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  Dragging herself back to school was hard, but she finished on time and graduated with honors, paying most of her tuition with her business. She gave a party for herself, because Tully conveniently forgot he said he would have one for her.

  Pulling up into the driveway after the graduation ceremony, she was thrilled to find her magnolia tree blooming for the first time. Covered with huge creamy-white flowers the size of dinner plates, the tree seemed to be saying congratulations and thanking her for saving its life. It was the best graduation present she could think of.

  Years before, at a yard sale, she had bought the seedling, which had two limp leaves, in a rusty coffee can. She called it her fifty-cent magnolia. Tully hated the tree on sight, constantly threatening to either dig it up or run over it with the lawn mower.

  But Anne held her ground. "Don’t you even think about touching that tree."

  The tree, a magnolia grandiflora, or bull bay, had grown slowly, inching up little by little. By the time it was seven years old and thirty feet tall, it still hadn't bloomed. Tully constantly complained about the leaves it shed, even though she was the one who did the yard work.

  He stopped complaining the day he found out how expensive it would be to buy a magnolia tree that size. Now he could never again complain that her fifty-cent magnolia didn't even bloom.

  What with Tully's retired pay as a full colonel with more than thirty years of service and his salary from Jordan Technology, they had an affluent lifestyle. Her husband's income was six figures a year, quite a large amount in 1986, but Anne never saw any of it unless he deigned to give her a few dollars every now and then. If she begged hard enough.

  He was inconsistent, sending her off on trips to visit her mother but refusing to allow her to buy anything for herself. Tully bought her a racy sports car, but she had only one dress in her closet. Her underwear was so raggedy, she was ashamed to go to the doctor. With school over, she continued to run her little business and used the money to gradually build a decent wardrobe.

  Every year Tully bought her a ticket to California to visit her mother. And every year she searched for David, going to his old neighborhood and haunting library stacks to search through California phone books. She wasn't sure who his agent was, or if he was still modeling. His parents and grandparents had all moved away. No matter where she looked, she kept running into dead ends, until at last she gave up trying to find him.

  It took her nearly five years to get her health back completely, and once she was well she couldn't find a job. After sending out countless resumes, Anne finally found a job as a newsletter editor for a large bank.

  The day she came home, full of pride, to tell Tully she had landed her first professional job, he said, "Good. Now you won't need any money from checking, so I'll take your name off our joint account."

  The move was meant to hurt her, but she didn't care. Now she had her own money.

  Although Anne saved every cent she could, she was scared to leave Tully because of a crazy loan from his parents. His father had given them $100,000 with the proviso that they repay him only if he ever needed it.

  She and Tully had to sign a promissory note so Big Tully could eventually declare the note a bad loan, which it was not, and take the entire amount off his taxes as a loss. Now Tully said if she left, she'd have to pay fifty thousand of the loan.

  If she left him, she could only raise that kind of money with her equity in the house, which meant she'd have no way to buy a house of her own, so she tried to hang on.

  A few years after giving them the money, Tully's father died. The note passed to Ida Lou, who was in her nineties and would probably live to be a hundred like her mother. Anne knew she couldn't leave Tully while his mother was alive.

  In July of 1989, Tully was laid off by Jordan Technology, and there was no living with him. His temper grew shorter, he was drinking more than he ever had, and he picked at everything she said and did. It was obvious his pride was wounded. He also was bored but did nothing to remedy the situation. His army retirement income was more than enough for them, so he didn’t look for other work.

  "Look," she said to him one afternoon, "why don't you go over to the school and become a volunteer? Before you went to school at Fort Leavenworth, you taught English as a second language. Maybe you could work with immigrant children."

  "You know, that sounds like a good idea. I've certainly got enough experience at it."

  To Anne's astonishment, Tully signed up at the neighborhood school that very morning, and was soon tutoring children from Iran, Bosnia, and Korea. He relished the task, even going out to their homes when they had no transportation after school. But there was no change in Tully's anger level at home.

