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women crying.
    “Don’t you want to marry someone your own age?” her aunt asked her. “If you ever had any children, by the time they are grown up, why—” she turned to her husband, her hands splayed in a posture of both pleading and exasperation “—he’ll be old enough to be their grandfather.”
    “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there aren’t any young men left anymore,” Anne-Marie answered coolly. “And the last thing I want is to raise some brat on my own while my husband gets his head blown off overseas.”
    Her aunt had opened and closed her mouth like a fish choking on air.
    Finally, in an effort to impart some good on the proceedings, her uncle had asked Anne-Marie if she truly loved this man; if she was ready to spend the rest of her life with him, until death do they part, and, more importantly, if she really knew what this meant. She had leaned back in her chair and sighed, then looked at him with such tired contempt that when she dropped her head and turned away he had not dared to press her for an answer. For the very first time he had seen her naked in expression and suddenly he had an overwhelming desire to get the girl out of his house once and for all.
    In that fact, he could not have known how alike in sentiment they were, probably the only thing, apart from blood, that they ever had in common.
    Her family could not understand why Lou Parks wanted to marry her. A bachelor, with a taste for whiskey and a strong Presbyterian streak, he seemed the least likely person to fall for Anne-Marie. Her uncle couldn’t help but question him over the validity of the relationship, when Lou, like a lovesick teenager, had come to his house the next day to properly ask for Anne-Marie’s hand. Anne-Marie had bent over the upstairs banister, watching her cousin and aunt in the corridor below, trying to listen in on what he was saying, and she had smiled to herself at what she had accomplished, and even more that they would never know how she did it.
    No one believed it would actually happen. They all thought it was a brief bit of madness that would be slowly weaned out before it could ever come to full destructive fruition. But even though the night before the wedding they had lain in their beds and wondered aloud if he would go through with it, the next day Lou had stood up in the church and never once faltered in his vows. Even their kiss had seemed sincere, as he cupped Anne-Marie’s waist to draw her closer. Louise had made a gagging noise until she was hit on the arm to make her stop.
    Her family was afraid of her after that, and she was glad. She saw how they greeted her and how anytime they said the words Mrs. Parks, their tongues seemed to slide over the letters as if, should they linger too long, someone would laugh at them and they would realize that they were the punch line to a joke she had been playing on them all this time. That wasn’t too far from the truth and part of them suspected so. To them she was a stranger, capable of what…they did not know, nor did they care to find out. But Anne-Marie did, and she was waiting: waiting for the chance for her true self to emerge as an independent, not defined by who she was with or whose house she lived in. But the more she waited, the less likely it seemed that it might happen.
    She saw her cousin look longingly over her shoulder and in that instant she took the chance to slip away. By the time Louise had noticed her absence, Anne-Marie had moved too far away for her to want to call her back. She wove her way through the garden. They called it a garden but in her mind it was no better than an untilled field, just long grass and bushes that sprawled down the back of the house in a wide arc and before she knew it, she had let it lead her away as it branched off to the left behind some trees. It was there, sitting on a bench, that she found Cal Hathaway. Later on in life he would say she was looking for him but she did not know it; that it