Page 26 of Lush Curves

“And I did see him in Denver.” Annie’s nail reached Sam’s wrist, stopped there as if checking his pulse. He wondered if she could feel his heart racing. “I saw him again and again. I moved in to his place within two weeks, he proposed to me within a month, I was pregnant one month after that. We married the day after I turned eighteen – almost exactly four months after he bought me that shot in that dive bar. It was all stupid-fast, but I was so, so in love with the man, and I truly thought it was going to be forever, you know? Handsome husband, house, baby… the whole thing.” Annie gave a self-deprecating laugh. “God, he even had a tiny white picket fence around the lawn, and a front porch. It was – well. It felt like a real-life fairy tale, you know? It was a livingdreamto a girl like me, after years of abuse and screaming and being afraid all the time.”

She stopped talking abruptly, looked pained. Sam braced himself for when things turned for the worse.

“It was a living dream, until it wasn’t.” She bit her full lip. “He – he was seeing other women when I was pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, twins almost always are, I suppose, and I couldn’t have sex, and he said his screwing around was my fault. But I suspect that he’d been seeing other women before my pregnancy advanced… I think he wasalwaysseeing other women, even up to our marriage.”

“Idiot,” Sam muttered.

“Yeah, well, so was I. I stayed.”

“You were young, and pregnant with twins, and had no job or support system in a new city,” Sam corrected her gently. “You were without any great options. Staying and having a roof over your head, and your babies’ heads,wasthe smart move, despite his affairs.”

“That’s what I told myself, every single damn day, and you know what?”

“What, honey?”

“I believed it, for a long, long time. It was… the lesser of many evils, you know? Stay and put up wth the cheating and lying, or go out with two tiny, helpless humans and figure out how to support them, and myself, and raise them and feed them and house them, all on my own. It just – I couldn’tdoit.”

“Not many can, Annie.”

“The thing is, I think I could have made a go of it, once Sarah and Noah turned five or six, and started school. For sure, I could have held down something part-time, budgeted and figured it all out as a single Mom. It would have been hard and I knew that, but I’d have managed, one way or another. Women do it every single day, and I’d have just put on my big girl panties and put my head down anddoneit. But… well… Noah…” Her voice trailed off and she looked awkward; Sam knew that she felt terrible about coming across like she was blaming her son for anything, because she clearly wasn’t. But there was a hard, harsh reality that Annie had had to factor into each and every decision of her life for almost three decades.

“Noah is autistic,” Sam finished for her. “And that’s a game-changer, in every way.”

“Yes.” Annie nodded, and he admired the warmth of her red hair in the light. “He couldn’t go to regular school, so that meant specialized programs and care, and he was home a lot. I did go to work at the diner then, just to pay for the special stuff he needed, but Ineverleft him alone with Billy. I only scheduled shifts when Noah was out at the community centre, or with the autistic kids group, or whatever.”

“Was Billy abusive towards Noah?” Sam asked, almost afraid of the answer. He knew far too well for his liking just how vulnerable mentally- and physically-challenged people were to abuse, and special-needs children were too-often the focus of their parents’ frustration and anger. “Or you or Sarah?”

“Never.”

“No?” Sam was surprised to the point of being stunned. “Even when he got drunk, he never lost control?”

“No. Billy struggled with Noah from the beginning, that’s for sure, but he never hurt his son. Not once, not ever. I mean, I can accuse the man of many, many things, but smacking any us around is not one of them. In a way, that’s almost too bad.”

“What?” Sam stared at her, appalled. “You’d havewantedhim to hit you and the kids?”

“Oh,God, no. Never.” Annie looked horrified. “That’s not what I meant, at all. I just meant – well. After Dick, I promised myself that if any man ever touched me in violence again, I’d leave so fast, his head would spin. It was theonething that I wasn’t going to accept, and I know that if Billy had so much as laid his baby finger on any of us, I’d have bolted for the damn door faster than ablink.”

“OK.”

“But that’s theonething that he didn’t do –though he made a point of doingeverythingelse – and as it turns out, I could hack everything else.” She shook her head, and he saw her disgust at herself. “The name-calling, the emotional abuse, the drinking, the slow, steady grinding down of any joy or love I’d ever had or known with him, until it was all gone. The poisonous silences and then hateful spewing of anger and rage, the smashed furniture and broken dishes in the mornings after a drunken rampage… all ofthat, I could put up with, and I did, for years. And a part of me wishes that he’d backhanded me, justonce. Just to get my pathetic, wishy-washy ass out the door, and my kids away. I always wonder… Istillwonder what our lives might have been if I’d just sucked it up and left, whatever my excuses or reasons for staying and pretending.”

“Annie… honey…” Sam clasped her hand in both of his now. “That’s not how emotional abuse works.”

“No, I know. I do. I just – I guess when I wasinit, all I saw was getting through the day without broken glass, but now… now I have hindsight, and all I see now is the wasted time, the years and years of just putting one foot in front of the other, never looking up to get my bearings. Especially sincehewas the one to leave, in the end, so things didn’t even finish on my terms, after all of that.”

“When did he leave?”

“The day after the kids turned eighteen,” Annie said. “Funny – they wereexactlythe same age that I was when I got married, and I’d thought I was so damn grown up when I said ‘I do’. But all I saw, when Sarah realized that Billy had gone and wasn’t coming back, was how young and vulnerable and afraid she was. She needed her Mom so badly, and even though Sarah pulled herself through and up, and she’s tough as hell in so many ways, she really hurt for a long time.”

“He just left without any warning?”

“Yep. Took off in the car, and I just assumed he went on a beer run, and maybe he did… but if so, the beer was in another state, ‘cause he never came back. No call, no note, no nothing. Just there one day, gone the next, leaving us alone and totally confused. Sarah was especially devastated, and couldn’t understand how a man could justleavelike that. I think it messed with her head badly, and I know it made her very suspicious of men.”

“I’m sure,” Sam said. “And Noah?”

“He actually barely mentioned Billy after he’d gone. I don’t think he’d ever felt attached to his father, so his loss wasn’t an earth-shattering thing for him.”

“As sad as that is, that’s a blessing in some ways.”

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