“It’s not across the country, Daddy,” I replied. I had suddenly, in the moments after winning the contest, gone from a high school–educated farm girl to a worldly socialite. “It’s just a couple of states away.”
“I don’t care where it is,” Momma said, her voice high and tight, “you’re not going.”
“That’s final,” Daddy added.
I guess, looking back now, that burying my brother so young and losing those two babies she tried to carry afterward made Momma and Daddy cling to my older sister and me a little tighter than some other parents. It had changed things for me too. I had longed for a sibling to grow up with, but Lib was already eleven by the time I was born. I would see the other kids with their brothers and sisters, playing and running. And I’d beg Lib to play with me too. By the time I was old enough to be of any interest to her whatsoever, Lib was already off at Women’s College. It broke Momma and Daddy’s hearts that she was leaving them, leaving Bath, going out to make a bigger life for herself.
I’ll never forget my momma and daddy’s faces the day Lib came home and told them she was moving to London. “He’s my husband,” she was saying, bordering on hysteria, when I walked through the door from school. “This is the chance of a lifetime for him. Reporting on thewar? This is something that country folks like us don’t get to do.”
Momma and Daddy were sitting across from Lib at our wooden kitchen table, Momma leaning on Daddy, sobbing into his chest. “She’ll never make it back,” she was saying over and over again.
Daddy didn’t say a word, but you could tell by his eyes that he was terrified. I, on the other hand, thought Lib was impossibly brave. She was going to go off and have an adventure. She was going to a war, in another country. This was what living was all about. I didn’t realize yet the supreme danger that she would be in. I didn’t know what was happening in London. I didn’t know how her days would consist of praying that she and her sons and her husband would make it through another night.
But I knew how Momma cried when she got those letters fromLib. And I knew how she cried even harder on the days those letters didn’t come. And I knew Momma and Daddy’s tightening grip on me was palpable, almost suffocating.
I blamed my sister that day. Why couldn’t she have stayed home with Momma and Daddy? Why did she have to be the one to go off? If she had stayed, maybe they would have let me have a life for myself.
I was too young to understand my parents. Too young to sympathize. I only thought they were trying to keep me from being happy by keeping me at home. And I had some living and some mistake making in me.
So I did what anyone in my position would do. I grabbed all the money I’d saved from under my feather mattress, packed my curlers, my best pumps and a few clean pairs of cotton underwear, the ones with the little line of lace trim around the top, and climbed down the drain spout before the sun came out. I left a note, just in case it wasn’t obvious right off where I’d gone. My intention was not to kill my poor parents with grief and worry. I just kept thinking about Katie Jo. She wouldn’t let a silly little thing like a “no” from her parents let her miss out on the trip of a lifetime. I was making my own decisions for a change.
With the gas and rubber rations, Momma and Daddy couldn’t have driven to find me even if they’d wanted. And they would’ve had to dig up all those mason jars of cash buried around the yard to have bought plane tickets to follow me. And so, for the next three weeks, until I came home and they chained me to the fence post, I was going to be my own woman.
In 1945, the Waldorf Astoria was glorious. It was heaven on earth. Movie stars and presidents floated down the halls in the finest fashions, ate off of gold-rimmed china and danced to the best orchestrasin the world. But I didn’t know all that. I’d only ever seen Mrs. Bonner’s boardinghouse in Bath with the one shared bathroom and the migrant workers in for picking season stealing a few hours of gritty sleep before getting back to it.
So those flyers with the black-and-white sketches couldn’t have prepared me for walking into one of the grandest lobbies in the world. The Waldorf even smelled rich. Like perfume, flowers and hundred-dollar bills. My hair curled like Ginger Rogers’s, with soft skin, full lips and the petite figure that youth allows, I didn’t quite look like New York City high society. But I’d been primped, dressed, primed and educated by my chaperone, which was nearly as good.
“Your dinner is waiting in the dining room, Miss Hensley,” the man behind the counter in the freshly pressed suit said. “Allow me to escort you.”
I was so busy taking in the marble lobby and the women flitting about in sequined gowns that I hardly even noticed the orchestra playing and the couples dancing merrily. I grew up on a farm eating butterbeans and pork chops, so to slide my pristine pumps underneath a white tablecloth and eat lobster thermidor and foie gras, crown of strawberries and Key West turtle soup... No words do it justice.
In the midst of the finest food I’d ever tasted, I could tell a commotion of sorts was beginning. But I figured what I considered an excited rumble might be ordinary in New York City.
As all the diners started running for the lobby, my heart dropped into my stomach because there was no arguing that something was wrong. And I had the horrifying thought that the last thing I would ever do to my parents was disobey them.
Annabelle
Fading into Him
True love is something you have to fight for. Lovey has been telling me that since I was a little girl. Sometimes you fight harder, and sometimes the person you love fights harder but, whatever the circumstances, if it isn’t a love worth fighting for, it isn’t worth having.
I realized that Holden still thought we were worth fighting for, as Ben said, “So you want to give me a little insight as to why I was punched out today?” Ben was lounging on our bed, towel around his waist, a frozen New York strip over his eye.
I grinned coquettishly, hoping he wouldn’t be angry with me, though, truth be told, he was very seldom angry. “I just wanted you to have a little excitement in your trip is all. I hired that actor to shake things up.”
Ben raised one eyebrow. “Uh-huh. Right.”
“Well, you knew I was engaged. That was my engagee.”
“That’s all?”
I wanted to say something more, but in truth, there was nothing more to say. “Those sentences literally just summed up our relationship.” I crawled up onto the bed, straddling Ben’s waist and rubbing his chest. “It was nothing like us.”
I wouldn’t say that I fell in love with Ben so much as he consumed me. From the very first moment I laid eyes on him, I began fading into him, staining his skin with mine like new denim on a white cotton T-shirt in the wash.
He smiled and looked at me with that adoring smile. “TL,” he said, “you are stupid beautiful.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head, leaning over to kiss him.
