...And Never Let HerGo

any longer.
    T OM C ARPER
was
elected to the Delaware governorship in 1992 and was inaugurated in January of 1993. Anne Marie went with him to the governor’s offices in Wilmington, in the Carvel State Building, where she became his scheduling secretary. It was a fascinating and challenging job, meant for a young woman who could keep track of dozens of details at once and still greet visitors with her wonderful smile.
    The world should have been Anne Marie’s oyster, but the ghosts of her past had come back to haunt her. She felt vulnerable and sad, especially since Nan was gone. A part of her was still the little girl whose mother was dead and whose father raged at her that she wasn’t good enough, that she was ugly and fat. It didn’t seem to matter what was reflected in the mirror; Anne Marie’s self-image was so distorted that she saw only the picture in her mind. She began to clean her surroundings obsessively, even more than she had when she lived with Carol Creighton while she was in high school. It was a way she could control the world around her and, perhaps, feel in charge of her own life.
    She tried to control her appetite too, because she believed that she was much too heavy, even though, at five foot ten inches, she weighed around 140 pounds, a perfect weight. When she could maintain rigid order in her surroundings and not give in to her hunger pangs, she was better able to quell the flurries of panic that sometimes washed over her.
    No one else knew how difficult life could be for her. But Anne Marie recognized that she needed help. Fortunately, her health insurance had provisions for therapy, and she had to pay only $17 an hour, while the insurance made a copayment of $68. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to afford it. She found a psychologist named Bob Conner, who listened to her, accepted her, and understood her pain. And she gradually began to make progress. After five months of counseling, she sometimes laughed with Bob, because
he
was a little chubby and he was encouraging her to eat more—but only in a very gentle way.
    Anne Marie, who had grown up poor and desperate in Wilmington, was now the governor’s scheduling secretary. It was a great job. And she had, at last, all the circumstances for a wonderful life. Her only real enemy was the portrait she carried of herself inside her head, and she was learning to accept the knowledge that it was distorted, and to change that image. If only she could accept herself as other people accepted her, she was going to be fine.

Chapter Seven
    T OM C APANO ’ S PLACE in the hierarchy of Delaware business and politics would become more and more entrenched during the eighties. Despite his affair with the ex-daughter-in-law of one of his firm’s founders, he stayed at Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams for eight years. There was no reason not to; he and Debby MacIntyre had agreed that it would hurt too many people if anyone got even the slightest hint of their true relationship. He was confident that no one knew about Debby.
    At first, Debby had no expectation that they would be together in any long-term way. The affair that began with a brief encounter in mid-1982 and resumed in late 1983 continued on a regular basis. She and Tom spoke on the phone every day, often several times a day, and they met once a week on Wednesday nights because that was the night that her children were with their father. If anyone had asked her at that point if she loved Tom, Debby would probably have found it difficult to come up with an answer. She tried not to think about it, but she admitted to herself that she was growing emotionally dependent upon him. Any woman in her situation probably would have; Tom was there for her as no one else had ever been, with the possible exception of her father. But her father had always had one ear cocked for a call for help from her mother.
    Although she wasn’t planning a future with Tom, Debby was stunned when he told her that Kay was pregnant again. “I was very upset. I wasn’t planning to ever have more children,” she said, “and I guess I just assumed that he wouldn’t either.”
    Debby had occasionally asked Tom if he was still sexually intimate with Kay, because she could not understand how he could be as close as he was with her and maintain a sex life within his marriage. “I felt if you were having sexual relations with someone, you were expressing your love for someone through intercourse—or rather,