Chapter 26

nnie and Mitchell were married the September after she graduated from Bedford. She had spent the summer numbly planning her wedding, going through the dreary details like a robot. The ceremony was held at the Harvest Hollow Baptist Church in Nashville. Sara flew in from Charlotte and Mel flew in from New York for the occasion. They were Annie’s bridesmaids. Lola was still on her three-month honeymoon, being held hostage by Briggs in Europe, so she wasn’t able to come, although she did send a telegram from Dublin, along with a large bouquet of white lilies that managed to look, in Annie’s eyes anyway, somewhat funereal.

Annie’s new in-laws, Preston and Gladys, had given the newlyweds a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee as a wedding present. They were simple country folk and saw no reason why a young couple would want to honeymoon in a place that offered more extravagant diversions than Hillbilly Golf or the world-famous Christus Gardens. The gardens featured life-size dioramas from the Life of Christ including, among others, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Angel at the Tomb. Mitchell was particularly enamored of an ancient coin collection on display that featured the Shekel of Tyre, thought to have been among the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. Annie followed him bleakly around the gardens, trying to ignore the piercing blue-eyed stare of the many lifelike Jesuses. Her guilt would later become a small thing, a tiny festering sore covered by layer upon layer of scar tissue. But in those early days of their marriage her guilt was a gaping rawedged wound that bled through the bandages when she least expected it: as she said her vows to Mitchell at the altar, as she listened while Mitchell shyly introduced her as my bride, as she watched while Mitchell, tearyeyed, knelt at the feet of a lifelike Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Unable to stomach another day, Annie, pleading a headache, sent Mitchell off to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum by himself. She lay on the round, crushed-velvet bed staring up at her sullen reflection in the ceiling mirror and listening as his cheerful whistle died slowly along the corridor. Over in the corner, the heart-shaped hot tub bubbled like a cauldron.

She couldn’t go on like this. She couldn’t go on living like an empty shell, a husk, a snakeskin, frail and papery on a sun-warmed rock. She had to get hold of herself. What can’t be cured must be endured, her mother liked to say. She was a fountain of good advice these days. It’ll hurt a little bit the first time, her mother had warned her about her wedding night (not knowing that Annie and Mitchell had been intimate for years). But after that, you’ll get used to it. (As if getting used to it was the best she could hope for.) It’s a sacred union, blessed by God, she had continued, before Annie cut her off with a curt motion of her hand. She had wanted to tell her mother that she was no virgin, not by a long shot, but she bit her lip and kept quiet. If her mother had noticed anything strange in Annie’s behavior leading up to the ceremony, she had, like Mitchell, put it down to pre-wedding jitters.

Annie sighed and rolled over, facing the windows. The drapes were open, and in the blue sky beyond the window the clouds stood in ridges, like rows of carded wool. She imagined the same bright sky stretching above Bedford. She wondered what Paul Ballard was doing now. She imagined him hurrying across the leaf-strewn campus on his way to class, whistling an aria from Tosca, his satchel swinging lightly as he walked.

Annie pulled the crushed-velvet covers over her head so she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror. The acts that had occurred in this gaudy room had less to do with a sacred union and more to do with a Juarez brothel, Annie thought dejectedly. The only thing missing was a trapeze, and Mitchell would have no doubt booked them into the Trapeze Room if it had been available.

Annie had shut her mind to what she was doing and followed his instructions obediently. Do this, put that here, roll over; she’d meekly done as she was told until he’d finally said in exasperation, “Damn, honey, could you show a little enthusiasm?”

“I’m tired,” was all she’d said, covering her eyes with one arm.

It was true, she was filled with a strange lethargy these days. Even during the long dreary summer as she’d planned her wedding, there had been days when all she’d wanted to do was sleep. Just throw the covers over her head and sleep. Like Rapunzel in her tower. Like Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince to come and wake her with a kiss. Only in Annie’s case, the prince would never come.

Years later she would see Paul Ballard as a slightly ridiculous figure. A middle-aged man with nothing better to do with his life than seduce naive young women. It was predatory, if you thought about it. What was it, Annie wondered, about her generation that made them such easy marks for men like him? She couldn’t imagine any of the young women her sons ran around with putting up with any such nonsense from a professor. The way girls were today, they would be the ones doing the seducing, and once the affair was over, you can bet the wife would hear of it. There’d be no sacrificial secrecy, no willingness to play a passive victim. This thought cheered her somewhat. She imagined that Professor Ballard was having a much harder time seducing Generation X. These girls, raised on reality television and MTV, would have seen through his clumsy attempts at seduction and betrayal, just as Annie did once she grew older and wiser. They would not have fallen for something as absurd as a dramatic reading of Keats.

