...And Never Let HerGo

ATHLEEN F AHEY -H OSEY : Hi, Anne. It’s Kathleen. Four o’clock on Saturday. When you come back from Robert and Susan’s tonight, please bring the boys’ sneakers? I forgot to bring them home today and poor Brendan has no shoes. But hold on. Kevin wants to say Hi. Say Hi—
    K EVIN H OSEY
[small voice]:
Bye. Love you.
    R ECORDER : Thirteenth saved message.
    S USAN F AHEY : Annie, it’s me. Calling to talk to you about tonight, but if I missed you, I will just talk to you when you guys come up. It’s five o’clock. Five after five. Bye.
    R ECORDER : Fourteenth saved message.
    Click [hang up].
    R ECORDER : Fifteenth saved message.
    G INNY C OLUMBUS : Hey, Annie. It’s me. I need to talk to you. Please call me as soon as you get this message.
[Gives her number]
Thanks. Bye.
    R ECORDER : Sixteenth saved message.
    S USAN F AHEY : Annie, it’s Saturday at eleven P.M. Give us a call. Bye.
    The last call had been only two-and-a-half hours ago. And none of the messages needed explaining to the group listening. “Anne Marie would have called back,” Jill said. “She always listened to her messages immediately, and she always called you back.”

PART ONE
    Pain has an element of blank—
It cannot recollect
When it began—or if there were
A day when it was not.
    It has no future but itself—
Its infinite realms contain
Its past—enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
    E MILY D ICKINSON

Chapter One
    W ILMINGTON RESIDENTS like to say that everyone who lives there is connected by only
three
degrees of separation, and it’s true. If everyone in town doesn’t actually know everyone else, they are at least related by marriage, employment, or coincidence. It would seem that keeping a secret in Wilmington would be akin to whispering it to a tabloid reporter, and yet deep and complicated clandestine relationships
have
survived Wilmington’s sharpest eyes.
    Perhaps because they know one another so well, Wilmingtonians can be initially standoffish to strangers, who don’t fit into their grapevine of interconnected relationships. To truly belong, one has to be born and bred in Delaware and stay there until, as the natives say, “Mealey’s carries you out.” For many neighborhoods, Mealey’s is the funeral parlor of choice.
    The city’s motto is carved into a sign on Delaware Avenue: WELCOME TO WILMINGTON , A PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY , a slogan that is either wildly ambiguous or optimistic. Wilmington is burnished with its patina of history, rife with somebodies who have made names for themselves.
    Wilmington is almost as old as America itself, the largest city in a state so small that it has only three counties, a state 110 miles long and not much more than thirty-five miles across at its widest point. Delaware’s land area is 1,982 square miles (compared to Montana’s145,556). But Delaware was the very
first
state to enter the Union—on December 7, 1787—and it was a well-established region by then. It is an insular and even provincial state, fiercely proud. It always has been.
    Delaware is a melting pot of cultures and origins, which is fitting for the first state. Sailing under the Dutch flag, Henry Hudson discovered Delaware in 1609, but the Swedes took over, at least temporarily, in 1638. England laid claim to Delaware three decades later and transferred its three counties to William Penn in 1682. Delaware fought as a separate state in the Revolutionary War, and although it was a slave state, it never seceded from the Union in the Civil War. There is, of course, a powerful French influence that permeates the state. In 1802, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont built a little gunpowder mill close by the shores of the Brandywine Creek, planting the first seed of a chemical industrial empire that would define Delaware ever after, bringing it prosperity and security.
    Wilmington is a beautiful city, suspended between early-day history and the year 2000. It has block after block of row houses, most of them painted brick, with colorfully contrasting doors. Large private homes are built of brick or stone and wood, with wide porches, and the somewhat narrow streets are shadowy tunnels between grand old trees. The trees and bushes and houses—and even some mammoth rocks—have all been there so long that a feeling of permanence pervades everything.
    Situated on Interstate 95 between the metropolises of Philadelphia and Baltimore, Wilmington has the sense of a city far larger than it really is; its population never