Everything She Ever Wanted (88 page)

harmed-Aunt Liz, but apparently there had been bad feelings in North

Carolina, and Pat was no longer wanted as a nurse for her aunt.

Happily, and much to everyone's surprise, Elizabeth Porter gradually

improved.
 
By full spring she was walking again and seemed far more

alert.
 
Although her illness had visibly aged her, she was able to be

with her sisters at the Siler Family Reunion in the summer of 1989.

Bobby and Charlotte Porter, Liz's son and daughter-in-law, had felt a

decided coolness in the family, however, since they had sent Pat

away.

Prudently, they chose not to go to the White Lake reunion.
 
They had

criticized Pat, and Boppo would not permit that.
 
With the exception of

Bobby's mother, Liz, the surviving Righteous Sisters sided with

Boppo.

. . .

Susan was still working her two jobs that summer.
 
Adam was only two

and a half and she hated to leave him with strangers.

Bill was working many evenings, Sean loved his little brother, but he

had an evening job too; and Courtney was too young for so much

responsibility.
 
Boppo and Papa agreed readily to look after Adam three

days a week and have him stay over two nights.

Pat was clearly annoyed by the arrangement.
 
She hadn't wanted Ashlynne

living with Boppo and Papa, and she didn't want Adam there either.
 
At

long last, Pat's reasoning finally became apparent to her oldest

daughter.
 
"I didn't want to believe it," Susan said later.
 
"I wanted

everything to be all right with my mother, but I finally had to

acknowled e that anyone -anyone-who took attention away from her was

her enemy.
 
My mother had to be Boppo's little girl.
 
It didn't matter

if Mom was fifty-three years old.
 
Ashlynne-and then Adam-were standing

in her spotlight.

She enjoyed Adam at my house; she didn't want him at her house."

One night when Susan, Sean, and Adam were at home together, Adam

started hitting Sean-and then himself-in the face and whispering,

"Shussh!
 
Be quiet!"

"Mom?"
 
Sean asked.
 
"Where's he getting that?"

"Adam," Susan asked, "what are you doing?"

He looked at her, hit himself in the mouth again, and mumbled, "Grandma

Pat."

Sean was furious.
 
Although he was a teenager, beginning to pull away

from the family, he adored his little brother.
 
The thought that anyone

had hit Adam-even Grandma Pat-made him terribly angry.

Emotionally, Susan was pulled in two directions.
 
She loved the mother

who had always told her she could accomplish anything, the mother who

had written her such wonderful letters and whose handiworks of love

were evident in every room of Susan's beautiful home.
 
She loved the

mother who had been taken away from all of them for seven and a half

years, and now was home again.
 
At the same time, Susan had finally

acknowledged that her mother was selfish, jealous, immature, and

consumed with the need to own more and more things.
 
Pat was sixteen

years older than Susan in years; in truth, Susan was the grown-up.

Because she loved her mother, Susan had trouble accepting her

suspicion that Pat had punished Adam physically.
 
She put that out of

her mind, believing that her little boy had only been cuffed lightly.

Perhaps he had tried to play with her dolls; Susan knew her mother

couldn't stand to have Adam or Ashlynne touching her dolls.

just as Susan was of two minds about her mother, she had a similar

dichotomy of feelings about her only sister.
 
Susan loved Debbie but she

disapproved of some of the things she did.
 
The two sisters were as

different as night and day; they always had been.

But they were buddies, so close to the same age, giggling over the

weird-but predictable-antics of their family.

Debbie claimed to detest sex, and yet Susan had seen her lift her

blouse and flash truck drivers as the women drove past big rigs on the

freeway.
 
Debbie had a sensational figure and she sometimes worked as a

cocktail waitress in the most minuscule costumes the law would allow.

She was either bubbly or depressed, depending on how her love life was

going at the moment.
 
Her marriage had been only a convenience for

years.
 
Dawn, a teenager now, was as beautiful as the rest of the Siler

women.

For years, Susan and Bill had listened to Debbie's lamentations about

her marriage and her off-and-on relationship with Mike Alexander, a

married man who sporadically promised to get a divorce and marry her.

The Alfords' home had always been a haven for Debbie when her world

crashed.
 
She had an insouciant air about her that made her endearing

even when she was outrageous.

