Stand-In Groom (32 page)

Apparently she hadn’t had a precocious talent at it, as the scene when they sat down to critique her work popped into her mind with picture-perfect clarity. Only ten photos—out of the hundreds she’d helped her mom develop—made it into the album. After that session, seeing the disappointment in her mother’s beautiful face and her father’s bright blue eyes, Anne had carried the camera with her everywhere—until her first grade teacher confiscated it because she wasn’t doing her schoolwork. When her grandmother gave it back to her after a week without it, Anne spent all of her free hours trying to practice what they’d taught her about focus, light saturation, contrast, and composition so that when they came back from taking photos sure to win them more national and international recognition, they wouldn’t be disappointed again.

Examples of her “much better” work followed—a close-up shot of ladybugs on a leaf. The branch of an old oak tree dipping down into the creek behind Mamere and Papere’s farmhouse. Uncle Lawson teaching Forbes to play chess. A wide shot of the entire family—except Lilly and Albert—eating Sunday dinner.

She flipped the next page and something slipped out. She caught it before it hit the floor, and her heart lurched. She unfolded the newsprint. There, on the front page, above the fold. A photo of the skeleton framework of the “tallest building ever to be built in Bonneterre” with which she’d won the newspaper’s amateur photography contest. She had to admit, the composition was pretty spectacular, taken from the roof of a nearby office building.
Maybe now my parents will see that they can stay in Bonneterre to take pictures and still have them printed,
she had thought when she had found
out about winning the contest.

The adult Anne snorted. At thirty-five, she knew why her parents had to leave to do their work. The child within her still wanted to know why they loved doing it more than being with their daughter.

Of course, they’d been thrilled. Had bought her a new camera. Had taken her out to dinner to celebrate.

Then the Smithsonian called. They wanted to display her parents’ photography in a special exhibit in the months leading up to the announcements of the Pulitzer prize, which everyone in the country was sure her parents would win for their photo essay on a flood that ravaged a previously unknown village in the Appalachians. They wanted Lilly and Albert to be there for the opening.

Anne begged to go with them, now that she was an awardwinning photographer herself. They laughed at her earnestness, but she got through to them because after a couple of days, they agreed she could go. They’d take a week and make it a family vacation. So many things for Anne to practice her photography skills on in Washington, DC.

Never having left Bonneterre before, Anne had been excited but tried to imitate her parents, to whom the trip was nothing out of the ordinary. She kissed Mamere and Papere good-bye at the gate at the Bonneterre airport—then just a small regional outfit—and followed her parents outside and up the steps into the small plane, lugging her heavy camera bag. The commuter jet had two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other. She sat beside her daddy, in the window seat, the thrill of finally getting to go with her parents ready to boil over.

Her stomach lurched as she remembered the sensation of the plane picking up speed down the runway. She swallowed hard and closed her eyes. She was holding Daddy’s hand, looking out the window at the buildings and trees whipping by. The front of the plane lifted up.

She swallowed again, cold sweat breaking out on her face.
Farther and farther back in her seat the g-force had pressed her as the plane lifted off the tarmac. Daddy pointed out the steeple of Bonneterre Chapel and the tree-shaded campus of the university. There was Town Square and the river.

The plane gave a sudden loud
pop
and jerked drunkenly to the right. Other passengers gasped. Daddy’s hand on hers tightened. What was happening? She looked up at Daddy, who wasn’t smiling anymore as he looked across the narrow aisle at Mama. The plane jerked again, and Anne could smell smoke. Something was on fire! A woman behind them started praying, calling Jesus’ name over and over.

The memories came back so real, so clear; tears streamed down Anne’s face, and she wrapped her arms around her churning stomach.

With a sickening screech, flames had erupted outside her mother’s window as the engine exploded. Anne remembered screaming. With gathering speed the small plane hurtled toward the woods. Daddy wrapped his arms around her, tucking her head into his chest, whispering, “It’s going to be fine, sugarplum. It’s going to be okay.”

