Everything She Ever Wanted (90 page)

the first time, Susan was actually afraid of her own mother.

By morning, the feeling had passed, leaving only a smoky hangover of

dread in her mind.
 
She had been sick so long it was sometimes hard to

think straight.

. . .

By March, Susan was still sick.
 
Her feet hurt so much that she hadn't

worn shoes, much less high heels, for four months.
 
And then, ever so

gradually, she began to have good days interspersed with the bad.
 
She

was far from well, but she was better.

Continuing the tradition of teenage-and pregnant-brides in the Siler

family, Debbie's eighteen-year-old daughter, Dawn, was getting

married.

Debbie asked Susan to take the pictures at the wedding and Susan

promised she would, all the time wondering how on earth she was going

to get dressed up, wear heels, and stay on her feet throughout the

ceremony and reception.

Dawn's wedding was March 10, 1990.
 
She was a beautiful blond bride,

and although she was a little queasy with early pregnancy, she was not

as nauseated as her aunt Susan was.
 
Somehow, Susan managed to take a

complete set of wedding pictures and stay on her feet.
 
Barely.
 
"I

didn't think I'd make it," she said.
 
"But I did.
 
I plastered on

makeup to give me some color, but I could see it didn't work in the few

photographs I was in."

Susan wore a white silk dress that was way too big for her, but she

cinched the belt over four notches.
 
The circles under her eyes made

her look ten years older than she was.
 
Boppo wore a lovely pale pink

crepe dress.
 
Pat wore her "marrying and burying dress"-the turquoise

dress that had once been Susan's maternity dress.
 
Debbie wore a very

expensive white satin brocade and lace dress.
 
She wore it very

carefully; she returned it to the store the next day.

It was, Susan acknowledged, a typical family wedding, at least for her

family.
 
On the surface, everything seemed lovely.
 
Underneath, there

were secrets, lies, evasions, and fears eating away at the very

foundation of the family.

Although not one of them would ever have admitted it, Susan and Bill

Alford and their children had lived a life-style that all of the

SilerRadcliffe clan envied.
 
None of them knew how very close the

Alfords had come to losing it all at Christmas, 1988.
 
It was a matter

of pride with Susan and Bill that they had handled their own problems,

pulled out of their economic quicksand, and gone on.

They almost made it.
 
But by the spring of 1990, there was not much

about the Alfords' lives that their relatives would have wanted to

emulate.
 
Bill's new company was in the midst of a buy-out too, and

Bill and Susan doubted that they could survive another job loss-even

after Susan's health improved enough for her to go back to work.
 
They

argued continually, and one or the other would storm out of the

house.

They were scared, worried sick about finances, worried about Sean's

mediocre grades, and worried about the future.
 
The emotional tension

was crushing.

"We grounded Sean too much and made him study," Susan remembered

regretfully.
 
"But we thought we were doing the right thing.
 
He was

sick of the tension and the fighting in our house-and I didn't blame

him.
 
It was such a bad time."

Sean was in love, and far more caught up in his girlfriend's family

than his own.
 
He graduated from high school in June, and Bill-who

found it difficult to let go of grand gesturesrented Sean a Cadillac to

drive to the prom.
 
Sean posed in his prom tuxedo for his mother's

camera.

It was to be one of the last happy pictures.
 
When he turned eighteen,

Sean moved into his girlfriend's family's home and completely turned

his back on his own family.
 
He wanted nothing more to do with them,

with their arguments, their worries, their lives.

"We wouldn't let him take his truck, and I felt guilty about that-that

was wrong-and I lost my temper and screamed at Sean," Susan said, her

voice full of pain.
 
Sean was her firstborn, her beautiful little boy

grown to manhood, and he he stepped out of his family's life as if he

had never was gone; been part of it at all.
 
hapter 7

Next-and very rapidly next-the Alfords filed a C bankruptcy petition.

They had no other choice.
 
The wonderful nouse in the Brookstone

Country Club complex was gone, and Bill was back on the road as a

salesman.
 
"We had no place to live," Susan said.
 
"We had no place to

go-except to Boppo and Papa's.

I was depressed.
 
