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didn't use it again during the week-long celebration.
. . .
Tom Allanson had made the most of his first years of freedom, earning
steady promotions and salary increases in his water treatment
job-enough so that Liz no longer had to work. They owned a little
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house out in the country north of Atlanta where they could sit on their
back porch and watch the dogwoods bloom and hear the wind in the pine
trees. They had a calico cat, a tank of fish, grew roses and
vegetables, went to church every Sunday, where Tom was president of the
Full Gospel Association, and they seldom thought about the past.
The last time Tom saw Pat was sometime in 1977, before he went to
Buford.
Shown a mug shot taken at her most recent arrest in 1991, his jaw
dropped. The Pat he remembered had been slender and delicate; this
woman was hugely fat. "I can't believe it. That's Pat?" He shook his
head, his thoughts unspoken as he handed the picture back.
Tom saw his son, Russ, regularly, but he still longed to find his
daughter, Sherry. "All I know is that she's married and lives out in
Seattle," he said. "I'd sure like to hear from her, but I don't know
where to start."
Tom had only one faded picture of his children when they were small.
He had kept it in his wallet for many years. "The rest are gone," he
said. "Pat destroyed every single picture of my children. Russ and
Sherry's godparents were professional photographers and we had
wonderful pictures of them every few months when they were growing
up.
But Pat was jealous and she got rid of them without my knowledge."
Tom Allanson had lost his children and more than a decade and a half of
freedom for a woman who said she loved him. By rights, he should have
double that to enjoy his life with the woman who had truly loved him
all through the years.
For Susan, there would be no happy endings. Inexplicably, just as the
Alfords had regained their financial footing and might have moved out
of McDonough-and away from Boppo's ubiquitous crystal gaze-Bill
announced to Susan that he was leaving her. He could no longer stand
her family. She was dumbfounded; she had no family any longer. She
had no one at all but Bill and her kids.
Bill moved out, without really explaining why.
Susan had to stay in McDonough, ostracized and alone, for six months.
Shy and dependent, married since she was eighteen, Susan now proved to
be tougher than she ever realized she could be. She packed up what she
could take and had a yard sale with the rest.
Courtney sold "South Fork," the dollhouse Pat had given her, for a
hundred dollars and gave the money to her mother.
During the yard sale, the family circled the block-not once but five,
ten, fifty times: Debbie and her husband and Ronnie, pointing,
laughing, and jeering. The colonel and Ashlynne walked by flying a
kite. Boppo drove by, again and again, her nose high in the air.
Except for Courtney and Adam, Susan was all alone.
Susan began moving on Mother's Day, 1992, hoping that on that day, at
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least, Boppo and Papa would be at Hardwick visiting her mother and
wouldn't follow her to see where she would be living. It worked,
although she later learned that the relatives who disowned her had
tried to get her forwarding address from the post office, her
childrens' school, and her former landlord. My?
Why couldn't they just let her go?
When Susan, Courtney, and Adam pulled out of McDonough for the last
time two days later, their truck laden down with the last of their
possessions, Susan caught a glimpse of a car that looked like Debbie's
in her rearview mirror. She drove a little faster, and switched lanes,
trying to lose them. As she headed northeast, and crossed from Henry
County into Clayton County, one of the tires exploded. By that point,
she had lost sight of the car that looked like Debbie's. She kept the
heavily loaded truck in her lane only with difficulty and drove on the
rim onto a feeder road, limping to a service station.
"I was afraid I didn't even have enough money left to pay to have the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]