She looked him up once, on the Internet, and discovered that he had retired and was living in Oregon. Still married, no doubt, to the wife who had put up with his constant infidelities all those years. Annie had felt an overwhelming pity for her; it was amazing to her now, and sad, that she had ever felt jealous of the wife, that she had ever wanted to take her place.

Eventually the guilt she felt over him merged with the guilt she felt over that other matter, the one she tried never to think of, and there were many times, as her marriage to Mitchell endured and the boys grew slowly to manhood, that she thought about confessing. All of it. She thought about letting go of the secret that nestled now like a small hard tumor beneath her heart. But then she would look into Mitchell’s bland, guileless face and she would know she could never tell him. She could never regain her faith by destroying his.

All of this was, of course, many years in the future. By the time her honeymoon ended, Annie had steeled herself for a life without Paul Ballard. She was in the beginning stages of recovery. She knew it was only a matter of time before her frozen core thawed and joy returned to her life, and until then she was willing to blindly follow her five-year plan. That’s what five-year plans were for. To keep people on the right track when all they really wanted was to veer off into dangerous and uncharted territories.

Their first year of marriage, they lived in a little rental house in East Nashville, not too far from where Annie had grown up. Every morning Mitchell rose and went off to work at “the store,” as he called the restaurant, while Annie washed the breakfast dishes and began her relentless cycle of housecleaning. Every day the floors and baseboards were mopped, the cabinets, countertops, and appliances were scrubbed until they shone, the walls and trim were wiped clean of fingerprints, the laundry was washed, folded, and put away. Twice a week the bed linens were changed, and the carpets were dragged into the yard to be beaten and aired. In between her cleaning, she planned her menus, clipped coupons, and had a home-cooked meal hot and waiting for Mitchell every evening when he returned home, weary and discouraged, from the store. Every Wednesday she bought groceries, driving sometimes to three or four stores to get the best weekly deals, and on Saturdays she worked in the yard. Caught up in her busy routine of cooking and cleaning, she had little time to think of anything else, but sometime during the month of December, while hanging a handmade wreath on the front door, it suddenly occurred to Annie that something was wrong.

She wasn’t pregnant.

Her five-year plan called for two children by the age of twenty-five and, given this time frame, her window of opportunity was quickly closing. After all, she had stopped taking the pill two weeks before her honeymoon. And frequent sex, she knew, equaled pregnancy. So she was a bit distressed on this warm December afternoon when, lifting her arms to hang the wreath, she felt the warm, gushing sensation that signaled the beginning of her menses.

She went inside to take a hot shower and think about this. True, the frequency of their sex life had declined somewhat since their honeymoon but since Annie had assumed that she was already pregnant by now, that hadn’t really bothered her. Mitchell was, she knew, worried about the business. Money was tight; there was only the one Cluck-in-a-Bucket restaurant, and Mitchell’s father, Preston, ran it the same way he’d run it for nearly thirty years (i.e., barely turning a profit). To make matters worse, a variety of fast-food chains and upscale eateries had recently flooded Nashville, and the competition was fierce. Nor could they rely anymore on the patronage of their once-plentiful country-and-western star clientele. Whereas Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash might place large orders with Cluck-in-a-Bucket for their family barbecues, young Nashville was more inclined to frequent the trendy eateries along Second Avenue. Mitchell came home most nights looking weary and dejected.

Standing in the shower while the hot water coursed over her, Annie realized that she’d have to take matters into her own hands.

Mitchell had bought her an outfit for their honeymoon, a French maid’s costume complete with garter belt, that she’d taken one look at and steadfastly refused to wear. But on this day, after climbing out of the shower, Annie dried her hair, pulled on a pair of her favorite pajamas, and went to check her closet. She found the French maid outfit in the bottom of a box she was saving for the church clothing drive. She had tried to throw the costume away but her frugal nature would not allow it. She’d hidden it in the bottom of the box hoping none of the ladies from church would recognize the other clothing as hers.

Two weeks later, on a soft gray December evening, Annie stood behind the front door in the French maid’s outfit, waiting as Mitchell pulled into the driveway. She waited until he had climbed the front stoop, looking more tired and discouraged than usual, before she flicked on the Christmas lights and flung open the front door. Whether it was the shock of the sudden flare of brightly colored bulbs or the sight of his wife dressed in a revealing outfit, the astonished Mitchell took an involuntary step backward, paddle-wheeled his arms, and fell soundlessly off the porch, managing to break his leg in two places.