Sean and everything we'd worked for was gone, and I'd

had to see Adam and Courtney give up their ittle girl, Boppo was always

rooms, their home.
 
When I was a l' the one who came to our rescue-but

we were grown-ups and it hurt so much to have to move in with them.
 
We

were so ashamed."
 
Boppo and Papa's little house in McDonough

was already crowded.
 
Pat had her wing, of course-her doll room, her sewing

room, her bedroom and bath upstairs.

She refused to let anyone walk through her entrance, so Papa quickly

built some rudimentary steps of unpainted two-by-fours outside the

kitchen sliding doors.
 
s ill livin r six days Ashlynne was t g with

Boppo and Papa five o out of seven, and she still slept in their

bedroom.
 
She had a room of her own, but Pat insisted it wasn't

Ashlynne's room; she called it "the guest room."

There weren't any other bedrooms.
 
The only place the Alfords could

stay was in the formal parlor.
 
There was no privacy, just a room with

oriental carpets and all the collected treasures from the Radcliffes'

tours of duty.
 
They would live there at Boppo's house, the eight of

themBoppo, Papa, Pat, Ashlynne, Bill, Susan, Courtney, and Adam -until

Thanksgiving Day.
 
And it would be the prelude to the unfolding of a

nightmare.

Susan had always believed in her grandmother no matter what, but this

time if Boppo helped herg she would be at cross purposes with what Pat

wanted.
 
From the moment they moved in, Pat made it clear that she

didn't want Susan and Bill and the children in her mother's house.

Perhaps it should not have been the shock that it was.
 
But Susan had

clung to the belief that a mother-any mother-would help and protect her

chid.
 
She was wrong.

Pat viewed Susan only as an enemy, a competitor for Boppo's love.

"My mother was outraged when we moved into'Boppo's house," Susan

said."

"She didn't want us there.
 
I had no idea how angry she would be.
 
She

was my mother, and we needed help.
 
But we were intruding on her

territory.
 
Just like Kent had.
 
Just like Ashlynne was.
 
She didn't

want us there.
 
She especially didn't want me there."

Adam missed his big brother, and he missed his own room.
 
He didn't

understand why they had to leave his house and all live in one room.

He was a very sad little boy.
 
He sat for hours in a chair by the front

window, his head on his folded arms, watching for something-or for

someone.

Susan was even sadder.
 
Her losses had piled one on top of another over

the past year and a half, and she had been mysteriously and dangerously

ill for four months.
 
Her body was well -She no longer suffered from

crippling pain in her hands and feet-but she could not seem to stop

crying.

At first, she tried to help with the cooking and the chores, but she

could not please her mother.
 
Pat watched her constantly and criticized

everything, from the way she washed a cup to the way she fried an

egg.

"I just gave up," Susan recalled.
 
"I finally just stayed in the living

room, sat on the couch, and cried.

Bill looked after the kids, he washed dishes, he did errands.
 
He would

sit around the kitchen table and talk with everyone, and he could still

make himself laugh.
 
He was wonderful.
 
I knew that he was feeling

terrible too, but I couldn't help him.
 
I was paralyzed."
 
Susan had

seen what her mother did to people who invaded her territory.
 
She

attacked where she knew they were most vulnerable.
 
She capitalized on

weakness, homing in on whatever would hurt the most.
 
Even though Susan

had been only a young teenager when Kent committed suicide, she

remembered how savagely her mother had attacked him.

And now she herself had become the target.

Susan's only defense against her mother's abuse, her sharp tongue, and

her constant criticism was to hide in the living room, appalled at how

increasingly depressed she felt.
 
When she looked into her mother's

eyes, she saw the same eyes she had seen the night she tiptoed down the

hall o to pick up Adam when she was sick, eyes full of hate.

Susan was so tremendously sad and so tired that she could scarcely

move.
 
She no longer cared to live.
 
But she had children to raise, and

she was frightened that she might do something irreversible just to

escape the pain she felt.
 
"I checked myself into Clayton Hospital,"

she said.
 
"In the old days, they would call what I had a nervous

breakdown-but they called it depression.
 
I sure didn't disagree with

them.
 
I was there for five days and I will never, ever forget that day

I came home.
 
My mother walked in, glared at me with loathing! and