Annabelle

Invisible Hand

Lovey always says that, at the end of the day, all a girl really needs to get through this life is a good dose of gumption. And I was trying to gather all of mine as I was sitting in the passenger seat, Rob driving through that same Salisbury historic district that had become my bed-and-breakfast home the past few months.

“Are you sure they’re going to be okay with this?” I asked Rob for the thousandth time.

He squeezed my hand. “Annabelle, you are the loveliest person I’ve ever known. My family isn’t going to care that you married some guy who was dumb enough to cheat on you. They’re going to love you as much as I do.”

I looked over at him. He was so handsome, so sincere. “So, can I still work for you now that we’re sort of romantically entangled?”

He looked over. “Hmmm . . . I don’t know. I don’t think anyone would really care, do you?”

I laughed. “Well, let’s see. They cared an awful lot about having a guitarist at the ten thirty service, and I’m still hearing about how a professional chef won the chili cook-off. So, yeah, I’d say this will be on their radar.”

He shrugged. “You have to, because otherwise I won’t have anyone fun to do my first thing of the day with.”

“True.”

A wave of sadness that I might not be working with Rob washed over me. And it occurred to me that, while I had taken it as a part-time gig until I found something new, as it turned out, the work of the church fulfilled me. There, I felt like my work had a purpose.

We pulled past Mrs. Taylor’s grand, columned home. I sighed, realizing how much I loved this neighborhood’s wide sidewalks and shady trees. This town had become a part of my story, and, even though I wanted to get as far away from Ben and his family as I could, I knew that I was going to have to grow up and deal with it.

Mom and Dad pulled into the driveway right behind us. When I told them that I was seeing Rob, Mom gave me the lecture that I thought would never end. “You’re rushing into this. You aren’t even divorced yet. You’re making the same mistake twice.”

But Dad had, in his predictably calming way, said, “Jean, for heaven’s sake. Let her move on. Could you have handpicked a better man for your daughter than Rob?”

We hadn’t exactly dropped the engagement bomb on them yet. We thought that maybe if we told both sets of parents together that it might be a little less of a shock. Well, actually, it would be more of a shock, but no one could make a scene about it because they had the others to save face in front of.

And we would have to do it soon because my engagement ring was more than a little hard to hide.

Rob rang the doorbell, and I handed his grandmother a bouquet of flowers and said, “Hi, Mrs. Taylor. It’s so nice to see you.” I grinned widely at her, hoping that she couldn’t smell my nervousness.

She peered down at my hand, not so much as venturing a smile, and I looked over my shoulder, happy that my mom was still jabbering away on her Bluetooth in the car. “My ring looks good on you.”

“Oh, I, um,” I stuttered. I didn’t know what to say. Thank you, felt wrong because she hadn’t been the one to give it to me. And I couldn’t decide whether she was unhappy that I had been the one to receive the ring.

Before I could decide on a proper response, she looked up at me with that same unflinching stare. “I’ve known since the minute I laid eyes on you that you two were meant to be.”

Then she turned and walked away into the kitchen, my flowers in hand. I looked at Rob, and he shrugged. I was so shocked I didn’t know what else to do besides laugh. I thought back to the “You know, we all just always thought he would marry Laura Anne” comment. Maybe it hadn’t been said out of malice after all. Maybe it was to plant a seed of doubt in my head that would eventually lead to Rob. Or maybe she already knew something that I didn’t. I shuddered wondering how long the whole town had been having a good gossip at my expense.

I heard my parents’ footsteps, and I turned with a smile, but, before I could say anything, Mom interrupted, with a pained expression on her face: “I think we need to get to Raleigh.”

•   •   •

Mothers know absolutely everything. So I content myself by saying that Lovey knew. She didn’t need to read the rest of the chapters because she knew how the book was going to end. I am telling my mother this as I carry the last of the boxes out of the assisted-living apartment that D-daddy and Lovey graced for such a short while.

My mother, the only member of the family who has always seemed completely free of the sentimentality that must be a genetic trait, can barely open her mouth to respond. The funeral may be over, but her dark circles will not be for quite some time.

“How can they be gone?” she whispers.

Louise, a crocheted flower band wrapped across her forehead, reining in the long, dark waves around her shoulders, comes through the door and says, putting her arm around her sister, “They aren’t gone.” She points to Sally and Lauren and Martha as they pass through the door, “Because we’re all here.”