After that, his leg in a heavy cast, he was confined to home for several weeks. Annie gave him a little silver bell to ring whenever he wanted her, and she continued to wait on him hand and foot in her French maid’s costume. She wasn’t taking any chances. She figured she had two weeks of fertility and she wasn’t letting it go to waste. The cast presented some problems at first, but where there’s a will, there’s a way, as her mother liked to say, and Annie quickly figured out ways around that. She was a vixen, a tramp, a gourmet cook in a French maid’s costume. She was every man’s dream wife. Mitchell lost his harried look and began to put on weight. His face flushed with color, his hair grew in thicker, and he went around the house on crutches, whistling cheerfully.

His mother, Gladys, shook her head in amazement and said, “Son, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you was having the time of your life.”

His physician, old Doc Grunewald, said, “Hell, boy, I wish all my patients healed up as quick as you.”

His father, Preston, asked anxiously, “When are you coming back to the store?”

By the middle of February, Annie knew she was pregnant. She folded up the French maid’s costume and put it away, and when Mitchell complained that she was no fun anymore, Annie reminded him that they had a lot of work to do to get ready for this baby, and he’d best get himself up on those crutches and hobble on back to work.

Despite the year’s optimistic beginning, things did not get better down at the Cluck-in-a-Bucket. Mitchell went back to working late. Every morning he left the house with a whistle on his lips and a spring in his step, and every evening he returned home with a little less spring. Annie did what she could to lighten his burden, keeping the house clean and hot food on the table, but her mind was preoccupied with other things, like furnishing the nursery and attending garage sales with her mother to pick up what they could. She also spent long hours poring over names in baby books trying to come up with something suitable.

Despite her minor in business, she was happy to let Mitchell limp along to work each day, blissfully unaware of personal or company financial matters. The pregnancy was easy, and Annie was determined to treat this as a new beginning, a chance to put the past behind her and start again. She was young and naive enough to believe that this was possible.

When she looked out the door one morning in her fifth month of pregnancy to see two uniformed water-meter workers leaning over the grate in her backyard, she went to the screen door and called to them. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, waving. “Can I get y’all some coffee?”

They were bent over the drain, struggling to lift the lid. They looked at her, and then at each other. Then they went back to work.

“Okay then,” Annie said, still waving, her little hand fluttering at the end of her arm. She had no idea what they were working on, but it looked important.

Later, when she went to turn on the kitchen faucet and nothing came out but a trickle of rust-colored water, the reality of her situation still didn’t sink in.

She went to the phone and called the city water board. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said to the woman who answered the phone, “but there appears to be a problem with my water. Two of your workers were out here this morning and I think they may have accidentally disconnected something when they left.” She was careful not to blame the workers.

The woman was quiet for a few moments, then asked Annie for her address. She put Annie on hold and came back a short time later.

“Your water’s been turned off for nonpayment,” she said in a jaded voice.

Annie was quiet, trying to figure out what she meant by nonpayment. Mitchell had all the bills sent to the store and she never even saw them. “There must be some mistake,” she said finally, and then added politely, “What can I do to fix this?”

“Well, you can start by paying your damn bill,” the woman said.

Annie called Mitchell. Then she got in her car and drove down to the water board to pay their bill. On the way home, she decided that she was going to have to take matters into her own hands again. Being poor was not working out. Letting Mitchell handle the family finances was not working out. Unless she stepped in and got Mitchell and Preston straightened out, her dream of a house in the suburbs by twenty-eight would never see the light of day.

She began going into the restaurant five mornings a week to help with the bookkeeping. Preston had been keeping the books, a job he hated and put off as long as possible. The ledger was a mess, and it took her a while to get it all balanced. Once she had a clear picture of their dismal financial standing, she set about doing something to change it. She called the store’s vendors and negotiated reduced pricing for bulk ordering, something Preston had never thought to do. She arranged for a small-business loan to help with their cash flow, then arranged additional discounts with their vendors for on-time payments. She bought a computer to handle all the bookkeeping and inventory tracking. She instigated Family Night Specials and Cluck Bucks, money-saving coupons given to repeat customers. She advertised catering for office parties, graduations, and PTA fund-raisers. By the time her first son, William, was a year old and she was pregnant with her second, the store’s profits were up sixty-four percent. When they received one of the letters from a franchising agent that Preston and Mitchell had been ignoring for years, Annie picked up the phone and called the agent.

The rest, as they say, is history.