  With their own children grown and out of the house, he was free to express his constant rage, and Anne bore the brunt of it. Every day was a trial for her. Finally, she moved into the guestroom, not caring if it upset him; he was always angry, so what difference did it make?

  Finding a good sale at an appliance store, she bought a small television for herself. In the evenings after work, she locked herself in if he was home. She loved having her own private space and the luxury of sleeping in the middle of her rice-post bed without fear of being hit while she slept.

  Tully was still drinking heavily and usually sank into a stupor late in the day, so about an hour after she got home, it was safe to put a frozen dinner in the microwave without having to deal with him.

  It was not the way she wanted to live, as a lonely prisoner in solitary, trying to avoid his anger. Anne knew she had to leave, but her financial situation terrified her. How would she live on what she made? He had told her she would get nothing from him, and she believed it.

  But she knew she'd rather live in a box in the park than continue to exist this way.

  Several months of misery dragged by before Anne decided she could stand no more and decided to spend some time with her mother. Taking time off work was no problem, so the next day she called her travel agent and arranged a flight for that weekend. She needed to get away from Tully.

  Too bad it can't be permanently, she said to herself.

  Chapter 18

  During the flight to Santa Barbara, Anne had time to think about her marriage, which had been a disaster since the very beginning.

  When she first met him, Tully dazzled her, charming her into his web, and her own lust for him betrayed her. Just standing next to him aroused her to the point that she could barely speak. Their chemistry was undeniable.

  "You know I love you, baby," was all he had to say to make her hot with desire. But if she had met his family first, she never would have married the man.

  Their honeymoon trip to Alabama was a disaster that portended the future, had she only taken notice. July in Mobile, Alabama, was like no summer she had ever known: an oppressive 98 degrees, with the humidity hovering around 99 percent.

  To say it was hot was an understatement, and she had never before breathed air that was almost all water. She imagined it was like one of those steam rooms where people sat around wearing only towels. Even a towel was too much in this weather, and by mid-morning her shorts and sleeveless shirt were sweat-soaked and clinging to her body.

  "Tully, I swear to God, I'm going to melt," she said, fanning herself with a newspaper.

  He laughed. "You'll get used to it. Everyone does."

  The worst part was staying with his parents, who had no air conditioning. According to Tully, his father was a wealthy man, so she wondered why they lived in such a tiny, rundown house, with only an attic fan to draw in a little air in the evening.

  With its dank and moldy smell, the house made her think of the tombs in New Orleans, where the water table is too high to allow underground burials. In the little houses of the dead, as the locals called them, the summer heat desiccates bodies completely, turning them to dust in a matter of days.

  "I am going to turn to dust. No, mud, the way I'm sweating," she said. Even though she took a cold show
er, she felt like a boiled potato, hot and crumbly inside. Their first evening at his parents' house, Tully found her passed out on the kitchen floor, and she spent the night in the hospital with an IV in her arm, recovering from heat exhaustion.

  As for Tully's father, a man known as Big Tully although he was two inches shorter than she was, Anne didn’t quite trust him. He reminded her of a comic-book character, with his round belly and slicked-down black hair that hung in a wispy fringe around a bald dome. She was sure he dyed it.

  For some reason, she didn't know why, she felt strange when Big Tully hugged her. Perhaps it was because his hugs lasted just a few seconds too long and felt just a little bit too tight. Or it might have been the way his beady eyes refused to meet hers.

  Worst of all was his constant flattery and touching. "Say there, little darlin'. Come here and give Big Tully some sugar," he said to her one day, pulling her too close for her liking.

  But she quickly learned how to deal with him. "Sorry, Daddy, but I'm just too hot and sweaty right now," she said. She thought she had caught on to the art of southern pussyfooting rather well.