I don’t think I’ve grasped that the two people I’ve always loved best aren’t going to be here next week when I want to come visit. D-daddy and Lovey have been a bit like the invisible hand that has guided my life, often showing up or exercising their influence in a moment when I felt like the dead end had come and there was no right way to turn. I had no one left to call when I needed the advice that can only be garnered over years and years of experience. I had no one left to find me dresses at a moment’s notice or remind me to always walk tall like I belonged. I ached to remember the arguments that Lovey and I had had in her last weeks of life, the way that I had wasted any of those precious days fretting over something that, while wrong, didn’t define or replace everything that my grandmother had been to me. I worried at first that she spent some of her final hours concerned about the safety of her secret. But I rationalize that she knew me well enough to know that I would never tell. She made a choice, and, in her way, I believe she did what she thought was right. Knowing what I know about my family, about how much we all mean to each other, maybe she did do the right thing.

In a similar situation, I thought about making a similar choice. I’d like to think that I would have told Ben about his child, that I wouldn’t have cowered from the difficult path. I should be thankful that I didn’t have to make that decision, but I don’t think a day will ever pass that I don’t think of the baby I lost, of the emptiness that replaced that dream. But, if nothing else, that experience made me see Lovey more clearly; it made me understand her choice.

Rob has helped me realize that people make decisions and they have to live with them. And it isn’t up to me to judge whether those choices are right or wrong, only to decide how my relationship ebbs and flows in regard to them.

Ben had made a decision that I couldn’t move on from. The wall had been built too high and too thick for me to climb over or around or break through. But, even still, I don’t regret my time with him. I’ll always believe that we truly shared a special kind of love. Special. But not the kind that lasts forever. Not the unconditional, selfless kind. We both made mistakes, and that will always hurt. But the bottom line is that we simply weren’t meant to be together.

But, with Lovey and me, the mistakes didn’t matter. Because we were bound by something so much deeper. Blood, love and now this towering secret that I would never tell. It was never mine to tell anyway.

My phone rings, breaking the oppressive silence of sorrow surrounding me. I didn’t want to smile, but it was that time. That glorious, all-consuming time when the man you have fallen deeply in love with drowns your thoughts with the way his hand feels on the small of your back, and your stomach drops with the memory of his smile on your cheek.

“You will never believe this,” Rob said as breathlessly as I’d ever heard.

“I might,” I answered wryly.

“I have just been offered the head priest position at Saint Andrew’s.”

I could feel my pulse tingling with the stunned excitement that, wherever this church was, it meant not only a dream come true for my soon-to-be husband but also equated to an escape from a town that held little for me but heartache and humiliation. “Like, my church Saint Andrew’s? Like, in Raleigh?”

“They said they found my new worship style inspirational and were looking to infuse some new lifeblood into the church, perhaps draw a younger membership.”

I smiled, my mom and aunts looking at me expectantly. I just mouthed, “Lovey.” There it was again, that invisible hand that, even beyond the grave, was still as present in my life as the blinking fluorescent light above my head.

I would never mention the very large bequest to Saint Andrew’s in Lovey and D-daddy’s will or the fact that Lovey was the head of the search committee for a new rector until the day she died. Just like neither Rob nor I would ever mention those lockbox documents that Melissa met us at the bank before opening hours to retrieve and destroy. Because, like Lovey always taught me, some things in life are better left unsaid.

Smiling into the phone, listening to Rob’s voice, the voice of a man I was not only passionate about but that I also loved and trusted, I finally knew that, like those other women in my family, I could be brave and headstrong, I could head off the impending troops with a swipe of my dishcloth. I could comment on the issues that it seemed more sensible to step away from. Walking away from my marriage hadn’t been weakness in direct contrast to their strength. It was only that I realized too late that what I had wasn’t worth fighting for.

As Rob said, “Are you okay with moving, Annie? Because if you’re happy here, we can just stay put.”

I thought of the For Sale sign perched in Lovey and D-daddy’s yard and how devastated D-daddy would have been that the home he built for his family, the place he loved most in the world, was given away to some stranger. I smiled. “I can’t think of anything better. And I know just the house.”

It was the first time I had seen my mother smile in a week. She squeezed me to her and said, “Lovey and D-daddy’s house, Raleigh and an Episcopal priest. I think you might have gotten it right this time.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Well, since you all failed miserably at granting Lovey’s lifelong Episcopal priest marriage wish, someone had to step up.”

“You never know,” Louise said, “it might not be too late for me.”

We all started down the hall, I think collectively relieved to never be returning to this place that, while stylish, had equaled death in all of our minds. “You might be a little too Buddhist for that,” Sally said.

Louise shrugged. “Ah, so close.”

“Maybe I’ll go after a priest too,” Lauren said.

“Oh,” Mom interjected, “so not Doug or John or maybe my husband?”

“That phase over?” Martha asked.

“I think I’ll stick to the single ones,” Lauren said. “In fact this new guy I’m dating—”

We all laughed, interrupting her sentence, and, as I slammed my car trunk shut and listened to the women remaining in my life banter with each other, I knew that Louise was right: Lovey and D-daddy were absolutely everywhere.