...And Never Let HerGo

“So I was sitting on the couch reading a magazine, and she got off the phone and said, ‘I’m really sorry I have to ask you to do this—but I need to ask you to leave.’ And I couldn’t believe I was being asked to leave, and I said, ‘Why?’and she said Mr. Capano had called and he was very upset and needed someone to talk to, and that she would give me a call in thirty to forty minutes and we would head on over [to O’Friel’s] at that point.”
    Jill reached for her purse and stood up to leave. There was nothing else to do. Tom’s problems evidently came first.
    Jill had been back home for about forty-five minutes when Anne Marie called and said she was ready to go. When Jill asked what Tom’s pressing problem had been, Anne Marie said, “He was very upset. He was having difficulties in his marriage, and he needed to talk to someone.”
    They went to O’Friel’s and had a good time, but from that point on, it seemed that Tom was always getting in the way of any plans Anne Marie made with her girlfriends. It was almost as if he didn’t want them to have a good time together.
    When the Tour DuPont bicycle races came round again in 1995, Jill and Anne Marie planned to go to several of the functions. The first night, Jill and a friend that Anne Marie had met at the Y were to meet at her apartment. “I was really excited,” Jill said, “telling Annie how much fun we were going to have, when she said, ‘I can’t go.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean you can’t go?’ and she said she had a job interview.”
    Jill just stared at Anne Marie in confusion; she had no idea that Annie was even
looking
for a job, and she was curious about how it happened that she would suddenly have a job interview on the very night they had been looking forward to for months. Anne Marie was hesitant about giving details about her job search.
    “She told me that it was for a personal assistant for someone in north Wilmington,” Jill said, “where she would make the same salary [as at the governor’s office] and there also would be an apartment provided to her—which would have been a good thing financially.”
    But Jill smelled a rat and kept asking questions. Finally, Anne Marie said that she was supposed to have an interview with Louie Capano—an interview set up by Tom. She was adamant that she really
had
to go because Tom had gone to so much trouble to set up the interview with his brother.
    Jill shrugged her shoulders, and Anne Marie told them to go ahead to the races and the party afterward without her. She promised to meet them after her interview with Louie Capano. But she didn’t show up for five hours, and when she did she was wearingold jeans and Jill could see she had been crying. By that time, the bicycle races were long over and her friends were at a party at the Holiday Inn. Anne Marie didn’t want to talk about her interview with Louie. And she went into an elaborate explanation about her puffy eyes, explaining that she had been crying about Bob Conner’s death. “Things keep reminding me that he’s gone.”
    Jill looked closely at Anne Marie. Something wasn’t right, but she didn’t want to pressure her. That was the worst thing to do to Anne Marie. They didn’t work in the same office anymore; Jill had been moved to the campaign office, and that meant she saw Tom Capano fairly often, because he was on the Democratic fund-raising committee. He still struck her as a very inappropriate person for Anne Marie to be seeing—and she worried about it.
    The next night Jill and Anne Marie met for a drink at the Holiday Inn, and Jill asked again how the interview had gone. Anne Marie didn’t seem at all excited about it. Rather, she sipped at her drink with a bleak look on her face. Jill tried to phrase her questions tactfully, but Anne Marie was so discouraged that she barely knew where to start. Finally, she looked up at Jill and said quietly, “I think he wants to control me.”
    “Who? Louie?”
    “No. Tom. If I took the job, it would be Tom who was controlling where I worked, and where I lived. Everything.”
    Jill would always remember how many times the word “control” came up in Anne Marie’s conversation. Thirty-one thousand dollars a year wasn’t a lot of money, and they did have to pay for their own apartments—but they were free. Once they walked out of the Carvel building, they could do what they wanted and go where they wanted. The way Anne Marie talked about the job with