...And Never Let HerGo

he would think that her legs were too fat. Tom had once said that Mike had told someone she looked “great” in a short skirt, and she wondered what he meant by that. Tom also reported that Mike said she had a “shitty apartment.” That hurt her.
    But then Anne Marie realized that Mike wouldn’t say anything like that, and Tom didn’t even know Mike, so where was he getting this supposed information? It was just Tom’s way of interfering. He had told her often enough that Mike was a nerd and she was a fool to waste her time on him.
    That Valentine’s Day evening, Anne Marie and Mike had dinner at Vincente’s, a restaurant on the Concord Pike near Mike’s house. They laughed and had a good time, and for the moment it was easy for Anne Marie to forget Tom. But he was almost always in her thoughts. She was trying, now, simply to avoid him. And all that winter of 1995–96, Anne Marie was growing thinner and thinner, her skin more sallow. She told Jill that Tom tried to be helpful and gave her advice about her eating problems, but there was a hopeless tone in her voice as she said, “Doesn’t he
realize
I’m the way I am because of him? I can’t control him but I can control what I put in my body.”

Chapter Eighteen
    A NN M ARIE AND M IKE had so many things they wanted to do together, and her calendar for 1996 was packed with social and family events. Two weeks after Valentine’s Day, they went to the Luther Vandross concert at the Valley Forge Music Fair. She and Mike had dinner with her uncle James, the monsignor, at Toscana on February 29, and Mike and James were able to get to know each other.
    “In a roundabout way,” Mike recalled, “Annie let me know how important her uncle was [to her]—and how important he was in some big decisions in her life—and I took that to mean that dinner and us being alone [him and James] was certainly his chance to get his opinion of me.”
    They went to the Russian ballet, and to see Tommy Davidson, a black comedian whom Mike admired. He had a strong affinity for African American music and humor, and he wanted to see how Anne Marie would react. She thought Davidson was hilarious. Mike wasrelieved. “I’ve designed programs at MBNA around minorities,” he explained, “and not everyone is open minded. . . . I couldn’t be with someone who wasn’t open minded about that. . . . You’re dating someone and they’re trying to impress you, and you just ask them a blatant question, ‘How do you feel about that?’—they’re going to give you the answer they think you want to hear. But she had as much fun as I did, so she passed my test there.”
    Anne Marie was passing a lot of Mike’s tests, although he used the word humorously: for compatibility and similar backgrounds, for beauty and grace and kindness, for being a woman who demonstrated a remarkable gift for maintaining her friendships for decades, for their shared values. Still, she lived with the fear that she would fail in Mike’s eyes on moral grounds if he knew about Tom. She was a young woman of the nineties, and she had never pretended to be a virgin, but sleeping with a married man was much more of a sin in her own eyes than having sex with someone who was single. She and her friends sometimes discussed the fine points that defined adultery, and Anne Marie was relieved when Jennifer Bartels Haughton pointed out in one of their phone calls, “You have to be
married
to be an adulterer.” She knew Jennifer wasn’t just being diplomatic; Jennifer didn’t know about the affair with Tom.
    One of Anne Marie’s relatives had broken his marriage vows and it had caused a lot of pain to everyone. Adultery was a sin that Anne Marie detested—and yet she agonized because she had at least contributed to adultery. Her guilt was immense.
    She and Mike had talked about marriage—but only as a concept, carefully avoiding a premature commitment. They agreed that they both wanted to marry and have children. Anne Marie brought up the subject of adultery several times, but again as a concept. When she asked Mike what he thought, she usually tried to sound disapproving, often saying, “Why don’t they just have the guts to go out of it, tell the other person they don’t love them, and go take up with a new person?”
    Mike agreed with her and evinced disapproval too, but he didn’t realize what she was really talking about. Later, he said somberly, “I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s a better way to do it rather