Smoke filled the cabin; flames backlit her mom.
Mama, get away from the fire—you’ll get hurt! Mama!

Anne leapt off the ottoman and dashed to the bathroom just in time as her stomach emptied all its contents. She collapsed on the cool white tile, sobbing, trembling, her heart racing.

She’d woken up in the hospital three days later. Lilly had died instantly. Albert lingered a few hours—his chest impaled with a twisted piece of metal, the same piece of burning metal that seared a scar along the left side of Anne’s neck. He’d protected her as best he could during the impact of the crash, shielding her from burning debris, but her injuries had still been extensive: her left foot and ankle crushed by her heavy camera bag, second- and third-degree burns where his hands and arms couldn’t cover her, the gash along her neck into the shoulder muscle.

Her father had only been thirty-four years old, her mother
thirty-two. Still so much life ahead of them.

Why, God?
She pulled herself off the floor and proceeded to brush her teeth.
Why did Lilly and Albert have to die? Why did I have to be deprived of my parents growing up? You could have saved them, but You didn’t. I don’t understand.

She took some Pepto-Bismol to try to calm her stomach.

God was no more to blame than her parents for their death. Yes, He could have worked a miracle and stopped them from dying. But He hadn’t. Accidents happened. She wasn’t the first child to have lost her parents, and she wouldn’t be the last. But she could take comfort in the knowledge that they’d believed in Him, had accepted that their salvation was only to be found in the blood of Jesus. They had been with Him from the very moment their lives here ended.

Leaving Anne to have to go on without them. To have the stigma of being the girl who had to depend on the charity of relatives for a place to live. The girl who was teased when changing clothes for gym class in the locker room because of all the burn scars on her back. No boy would ever want to be with a
monster
like her.

That legacy followed her through junior high into high school, combined with the fact that she had a burning need to please every adult she came into contact with, including all of her teachers. What other students saw as Anne trying to ingratiate herself by volunteering to help or getting the best grades had been no more than her need for approval by anyone in a pseudo-parental role—at least, that’s what a friend had written in a psych paper about her in college. The teasing had followed her, too. Especially being nearly six feet tall at thirteen with no athletic ability whatsoever.

She returned to the living room and started replacing items in the box. The trip to Baton Rouge in ninth grade had been great because only the kids with the top grades—other nerds, geeks, and social outcasts like herself—had gone. No one had teased her about her height, her grades, her lack of “real” parents.

She cracked open her high school scrapbook. A photo of her
with her “older brothers” and Forbes slipped out. Maggie and Errol’s three older sons, Whit, Andre, and David, along with Forbes had done their best to protect Anne from the worst of the teasing. But they’d had their own lives and couldn’t be around all the time.

Tucking the photo back into the book, she continued flipping through. She stopped in the pages representing her junior year. A piece of paper with purple ditto-machine ink glared back at her:

A
CADIANA
H
IGH
S
CHOOL

N
OMINEES FOR
J
UNIOR
P
ROM
C
OURT

As a joke, someone had nominated her for prom court. She’d tried to make light of it, not to take it seriously. That was hard when Aunt Maggie heard, though. Since Maggie had no daughter of her own, she and Anne had a strong relationship. But Aunt Maggie couldn’t understand why Anne wasn’t excited about being nominated, until Anne finally confessed that she didn’t have a date for the dance and knew no one would ask her to go.

Maggie had suggested Anne ask one of her cousins to go as her date. It was the only major argument she and Aunt Maggie ever got into. Anne won but felt terrible for disappointing her mother’s sister, who’d been so kind as to take her into her home to live.

Once the flyers had been passed out among the junior class, the teasing intensified and started getting nasty when the chess team, chemistry club, and honor society started campaigning for her.

She could remember that worst day like yesterday. Three of the cheerleaders had cornered her outside the gym on her way out of PE—one of them was her cousin David’s girlfriend. They threatened her with all sorts of retribution stolen straight from the Molly Ringwald movies they’d seen too many times. She was doing her best to get away when a masculine voice rang across the hall.

