by Ann Rule
When Adam had his tonsils out in November 1988, his grandma Pat was right there with him, holding him and promising him ice cream. She sat beside his bed in the hospital whenever Susan had to step away for a moment or two. Susan’s eyes misted when she thought how happy she was that her mother was able to be with them again.
She hadn’t made much progress on her book about her mother. With all the moving and resettling, she found it difficult to get going. She had sent for as many family birth and death certificates as she could track down. She knew now how hard Boppo’s teenage years had been, and about her three early and difficult pregnancies. She verified what she had always really known—that her uncle Kent had been a suicide. She found no medical records of other relatives with a history of rectal bleeding, but that didn’t seem so important. Adam had out grown that frightening symptom.
Bill Alford was working as a vice president in upper management in a company that seemed as solid as the marble in Stone Mountain. But then came a buy-out. Just before Christmas, 1988, he suddenly lost his job. Susan and Bill had already invited the whole family for Christmas dinner, and they never let on what they were going through. Photographs taken of that day’s celebration gave no hint that anything was wrong: four generations of a truly beautiful family, bowing their heads before Christmas dinner.
“It was rough,” Susan remembered. “But we made it. Nobody knew what had happened. Bill got another job. I worked two part-time jobs.”
During the day, Susan was on call as a substitute teacher. She taught at every level from elementary to high school—particularly special education classes. Evenings, she worked in store security for department stores, Macy’s and then Sears. She grew adept at changing her appearance by wearing wigs and dark glasses. She wasn’t very big, but she was fast and had a good eye for telltale movements on the part of “shoppers.” Working with male security officers, she chased scores of shoplifters and caught them in the parking lots. Susan’s college credits were in criminology and psychology; she didn’t have a degree, but she still hoped to get one. Her mother thought that policemen were low-class: “They’re so stupid, they couldn’t find work anywhere else,” Pat often said. But Susan seriously considered a career in law enforcement.
Bill’s new job looked promising and they breathed a sigh of relief. Like so many couples in their thirties, they were living well, perhaps too well. The Brookstone house was as nice as, or nicer than, their home in Florence, and the mortgage payments were hefty. Their children were used to having extras, and Bill and Susan were happy that they could still provide them. Sean got his own truck on his seventeenth birthday—not a brand-new truck, but one that any seventeen-year-old boy would be thrilled with. Bill and Susan decorated it with banners and balloons.
Even though Susan was now working hard herself, it still hurt her to see her mother sitting on the wobbly folding chair at Golden Memories. Debbie was working as an office manager and nurse for Dr. Francisco Villanueva*. Susan wondered sometimes why Pat and Debbie didn’t go back to their nurse’s aide jobs. Pat could certainly have made more money doing that, but neither of them seemed interested in returning to that career.
Pat became obsessed with worry about her future. What would become of her? She asked Bill to promise her that she would never be alone. If he and Susan assured her that they would build a little house for her in back of their house, and take care of her when she got too old to work, she would feel so much better. Susan saw that her mother wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be. She realized that she could not survive if Boppo weren’t around, and Boppo and Papa were growing older. Pat needed protection and care, and the Alfords promised her that she didn’t have to worry; they would take care of her.
Pat told them she was worried about Sean and Courtney too. She urged them to rewrite their wills and name her as the children’s guardian and as executor of their wills if anything tragic should happen to both of them. She apologized for the years of chaos. “I understand why you couldn’t put me in your wills before—I wasn’t myself, I was sick—but that’s different now. I suppose you have Boppo and Papa in there to take care of the children?”
Susan half nodded. Actually, she and Bill had listed his brother and sister-in-law—her family was always in such upheaval—but she didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings.
“Well,” Pat hurried on, “just change that and put my name first. They’re getting older, and it would be such a mess if I wasn’t listed first. Put me down, then Boppo, then Papa.”
Pat brought up the subject of the Alfords’ wills often, but Bill always managed to steer her away from the topic.
Sometimes, Pat talked about her own death—as if it were imminent. She bought herself a plot up in North Carolina where Grandma and Grandpa Siler—and Kent —were buried. She asked Susan if she might have the full-cut turquoise maternity dress that Susan had worn when she was pregnant with Adam. Of course Susan gave it to her mother. It had fit her loosely when she was nine months pregnant; it just fit Pat, who had now gained over a hundred pounds.