  The man has to be close to sixty years old. Why would he flirt with someone my age? I’m his son's wife, not some girl in a bar. More than once she caught the sickly sweet smell of bourbon on his breath. Maybe that was it.

  The whole time she and Tully stayed at his parent’s house, Anne had nightmares in which a huge black spider slowly lowered itself onto her face, smothering her. It was as if a primitive part of her recognized danger and was telling her to be on guard.

  The night before they were to leave, she awoke, feeling someone’s presence next to her bed. When she moved, something touched her arm, and she screamed. Tully switched on a lamp, and Anne was startled and embarrassed to find her father-in-law, wearing only a T-shirt, standing next to her side of the bed, fondling himself.

  “He’s drunk,” said Tully. “Probably thought he was in the bathroom.”

  But Anne’s gut feeling was different, and she refused to ever stay at their house again.

  Tully's mother, Ida Lou, made her feel creepy too. The woman shot forth an endless stream of talk, all the while staring at her, unblinking, with milky blue eyes.

  The first time they met, Ida Lou started out with an innocent-sounding question, "Do you know how to cook yellow squash?"

  "Yes," Anne said, but before she could say anything else, Ida Lou immediately jumped in with a long, boring discourse on the subject. Then another question and another explanation, which was the extent of their conversation each time she was with her mother-in-law.

  Once, Ida Lou confessed to having a horrible temper as a young woman; but she immediately launched into another question and self-answer session before Anne could comment.

  She was surprised at the deference Ida Lou showed Big Tully, catering to his every demand and never disagreeing with him. But such was the way with many women of that generation, particularly in the South.

  In later years, Anne discovered that her father-in-law was a binge drinker who often took all the proceeds from one of his store's cash registers and went on a bender, hiring a cab driver to haul him from bar to bar until the money ran out.

  "My dad made millions, lost it all in the Great Depression, and then rebuilt his fortune. When I was seven, Mother divorced my dad and remarried, but it didn’t last long," Tully said. "Meanwhile, Dad married and divorced five other women, all cheap whores. I bounced back and forth between my parents and my alcoholic grandmother when I was a child. Mother and Dad remarried in 1950."

  Jess, Tully’s younger brother, a handsome blue-eyed, blond devil, was stunning to look at, but he had a stutter that made him sound like a moron. There was so much sadness in his eyes that Anne couldn't bear to look him in the face.

  When Jess tried to interact with his father, Big Tully rudely interrupted or corrected him. Her father-in-law's vocabulary seemed to consist of only put-downs, although he never talked that way to Tully. Anne was embarrassed for Jess. With these parents, Anne thought it was a wonder any of the children learned to talk.

  Jess was divorced for what Anne came to find out were the usual Weldon reasons: drug addiction, alcoholism, gambling, and other women. Supposedly, he helped his father in the family business.

  They owned several supermarkets in Mobile, but from what she saw, his father did all the work, because Jess was constantly glued to a well-worn chaise longue on the screened-in porch. Most of the time he appeared to be sleeping, but he seemed to liven up enough to eat dinner before sinking back into his coma-like stupor.

  Worst of all was her sister-in-law, Cindy, a struggling movie starlet who married and divorced a famous movie producer. She got pregnant, and he left his wife and children to marry her. However, she lost the baby, and he had a vasectomy.

  Twenty years later, Cindy's husband left her for another woman. The family buzz was that he left because Cindy had an affair and a baby that was not his. It was a messy divorce. Once it was over, she moved to Houston, claiming she had adopted the child. Interestingly, the little girl looked just like the Weldons.

  Anne always said that Cindy had married well and divorced even better, having gained a great deal of real estate in the settlement, including the mansion in Beverly Hills, which was sold for a tidy profit.

  It was when Cindy moved to Houston and bought a sprawling house in a gated community that the problems in Anne's marriage intensified. Tully had never been much help to begin with, but once Cindy came to town, he became her devoted minion, spending all of his free time managing his sister's affairs. At first, Anne thought she and Cindy would become friends.