“Leave her alone!”

The three cheerleaders had squeaked and spun around.

Cliff Ballantine—tall, slender, and well liked, with dark hair and
brooding good looks—stood over the three twits like an avenging angel. She’d only seen him in the school plays or across the room at assemblies. The cheerleaders scurried away, and Cliff had escorted her to her next class.

Anne didn’t go to junior prom by her own choice. By the end of the school year, Cliff was working for Aunt Maggie part-time, and Anne was helping him with his English homework so he could graduate.

Maggie had taken every opportunity that summer to have the two of them work together. Although with every appearance of being outgoing and happy-go-lucky, Cliff let only a few people, including Anne, see his vulnerable, somewhat introverted side. She was the only girl at school who knew he lived with his mom in a trailer park on the edge of town instead of at his deceased grandparents’ address that he used to be in the Acadiana High district—the school with the best drama program in town. He was the only person outside the family she ever told all of the details of the plane crash to. She also recognized that he used his good looks and charm to get people to do what he wanted. She’d confronted him about it the year before he graduated from college, but he just laughed, patted her cheek, and asked her if she could go to the library and find him some books for a sociology research paper he had to write.

She put the scrapbooks, the wedding plan book, and everything else back into the box and snapped the lid on.

If Cliff hadn’t really wanted to marry her, why had he asked in the first place? They’d never really been “boyfriend and girlfriend”— he’d gone on dates with other girls in college. But when he moved away to California, he’d seemed to cling to her like a lifeline—and, of course, a constant source of money when he quit whatever part-time job he was willing to take on.

Ask him
.

She lugged the box back to the closet and returned to the bathroom to start getting ready for her date. She stared at herself in the mirror as a slow smile spread across her face. After all these
years, she’d finally figured out how to talk to Cliff. She’d make an appointment with his personal assistant, George.

Her cell phone buzzed and started playing “That’s Amore.”

“Hello, George.”

He didn’t respond immediately, and her smile faltered.

“Anne, I—we—something has come up.”

She trudged into the living room and sank into her big chair. “That’s okay if you have to cancel tonight.”

“Oh no, it’s not about tonight—well, it is, but it isn’t—” He let out a frustrated breath into the phone. “I’m making a muck of this. Here’s the issue. Mr. Ballantine just received word from his agent that he’s gotten a call for Mr. Ballantine to star in what’s sure to be one of the biggest movies he’s ever done. Mr. Ballantine doesn’t want to turn it down.”

Anne frowned. “Okay.”

“The movie starts filming in September in New Zealand for ten weeks.”

“Ten—oh. So they want to postpone the wedding?” A tingle started at the base of her skull. Postponing the wedding would mean George would be around that much longer.

“Well, no. They’d like to move the wedding up to the last weekend in August.”

Anne’s fantasy of George being around for an additional two or three months crashed into a heap of anxiety. “Last weekend in August? With everything we have left to do? Are they still determined to have it the same size?”

“Yes. Everything still the same, just moved up almost two months. Anne, I know this is an imposition on you. But Mr. Ballantine has instructed me to spare no expense in making it happen. Do you—do you think it can be done?”

Her stomach started churning again. Six weeks to do what was going to be difficult in four months. “Of course. But I think instead of going out for dinner tonight, we should have something delivered to my office and work on a new timeline.”

The relief in his sigh was palpable through the phone. “I’ll meet you at your office at six. I lo… I’ll pick up dinner. What do you fancy?”

Anne left the choice of meal up to him—she wouldn’t be able to eat anything anyway—and bade him farewell for the time being.

So much for a leisurely, romantic dinner.

T
he weeks between the engagement party and Courtney’s wedding sped by, even though Anne did everything to utilize every minute of every day. After a quick trip to New York to get Cliff settled into his Manhattan condo, George returned to Bonneterre to assist her with anything she needed.