Stop the Wedding! Read Free Page B

reserved enthusiasm until she could better feel out her mother’s state of mind. She left the train, exited the station and flagged down a taxi at the curb. In the few seconds it took for the car to pull to a stop, she could almost feel the freckles popping out on her nose. Hundreds of lemons in college had lessened the effects of outdoor swim meets and practices, but her skin remained susceptible. Annabelle scrubbed a knuckle over her nose and sighed. Freckles did not lend themselves to the authoritative look she needed on the job. Or to feel grown up, which always seemed harder around her mother.
    During the cab ride, she practiced a hi-Mom-I-was-just-in-the-neighborhood greeting, but was admittedly a bit nervous by the time the cab pulled up to the familiar white house with red shutters. Her heart pounded as she tipped the driver, then she climbed out and allowed the memories to roll over her. Voices and smells and images from the past rose up to comfort her…she was home.
    The driveway sat empty, but her mother had told her she’d cleaned out the garage and started parking inside. On the way up the sidewalk, Annabelle pivoted and nodded in appreciation at the magazine-worthy curb appeal of the sprawling ranch-style home. The mulch beds on either side of the stoop featured the biggest and brightest of the perennials Belle had accumulated over the years. A gray birdbath with a fairy on the pedestal sat off to the right, providing nourishment to a gaggle of butterflies. The yard was immaculate, save for a single wad of crabgrass. Annabelle stooped to uproot the offending weed, an act that had her father smiling down in approval, she was certain.
    I’ll take care of her, Daddy, just as I promised.
    When she straightened, she caught sight of a three-story coral-colored stucco home through the trees and frowned. Martin Castleberry’s house, she presumed, from her mother’s description. The man probably watched her mother with a pair of binoculars before he asked her out.
    Annabelle climbed the stacked-stone steps of the house she’d grown up in, noticing the same rock on the same corner of the same step was loose—just loose enough to remove and put a note behind it for her friend Lisa who’d lived in the house closest to theirs at the time. But Lisa and her family had moved to Illinois when the girls were eight years old, and Annabelle had lost count of how many times their house had changed owners, as had most of the homes in their isolated neighborhood as the developers crept closer and closer. The juxtaposition of the neighborhoods today could best be described as Southern Living meets Metropolitan Home .
    She rang the doorbell and smiled wide, ready to throw open her arms and embrace her mother. A minute later she stopped smiling and rang the bell again. Where would her mother be at two o’clock in the afternoon? A heartbeat later, she bit down on her tongue in realization. Probably at her boyfriend’s. Correction—her fiancé’s . Annabelle grimaced. She had never liked that uppity complicated word. Fiancé. Americans had simply adopted a pronunciation from the French to sugarcoat the sticky implication of the word: Constrained. Bound. Trapped.
    She lifted the shiny brass knocker and rapped it loudly. Finally she retrieved a ring of keys from her purse and unlocked the door. Thinking her mother might be in the back yard, Annabelle walked through the living room toward the kitchen. Along the way, she scrutinized the newly painted walls with a critical eye—where were all the pictures of her father? In the kitchen, she stopped and stared at the counter.
    Was that a dirty glass? And—she rubbed her eyes—a saucer with crumbs on it?
    Well, there was her answer—some messy person had obviously kidnapped her mother and was occupying her home.
    She crossed to the sliding glass door, opened it, and stepped onto the deck her father had added a few years ago. “Mom?” The back yard was vacant, but she paused to