“There,” Pat said. “Now I have my marrying and my burying dress. Whatever happens to me, I’m ready.”
Susan bit her lip. It was sad to see her mother settling for so little in life. There would be no “marrying” for Pat—not anymore; she never went anywhere, except with Miss Loretta or to visit family.
***
In February 1989, Pat’s aunt Liz Porter in North Carolina wasn’t feeling well, and Pat insisted on going up to take care of her. Aunt Liz had always been her willowy, beautiful aunt, the sweet aunt who couldn’t balance a checkbook to save her life. She had raised her son, Bobby, alone after her husband disappeared into the woods. Until the mid-1980s, Liz was a strikingly attractive woman. But she was well into her seventies now and quite frail.
Pat moved in to care for Aunt Liz—just in time, she soon said, because her patient grew frailer rapidly. Liz had been ambulatory, but she became so weak that she could no longer walk. Pat rented a wheelchair and tenderly pushed her aunt around. She explained to Liz’s doctor that she was well experienced in dealing with the losses that accompanied advancing age.
Pat took complete care of Aunt Liz for six weeks, virtually shutting her off from the rest of the world. She explained to her cousin Bobby and his wife, Charlotte, that his mother was far too ill to have visitors. She discouraged them from coming by so often, assuring Liz’s family that she would recover much sooner if she could only have complete rest and quiet. Pat was her aunt’s only caregiver and companion. She also advised Liz on her legal affairs and urged her to have a proper will drawn up.
For a while, it seemed that Elizabeth Porter would not survive. Her physician was appalled at how rapidly his patient was degenerating. When Pat returned to Boppo and Papa’s, it seemed likely that she would not see her aunt alive again.
Pat complained to her mother that no one even thanked her for the tender care she had given her aunt. Boppo was insulted by their lack of appreciation. “Your mother,” she told Susan and Debbie, “has always been especially kind to elderly people, children, and animals. Everything your mother does is always taken the wrong way by her cousins, and I don’t know why. If it was anyone else saying or doing it, it would be perfectly all right—but not with your mother. Your poor mother had to leave all upset, and drive all the way back. I’m shocked at how her cousins treated her, and all she wanted to do was help. Your mother works harder than anyone I know, always busy with something in her hand, up all hours of the night sewing—”
Susan couldn't see how her mother’s sewing all night could have helped—or 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 198
9. 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 acknowledge 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?”
Debbie 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?”
“Ronnie has to be out tonight,” Boppo would say soothingly.
“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.
CHAPTER 46
***
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 each other again. But Tom had no idea where Sherry was.
Tom had a good job waiting for him; his expertise in wastewater 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 December of 1989, Susan contracted what seemed to be a stubborn 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 bearing-down agony as if her extremities were caught in intractable vises.
It was a familiar pain—not unlike what she had felt in the summer of 1987 when she had had such a terrible time driving home from Boppo’s house to Florence, Alabama. But this time, it was worse. “I just had to keep rubbing my hands, kneading them, trying to work that terrible aching out of them. They hurt so bad I’d wake up at night with the pain.”
Pat drove up to Brookstone from McDonough and announced that she would take care of Susan. “Mom wouldn’t let me do anything,” Susan remembered, “She took care of Adam, she cooked for Bill and Courtney and Sean, and she tried to be sure I didn’t get dehydrated. She’d fix me soup or tea and come and sit by me until she saw that I was swallowing it. I didn’t know what I would do without her.”
Bill and Sean were hardly grateful. They made fun of Pat’s cooking; worse than that, they made jokes (behind her back, of course) about being afraid she would poison them. It was an ill-kept secret that Grandma Pat had been in prison for arsenic poisoning, and Bill and Sean shared a certain perverse sense of humor.
“Mom was no star in the kitchen,” Susan admitted. “She tried, but—and I hate to say it because it sounds mean—my mother is not known for her cooking. Sean and Bill wouldn't eat what she made. Her ‘famous tuna’ still had the oil in it and then she added mayonnaise besides. She never skimmed the grease off of spaghetti [sauce] or chili. She liked it that way, so she assumed everyone did.”
