“I wondered. You haven’t had wine since you moved in. I thought it might be because of Alice.”
“Nope, I just didn’t want to let you get your way. At the time, I was mad at you for telling me what I couldn’t do. I didn’t like it.”
“Hmm... interesting how much you love it now.” She blushes again. “I’m surprised today was the Art Institute. I would have thought you were going back to the library to take some of those books back. You managed to get through far more over the weekend than I thought you would. Hell, I couldn’t believe how many you came home with. If you wanted that many books, you should have gotten a cart to take with you. All those books, and you still read on your tablet. Are you going to be able to read all of them?”
“I do get a little carried away when it comes to books.”
“Why did you go the library? Why not go to the bookstore?”
She looks at me like it’s a stupid question. “I love libraries. Maybe you’re right and I won’t be able to read all of the books I get but I would like the chance to try. With the time limit on a library check out I’m more inclined to read what I have. When I go to the bookstore, knowing they’ll be there for as long as I want them, I go a little crazy. I would have needed a car to get them all home.”
“You love libraries, really?” Her eyes glowed when she said it.
“Yes, especially the older ones. I love the sheer history they represent, the way some of them are the prettiest buildings in the city. Because, you know, a lot of times libraries were some of the first buildings built in a city or town.
“Then there’s the whole idea of a library. You get to pick out any book for free. It blew my mind. I didn’t get to go into one until I went to Vegas at eighteen. Until then, if it wasn’t the bible I couldn’t read it. I remember spending hours in the library at first, not realizing I could leave with the books. One of the librarians finally took pity and explained how everything worked.”
“You had never been in a library before?” The very idea of someone not knowing what a library was and how it worked, at the age of eighteen, is crazy to me.
“My parents allow me in a place full of information that conflicted with anything I was being taught? No way, not going to happen. I was determined to make up for lost time and read everything I should have read growing up.”
“Your parents kept a really tight leash on you, didn’t they? I don’t think I really understood until now.” And I didn’t. Even though I took in what
she told me, and committed it to memory, I thought it meant I understood. But I didn’t, not really.
“Very much so, at all times. My home was about twenty miles outside a town of less than ten thousand people. I was never allowed to go into town without my mother by my side, even then it was only a handful of times. My father ran a farm that supplied most of the dairy and meat for the town.
“While we weren’t rich, it was enough to support a family of twenty. It also meant we didn’t need to leave the farm for hardly anything. From sun up to sun down, it was on and on about how right we lived and how wrong everybody else lived.”
“That sounds tough, I’m sorry. How did you manage to get away from them? You never said exactly.”
I’ve hit a nerve. I’ve been careful until now letting it go every time I asked a question about her past that she didn’t want to answer but I’m dying to know her better. The things I knew were only a fraction of the real story. Her lone offer up of being taught sex was only about procreation and not to be enjoyed explained so much for a while it was enough. Now I want to know more about what had made Anne who she is. She swallows as she studies the ice in her glass. “It was easier than they thought it would be. A week after I turned sixteen, my mother started talking to me about how my father had already started looking for a husband for me. She named a man twenty-seven years older than I was, who was interested in a wife who would be a good breeder. He was willing to wait until I was eighteen but not a day later.
“When she first told me, I’m sitting there trying to feed my two younger brothers. She’s pregnant and is breast feeding my youngest sister. All I could think of doing was getting up and running for the door. It actually ran through my head, just get up, and run until I couldn’t keep running. The life I was growing up in was supposed to be my future. I hated nearly every hour of my day. My mother was insistent it was a good life. But it couldn’t be when I felt suffocated by the rules and the demands and I hated it. I didn’t really know what other kind of lives there were besides the one I was living but I knew I didn’t want it.
“All I knew was I wanted out. Billy was one of the few farmhands who wasn’t scared of my father. Billy ignored the rules about not talking to me and my little brothers and sisters. He talked about his plans for leaving our small town, of following his uncle to Las Vegas. Although he wanted to work in a casino, he was willing to work in his uncle’s furniture making business, anything but becoming what our parents were.
“I hung on his every word. At first, I just wanted him to take me with him. That was my only interest in him, but Billy being eighteen, had other things on his mind. I could say he used me, but I can admit we both used each other.
“Did I plan to get pregnant at seventeen and married at eighteen to a boy who didn’t want me, but didn’t want to be disowned by his family? No, but I let him use me to get what I wanted, a way out. I didn’t think about what would happen once we got where we were going.
“In the end we both got what we wanted, in very different ways. His uncle in Las Vegas took us in because my family wouldn’t have anything to do with me, As far as my parents were concerned Billy’s family wasn’t good enough for me to marry into. We couldn’t stay in our hometown, no one was willing to anger my father by hiring Billy.
“Eli, Billy’s uncle, was a good man. He put up with Billy longer than either of us deserved. He also helped us find our own place. Eli put Thomas on his family’s insurance when it became obvious something was wrong when Thomas was first born. He and his wife were with me for Thomas’ first open heart surgery, when Thomas was only two weeks old.” It’s the most she’s ever said about her son, as if she realizes it she stops.
I want to ask more about Thomas. Except, I hate seeing the pain in her eyes. Her smile is long gone. “I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry the path you took brought you here to me now.”
I had only intended to tell her I was sorry, sorry for making her lose her smile, sorry for making her remember things I knew she would rather forget. Where those other words came from I’m not sure, but they are very true.
“I’m not sorry, either. What about you? You don’t talk much about yourself. I remember reading you were some sort of young genius. When did you get into computers?”
Shrugging, I downplay my dysfunctional past after hearing her own put my mine to shame. “I was eight. Like you, I was homeschooled, but my mother left me to do what I wanted after she felt I learned better on my own. She was a schoolteacher before I was born. I was reading Mark Twain by the time I was three, Dickens by the time I was four, and bored by five.
“Computers were emerging back then, so my mom sat me down in front of one. It was supposed to help me learn when I exceeded her limits. I became obsessed with it quickly. Before long, I wanted to learn what made it work. It all went from there.”
She wipes her plate clean with the bread she had held back for it. I call the waiter over but not for the check. When I order the tiramisu she groans. I laugh. “We’re sharing. One dessert, two forks.”
“Promise?”