Page 24 of Lush Curves

“Right?” He grinned back at her, loving to see her happy. “See what the future holds, huh?”

“Sure,” Annie said, though she secretly thought that shealreadyknew what her future held, and that was more of what she already had. “Why not?”

“So…” Sam said, circling his hand in the air. “You feel OK telling me, honey?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Her blue eyes were very serious as she stared at him. “You told me something hard.”

“It’s not aquid pro quoarrangement. Don’t feel like you have to tell me anything that you don’t feel like talking about, just because I chose to tell you about my childhood. You tell me when you’re ready, not because you feel pressured or like you owe me.”

“Oh, Sam,” she said, ridiculously touched, yet again, at this man’s incredible sensitivity. “It’s fine. Really.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.” Annie took a deep breath. “Yes.”

Sam nodded, took a sip of green tea.

“So.” She bit her lip. “My parents divorced when I was almost a year old, and my father disappeared immediately. Mom was left alone with me, and she just couldn’t cope as an unemployed single mother in a city as expensive as Topeka, so she moved us back to her parents in Wichita, mostly so she could have someone to take care of me while she went out job-hunting. She found a job, eventually, as a check-out girl at a grocery store. It was decent money, especially for an unmarried woman with a tiny kid, and it was clean and bright and safe. She got a discount on any food shopping, and that helped too, since she was all about saving money for us to be more independent. She started every morning at five – she even worked Saturdays – and finished at two, though she’d work a double shift if she was asked and finish at ten or eleven, after cleaning up. I never knew her to turn down overtime, not even once, and I think in sixteen years, she took exactly one day off, and that was after my stepfather threw her down some stairs and she ended up with a concussion and a broken shoulder. She staggered in the next day, barely able to focus for the double vision and the painkillers that would take out a horse, and with only one working arm that she couldn’t even lift, but she damn welldidit, to hell with any of it. She was the toughest woman that I have ever known.Ever.”

“Holy Lord,” Sam said softly, now utterly certain where Annie got her astonishing strength and compassion from. He also knew a thing or two about abused women and their injuries, and he knew that if the dickhead had thrown Annie’s Mom down some stairs, then she’d hiddenplentyof injuries before then, because these things always,alwaysescalated. Stair-throwing was rarely the starting point of abuse, though Sam had been wrong about that before. “When did she remarry?”

“When I was seven.” Annie smiled vaguely at the waitress as she dropped off the plate with their fortune cookies and the bill. “He was a regular customer at the grocery store, and Mom told me that he always made a point of coming through her check-out. He flirted like mad, and asked her out continuously. She said no for three years, then one day she just said yes. I think she was even more surprised than he was.”

“They dated for a year, I guess, and then they married. We moved into his place, just a few blocks from my grandparents, so they could take care of me after school until Mom and Dick the dickhead got home.”

“Wait – was his name actuallyDick?”

“Yep. One of those weird cases of calling a thing exactly what the hell it was.”

Sam laughed, half-appalled, half-astounded. “No kidding.”

“Anyway. My grandparents died when I was twelve, within a few months of each other, both from cancer. They’d begged Mom to get the hell away from Dick, but by then, she was so, so afraid. He always said that he’d find us, kill me, make her watch me die. And she believed him, Sam, and so did I. He’d get drunk and say plenty of bullshit, but when he talked about this, hemeantit.”

“I know.”

“Howdo you know?” she asked, a bit desperately. “You must have seen lots of abused women?”

“Far too many.” His voice and face were grim. “And one thing that I’ve heard, over and over again, is that the women and kidsknewwhen the abuser was telling the truth. Just like theyknewwhen the abuse was about to start up again, they knew long before it actually happened. Even if the abuser was just sitting and watching a baseball game on TV, the victims sensed it coming – like an approaching storm. Theyfeltit, like electro-magnetic currents in the air, or something. One woman told me that her husband’s ‘tell’ was a twitching right eyelid. Another woman knew the shit was about to hit the fan when her boyfriend started using the word ‘whore’ to refer to an inanimate object. A kid told me that he knew his Dad was going to get violent by the way his walk changed when he went between the living room and the beer fridge. These women would then doanythingthey could to calm the situation, or at least stop it from escalating, but it rarely worked. So then they’d just try to get out of the way, get the kids to safety… and sacrifice themselves to the fists and violence if he was determined to hit someone, and it came down to her or her children.”

“That’sexactlywhat Mom did,” Annie said quietly. “She’d do everything in the world to keep Dick from losing it, but it was like trying to hold back a coming storm rolling down from the mountains. So then she’d put me in my room and tell me to get under the bed, and she’d step between the door and Dick, just step up and into the punches. She – she got sohurt, hurt sobad, and she did it for me.”

“She was your mother,” Sam said, reaching for her hand. “Mothers do that for their kids. They do it without question, without regret.”

“Yeah.” Annie took a deep breath, held onto him, drawing a bit of strength. “I’d do it for my kids.”

Sam wanted to ask her if shehaddone it for her kids, decided to wait and let her tell him that, if it had happened and if she wanted to. So he just stayed quiet, held her soft, small hand, loving that he was touching her at long last.

I’ve waited three goddamn years to do this.

“Mom died when I was seventeen,” Annie said. “Believe it to not, Dick didn’t kill her, but it sure as hell wasn’t from lack of trying.” She paused, gave Sam a gentle look. “She died in a car accident.”

“Oh, no,” Sam muttered, fighting down the urge to enfold her in his arms. “I’m sorry, honey.”

“I know you are,” she said. “You know what it’s like to lose a parent that way.”

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

“So… then it was just me and –him.”

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