Whatever she did, she was still Susan's sister, and Lord knows they had

stuck together through some treacherous times.

They had long since learned to laugh about their mother's

histrionics.

Pat often took offense at something Debbie or Susan said to her during

a phone call.
 
They would hear the receiver drop, and then dead

silence.
 
Pat was brilliant at timing the "interrupted phone call,"

because invariably her daughters would hear the sounds of a car door

and then a house door slamming-Boppo and Papa arriving home-and next

their gasps as they discovered Pat crumpled on the floor in a faint,

the phone receiver still clutched in her hand.
 
Boppo would pick up the

phone and demand, "Now what have you done to your mother?"
 
ebbie and

Susan had learned to suppress their giggles; they knew their mother was

perfectly fine.
 
But Boppo apparently still believed each fainting

spell, each sudden illness.
 
If Miss Loretta, Pat's special friend, was

late in calling, Pat was sure she had had a wreck on the freeway and

was lying stone cold dead in a ditch.
 
Loretta always called, and

things always turned out all right.
 
Hysteria was merely Pat's way, and

Boppo played right into it.

Debbie sometimes called Susan to report on one of Boppo's phone

calls.

Both of them could imitate their grandmother perfectly, but they were

smart enough not to do it in front of her: "Debbie [Debbie imitating

Boppo], your mother has taken ill on the way to [or from] Susan's

house.
 
She's at the hospital," or "Debbie, your mother has been in a

terrible, terrible rainstorm coming from Alabama.
 
We are staying in

constant contact with the state patrol for any word of her."
 
Debbie

would tell Susan, "I'm so goddamned sick and tired of hearing about the

state patrol.

You and I know Mom's doing this on purpose-just to get attention."

And, of course, Pat was.
 
She would invariably show up eight or nine

hours late and make a dramatic entrance.
 
But after Ashlynne started

staying with Boppo and Papa, nobody seemed to be as worried about

Pat.

When she showed up, dripping wet and exhausted from her encounter with

yet another "awful, utterly terrifying thunderstorm," and found Papa

calmly rocking Ashlynne to sleep and crooning to her, Pat would flush

beet red and demand, "What's she doing here?"
 
ould say soothingly.

"Ronnie has to be out tonight," Boppo w "Well, he can goddamned well

come and get her!
 
She's his child.
 
Not yours!"

Pat clearly detested her own granddaughter.
 
And Susan suspected that

Adam was no more welcome.

On October 25, 1989, Tom Allanson was finally released from prison.

They hated to see him go down at Jackson; he knew more about the

internal workings of the prison's physical plant than anyone on

staff.

More than that, he was a nice guy who got along with everyone.
 
He had

been behind bars for more than fifteen years, long since forgotten by

the Radcliffes and family, except for Susan who had continued to write

to him occasionally.
 
Nona and Paw were dead and Tom and his aunt jean

estranged.
 
His son, Russ, had come to see him in Jackson when he

turned eighteen and they had tentatively begun to get to know ea(h

other again.
 
But Tom had no idea where Sherry was.

Tom had a good job waiting for him; his expertise in waste water

management made him eminently employable.
 
His new boss had held the

job open for him for a year, and he handed Tom the keys to the company

truck the day he walked out through the prison gates.
 
He also had a

bride waiting for him.
 
Tom and Liz were already common-law married, of

course, but they wanted a regular wedding.
 
They got married the day

Tom was freed.
 
He had never been good at dates; he didn't realize that

October 25 was the same date he had married Little Carolyn more than

two decades before.
 
It wouldn't have mattered.
 
That might as well

have been a hundred years ago.

Tom didn't think about Pat either.
 
She was a thousand years behind

him.
 
She had become only someone he had known once.
 
He didn't hate

her.
 
She was no longer important enough to him to hate.

Susan's growing fears about having Adam stay with Boppo, Papa, and her

mother soon became moot.
 
She was the next family member to fall ill

and she had to stop working.
 
In Decemtracted what seemed to be a

stubborn her of 1989, Susan con kind of flu.
 
She had headaches, joint

pain, and couldn't keep anything on her stomach.
 
She stayed home with

Adam, but she couldn't keep up with him, and she couldn't even start

her Christmas baking as she had hoped to do.
 
After the first few

weeks, the pain in her joints settled in her hands and feet, a