...And Never Let HerGo

everyone went down to the shore every weekend. But Anne Marie was very worried. She said Tom wouldn’t want her to stay in a house at the ocean where there would be other men present. “I think he would be very much against that,” she told Kim.
    Kim stared at her. They
always
met men at the shore; that didn’t mean they were going to sleep with them, or even date them. Anne Marie admitted then that Tom had “flat out” said that he didn’t want her in
any
house at the shore.
    The two old friends arranged to join in the rental in New Jersey anyway, but the summer was basically ruined. They rarely went. And Kim took to calling Tom “Capano,” refusing to add the “Mr.”
    “We were not that comfortable in that house,” she recalled, “because we didn’t know any of the other people. But also there were fights about it between Capano and Annie. They would fightbecause she was going to this house at the shore, and we didn’t know where we would be sleeping—or if we would be sleeping on the floor. And there were five or six single guys at the house, so it was always a problem for her because she was given a hard time from Capano.”
    They had originally met at the shore and all their other summers had been wonderful, but Kim and Anne Marie found that nothing seemed to be working out in the summer of 1995. It was because of Tom, of course; he was effectively caging Anne Marie. Even so, the two old friends made a valiant effort to spend the first weekend of June at the ocean. They agreed to meet at a mutual friend’s house on the way down, and Anne Marie promised she would be there at noon on Saturday.
    Kim remembered that day. “She wasn’t there at one, and she wasn’t there at two. And I kept calling her and I would get her answering machine. And finally, at maybe four or five, she called me at the Fords’ house to say that Capano had just left, and they had had a huge fight because he did not want her going to the shore. And he brought over wine and salmon, and things for her apartment, and then this fight ensued and she was too exhausted to make the trip.”
    Kim tried to understand what Anne Marie was going through. Anyone on the outside looking in would have told her to flee, but it wasn’t that easy. “She was in love with him,” Kim said, “but she was confused. Because he was married with four children, she didn’t think the relationship could really go anywhere.”
    That wasn’t the only reason Anne Marie vacillated about Tom; she had seen how he felt about his four daughters, and she knew she would always come in a distant second to them in Tom’s mind. And there was their age difference. It might have seemed romantic at first to be courted so passionately by an older man, but now that he had crowded her into a tiny world where she could scarcely breathe, she saw how little they really had in common. He wasn’t interested in socializing with her friends, and she had trouble visualizing him with them, anyway. Tom tried very hard to be in sync with music, fashion, and the patois of people in their twenties, but he often came off only as trying too hard. He belonged to a different generation and it showed. But most of all, Anne Marie knew that her family would be extremely upset at the idea of their little sister and Tom Capano.
    On the other hand, Tom was still pressing her with his arguments about why she should forget everyone but him. He “was buying her,” Kim said. “He was explaining to her what he could offer her in this life. He could offer her anything she wanted, so that confusedher—about the social status, and whether this was something she really wanted, having the comfort level of not having to worry about money anymore.”
    And that was a far bigger thing for Anne Marie than it would be for most young women. She had
always
worried about money, about where she would live, and even about what she would eat. She was still the little girl who had been afraid that her classmates would look down on her if they knew she lived in a house without lights and hot water.
    Tom kept Anne Marie continually off balance. When he was pleased with her, he listened sympathetically as she spoke of her fears and insecurities, and he told her how wonderful she was. He offered her a world without any anxieties. But when she displeased him, he could be as cold as death.
    Then again, he could be so nice. Jackie Binnersley Steinhoff, recently married, was hoping to open a coffee shop in