Annabelle

In Your Head

If you do something you love, you never work a day in your life, according to Lovey. One of the great things about my new job was that, while it put a check in that “employed” box, it was about the furthest thing from work I could imagine. My days were jam-packed with fun activities that, even when they were dreadfully annoying, like that day with Mrs. Taylor, were much more exciting than pushing paper around a desk and intermittently checking Facebook, making sure I didn’t need to hide any more offensive messages from my husband.

Plus, if I wanted to flit over to Greensboro, the midpoint between Raleigh and Salisbury, for lunch with Mom and Sally, Rob didn’t care one bit. Although my hours indicated otherwise, I was still technically part-time, after all.

I was practically salivating over the black-eyed-pea cakes that I knew I would order, smiling thinking of how much fun it was going to be to laugh with my family—especially since Ben’s newfound “real” job had him working so much. It was definitely a switch after being together nearly nonstop for a year.

The minute I saw Sally, though, I felt the day take an unexpected U-turn. I slid into the oversized, mercifully tall booth, sized just right to hide Sally’s pained face. My mind wandered to the first natural place: Lovey and D-daddy. But, when my mom’s face came into view, where she looked at me from beside her sister, I felt the tension dissolve a little. I knew her well enough to know that her expression was out of feeling her sister’s pain, not her own.

Sally pinned on a fake smile and said, “Well, hi, Annie.”

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Mom said.

I crossed my arms. “I’m twenty-three years old. You can’t ‘nothing’ me anymore and think I’m going to buy it.”

Right then, my phone beeped. I looked down expectantly, hoping it was something sweet from my husband. Instead, I sighed and rolled my eyes, setting my phone on the table.

“What’s up, buttercup?” Mom asked.

“Holden is what’s up. He won’t freaking leave me alone.”

As Mom said, “You know I hate that word,” Sally burst into tears like I had just announced that I had received a text from my oncologist. I looked at Mom, stupefied. Sally had always been sensitive, sure. But Holden texting me here and there wasn’t anything to cry about.

I took a sip of my tea, told the mystified waiter that we might need a minute and said, “Okay. Now ‘nothing’ definitely isn’t going to cut it.”

“Don’t you dare get involved with him, Annabelle,” Sally sobbed. “If it means changing your phone number and closing your e-mail and moving to a new house, you get away from him.” She pointed her finger at me. “Don’t let him get in your head.”

I shook my head, feeling my eyes widen. “I’m not,” I said. “I promise. At first I was being mean, but that didn’t work, so now I’m just ignoring him.”

Sally shook her head. “That’s what I should have done with Kyle.”

“Kyle?” I mouthed to Mom.

Then I nodded, remembering Kyle Jenkins, the absurdly handsome man who was always eyeing Sally at the Shoals Club. We all knew that, for him, she was the one that got away, the reason he never married or had a family.

“Lauren is dating Kyle,” Mom explained.

I took another sip of my tea, still feeling a little bit confused.

“No, no,” Sally said, sitting up taller and composing herself. “She should know. Someone should learn from my mistakes.”

The waiter reappeared, and, at what seemed like a very inconvenient time, we ordered our food. I was literally on the edge of my seat, waiting for these random ingredients to mix in the cocktail shaker and become something cohesive.

“People like Holden, they get in your head,” Sally said. “You think it’s all well and good, but they wear you down over time.”

Mom pushed her hair behind her ear and said, “No, Sally. Holden was never like Kyle. If anything, Kyle was more like Ben.”

That made my breath catch in my throat. I still wasn’t sure how the frames of this film were going to fit together, but I knew unequivocally that I didn’t want Ben to be like Kyle when, as I was starting to see, these tears my aunt was crying were over him.

“Wait,” I said. “I’m so confused. Why is Kyle like Ben?”

“Kyle was the absolute love of my life,” Sally said. “We had that instant, burning passionate love that you dream about all your life.” She shrugged. “And then he just dumped me.”

“And so you married Doug,” I said. Doug certainly wasn’t a head-turner like Kyle, but he was a good man. He was always there for all of us and the first one to make a joke or lift you up when you were feeling down. I had always thought that Sally and Doug’s marriage was as solid as it got.

“And Kyle decided he wanted me back. He wrote me letters, called me at work. A time or two, he even showed up at my office.”

My mom shook her head.

I leaned back the slightest bit, so the waiter could put those black-eyed-pea cakes I’d been so excited for in front of me. And I wondered again why we would be in the midst of such an emotional crisis in the middle of a restaurant.

“And then what?” I asked, popping my fork into my mouth, thinking through my anxiety that the food really was tasty.

“He wore me down,” she whispered.

“You had an affair?” I whispered back, wide-eyed.

Mom laughed quietly. “More like a marriage.”