  Pictures taken of Cindy in her thirties showed a beautiful, willowy young woman with dark hair, ice-blue eyes, and a snowy complexion. By the time she was fifty, however, she was thin to the point of emaciation, with leathery skin and long, over-processed hair dyed bat's-wing black. Standing all of five feet tall, Cindy wore a lot of jewelry and dressed like a twenty-year-old, so the total effect was ludicrous. Her strong Alabama accent was probably the only real thing about her.

  The more time Anne spent with her, the more she became annoyed at the many lies Cindy told. Not only did the woman repeat outrageous stories over and over, but each time she told them differently. The woman was a pathological liar. Worst of all, Cindy always turned every conversation to sex.

  Once Cindy made a startling revelation. "Daddy worshipped me," Cindy said. "When I was twelve, he took me to New York and showed me how to be a woman."

  Anne didn’t know whether Cindy’s disclosure confirmed her own suspicions about the man, or if it was just another of her tall tales.

  Before long, Anne got to the point where she couldn't stand to be around Cindy, especially when her sister-in-law’s dishonesty became evident.

  "Here, Anne," Cindy said one day. "Take this ring and enjoy it. I'll report it as stolen, and we'll split the insurance proceeds.”

  "I don't think so," Anne said firmly.

  Before Cindy moved to Houston, she mailed them a crystal bowl that arrived broken. Tully called Cindy to let her know about the broken vase.

  "I insured that bowl for twice what I paid for it," she said. "If you'll go to the post office and file a claim, we can split the proceeds."

  Instead, he wisely boxed up the bowl and sent it back to her. Anne thought the bowl was already broken when Cindy mailed it.

  Cindy dreamed up even bolder schemes, posing as an interior decorator so she could buy costly furniture at wholesale prices. With her fancy clothes and jewelry, and the expensive cards she'd had printed up, she appeared to be who she said she was, so no one questioned her credentials.

  "I'm decorating a spec house in Heatherglen," she told the sales staff. Once a piece was delivered to her house in the gated community, she called the store. "This item is damaged," she said, "and I am not going to pay for it."

  Afraid to upset a wealthy client, the store didn't fight back, merely writing it off as a loss. Cin
dy got lots of free furniture that way. Living in a gated community could be quite profitable.

  Anne was glad to see Cindy's greed backfire on a couple of occasions, though. The first time was when she tried to find fault with the wealthy contractor who installed her swimming pool.

  "I hate it," she said. "This pool is not what I wanted, and you won't get a nickel out of me." But of course, she didn't complain until after it was already finished.

  For the first time, Cindy tangled with the wrong man. He slapped a lien on her house for nonpayment and took her to court, winning a judgment against her, plus court costs. Anne thought that would be enough to convince her sister-in-law not to pull such stunts, but the woman didn't learn a thing. After all, it was not about the money, but power and control.

  "Tully, there's a thirty-foot well on my property, and I think I'll have a sprinkler system installed. It will save me a lot of money," Cindy said.

  At first, Cindy must have thought that she would be able to escape paying for the computerized lawn-sprinkler system the most reputable irrigation specialists in town installed on her two-acre lot.

  A week after it went in, she called the company. "This sprinkler system doesn't work correctly, and those sprinkler heads are six inches taller than I wanted," she said. "Furthermore, I will not pay for such inferior equipment."

  Two days later she woke up to find her entire sprinkler system had been dug up. Hysterical, she called all over town, trying to find another installer, but no one would talk to her. They were all too busy.

  Finally, in desperation, with her lawn burning up in the August sun, she called the original sprinkler man, who agreed to come and put in another system. "Of course, ma'am, I will require the full amount . . . plus tax . . . cash . . . in advance," he said.

  Frantic, she paid up front and got a new sprinkler system. However, she called Tully almost daily, complaining that the new system didn't work right.