his house once and for all.
In that fact, he could not have known how alike in sentiment they were, probably the only thing, apart from blood, that they ever had in common.
Her family could not understand why Lou Parks wanted to marry her. A bachelor, with a taste for whiskey and a strong Presbyterian streak, he seemed the least likely person to fall for Anne-Marie. Her uncle couldn’t help but question him over the validity of the relationship, when Lou, like a lovesick teenager, had come to his house the next day to properly ask for Anne-Marie’s hand. Anne-Marie had bent over the upstairs banister, watching her cousin and aunt in the corridor below, trying to listen in on what he was saying, and she had smiled to herself at what she had accomplished, and even more that they would never know how she did it.
No one believed it would actually happen. They all thought it was a brief bit of madness that would be slowly weaned out before it could ever come to full destructive fruition. But even though the night before the wedding they had lain in their beds and wondered aloud if he would go through with it, the next day Lou had stood up in the church and never once faltered in his vows. Even their kiss had seemed sincere, as he cupped Anne-Marie’s waist to draw her closer. Louise had made a gagging noise until she was hit on the arm to make her stop.
Her family was afraid of her after that, and she was glad. She saw how they greeted her and how anytime they said the words Mrs. Parks, their tongues seemed to slide over the letters as if, should they linger too long, someone would laugh at them and they would realize that they were the punch line to a joke she had been playing on them all this time. That wasn’t too far from the truth and part of them suspected so. To them she was a stranger, capable of what … they did not know, nor did they care to find out. But Anne-Marie did, and she was waiting: waiting for the chance for her true self to emerge as an independent, not defined by who she was with or whose house she lived in. But the more she waited, the less likely it seemed that it might happen.
She saw her cousin look longingly over her shoulder and in that instant she took the chance to slip away. By the time Louise had noticed her absence, Anne-Marie had moved too far away for her to want to call her back. She wove her way through the garden. They called it a garden but in her mind it was no better than an untilled field, just long grass and bushes that sprawled down the back of the house in a wide arc and before she knew it, she had let it lead her away as it branched off to the left behind some trees. It was there, sitting on a bench, that she found Cal Hathaway. Later on in life he would say she was looking for him but she did not know it; that it was fate that had led her there. I am inclined to agree.
“I’m sorry, I did not mean to intrude,” she said. He looked up at her then. He was reclining back on the white bench, a tumbler beside him and a bottle of scotch.
“Who are you? I ain’t seen you before,” he said curiously.
“I’m Anne-Marie Parks,” she replied coolly and then held out her hand as an afterthought, but he’d already turned from her back to his scotch and her hand fell limply to her side.
“You from here?” he asked sharply.
“Most of my life.”
“How come I don’t know much of you then?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows much of me.”
He looked her up and down. “Probably the best way,” he said conclusively. “Soon as anyone knows anything about you in this place they all start wanting a piece. Well, they’ve had as much as they’re going to get of me.”
“Where you been? They—I heard that you had been away for some time now.”
“Oregon. I’m a salesman there.”
“Oh?” enquired Anne-Marie casually. “What do you sell?”
He shrugged. “Whatever needs selling.”
This was how my grandfather was—cold, casual, unattached to anything and anyone except his daughter. He’d had enough of attachments at this stage in his life. All they ever seemed to do was bring him harm.
“I heard your daddy is dying.”
“You heard right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You wouldn’t be if you knew him.”
“I think you knew him and you’re still sorry, or you wouldn’t be down here away from everyone knocking back scotch.”
In the dark she could see his gaze arrest in surprise. His hand hovered over the bottle before he poured a thimbleful.
“Want to taste?”
She drew herself up.
“Ah, now there’s no need to be like that. A bit won’t kill you and it’s the good kind anyhow. My pa has good taste in liquor.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I’m thirty-five.”
“Well, it’s a sorry state when a man of your age is hiding from a party thrown for him at the bottom of a garden, drinking stolen liquor.”
Cal laughed. “You ain’t very popular, are you?”
Anne-Marie put a hand to her neck and then dropped it in irritation.
“About the same as you from the sounds coming out of people. Who says I ain’t anyhow?”
In the dark he seemed to smile. “Nobody is who likes pointing out other people’s truths.”
He stood up then and she saw how tall he was, the broad shoulders, the thin nose and square jaw, his long hands that were now cradling his drink. She would come to know how much he would like to drink and for a long time it would not bother her.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Weren’t you paying attention? I told you it was Anne-Marie.”
He shrugged. “Anne-Marie just don’t seem to suit, is all. You don’t look like an Anne-Marie to me.” He licked his lips. “Anne-Maries are soft creatures. You ain’t soft, you’re hard and brittle and harder because you know you’re brittle. Your name is a lie, Anne-Marie, but then so is mine. People call me Cal, have done all my life, but my name is Abraham. You know your bible—Abraham is the father of the twelve nations of God’s chosen people, all-wise, all-knowing. But I ain’t no Abraham just like you ain’t no Anne-Marie, so what then is your name, girl?”
It was then, my grandmother said, that she knew it. She watched the swaying man try to steady himself on his drunken feet and even though he wasn’t handsome, even though he was just some salesman from Oregon, even though she felt a creeping vine of disdain tug at the corners of her mouth as she observed him, it could not change her revelation.
“One day you will know,” she would say much later. “You will just know and all you can do is pray for the serenity to accept it and the courage to follow through.”
“My mother called me Lavinia,”