I glared at her. “That’s mean, Mom. And what does that mean?”

“We’ve been seeing each other on and off since 1989.”

I almost spit my black-eyed-pea cake right across the table. I didn’t want to, but I laughed incredulously. “So the reason he looks at you like you’re on fire is because you are on fire.”

Sally looked down at her hands. “I’m so ashamed.”

“Does Doug know?”

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “Doug has known forever.”

“And he’s okay with it?”

Mom rolled her eyes. “The whole thing is utterly absurd.”

I shook my head and put my hand on the table. “Wait a minute. Is that why Doug didn’t come with us to the beach? Because you were sneaking out with Kyle?”

Sally scrunched her nose in a gesture that revealed everything.

I stared at her in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that the man you have been seeing on the side since before I even existed—who your husband knows about—is dating your sister?”

Sally nodded. “Kyle told me that he had had enough and that I had to choose. Of course, I don’t want to break up my marriage, so I chose Doug.” She inhaled. “It has been like living without water, but I chose to stick it out.”

“So he—very maturely—chose to start ‘dating’ Lauren,” Mom said, making air quotes.

My phone rang. It was Ben, and, even though I missed him like crazy and wanted to talk to him, this was like one of those really great stories in Us Weekly that you don’t want to read while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store but you can’t possibly resist.

“How could you even want to be with someone who would do that to you?” Mom asked, shaking her head. “You’re a grown-up, and they’re playing this ridiculously childish game with you.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “Forget wanting to be with him. How could you be married to a man who was okay to sit back and let you have an affair for your entire life together?”

Sally leaned back heavily on the bench and sighed. As if Mom and I had never even asked her a question, she said, “What if Momma knows?”

Mom shook her head.

“Lovey knows everything,” I said.

Sally gave me a downtrodden look.

“What?” I asked. “She does. She knows everything; she just has the decency not to say it.”

Mom gasped. “That comment on the beach!”

I nodded furiously.

“Oh, God,” Sally said, laying her head on the table. “About how she was so glad I married Doug and not Kyle.” She sat back up. “I’ve been worrying about Lauren telling her, when, in reality, she has known the entire time.”

“Wait,” Mom said. “So you think Lauren knows?”

Sally laughed cruelly. “Hell yeah, she knows. She’s playing the most vicious game of chicken with me that I’ve ever encountered.”

“Ohhhh,” Mom said knowingly. “So her parading around bragging about how rich and charming and funny he is is her seeing how long it takes to break you.”

“This is the most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

I was sort of impressed, though. I mean, here was this squeaky-clean woman that you would never imagine had even had sex were it not for the children to prove it. And yet, here she was, gallivanting all over the state in the midst of a totally torrid affair for decades without anyone being the wiser. I looked at her milky skin, relatively wrinkle-free and, despite the circumstances, generally unworried in appearance. I thought of Ben, of the physical pull my body felt toward his, of the gnawing feeling in the back of my mind I always had knowing that I was away from him. I craved his touch and his attention. And so, in that way, I could relate to what Sally was going through.

I just had no idea that it could still be happening to a sixty-year-old.

I shook my head again. “So what are you going to do?”

She sighed heavily again. “As twisted as it is, I think it’s going to work.”

“What is?” Mom asked.

“This ridiculous little game Lauren and Kyle are playing.” Sally shook her head. “I want to be with Doug and be happy—”

“But you can’t,” Mom said.

Sally shook her head and, in a near whisper, said, “I’m so desperately in love with Kyle.”

In spite of the terrible circumstances, I smiled. It made me happy to know that, even after all these years, Kyle could make Sally feel like a desperate schoolgirl in love. Because I never wanted that feeling to end with Ben.

I had always thought of my aunt Lauren as the villain of our family and, trust me, I thought what she was doing was evil. But maybe her intentions were the purest of all of us. Instead of letting Sally hem and haw and finish off her life unsettled and unsatisfied, she was pushing her to choose the man she knew had been first in her sister’s heart all along.

I looked at Mom, “Did you know about this?”

She shook her head.

Then, to Sally: “Did Lauren?”

Sally shook her head. “I’m assuming that Kyle told her.”

“Seems like a pretty risky move,” I said.

Sally’s face was suddenly wrought with horror. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “She does know, right? I mean, they aren’t actually dating? This is just a game.” She looked down at her hands and whispered, “Isn’t it?”

Mom reached over and patted her hand reassuringly. “Lauren is tough. No doubt about that. But the thing about her strength is that she uses it on those who are trying to hurt the people she loves. She would never turn on us.” She paused. “We’re sisters.”

I shook my head. “Seems like a pretty risky move all the same.”

Then, as my phone beeped with yet another text from Holden, Mom said, “You, of all people, should understand the crazy lengths people will go to for love.”