...And Never Let HerGo

balloon, humid and hot, with scarcely an interim period for anyone to adjust. On Fridays, all the roads heading south are full of beach traffic. And all the restaurants that can, including KidShelleen’s and O’Friel’s Irish Pub, open their outdoor decks and patios. The big old city houses seem to trap the day’s heat. In the working-class neighborhoods, people in undershirts and halters emerge to sit on their front stoops or drag lawn chairs out in the yard or parking strip to find a spot of cool.
    Homemade water-ice stands spring up in Little Italy. The mixture is not a snow cone. It’s less than sherbet, more than lemonade, and balm to parched throats. The vendor sloshes a dipper through a washtub full of a slush of shaved ice, lemon, sugar, and water, and then fills a waxed paper cup to overflowing.
    The Trolley Square neighborhood lures yuppies to outdoor decks, where they sip Corona and watch the traffic go by. Every hour or so a train crosses the trestle bridge in front of Kid Shelleen’s patio, and conversation stops as the cars rumble past. This had been Anne Marie’s milieu in recent years, trendy, loud, and fun, but somehow full of the past, too.
    Her apartment on Washington Street was close to downtown Wilmington and not nearly as affluent as the Forty Acres and Trolley Square neighborhoods. From her apartment, she could walk up Eighteenth Street, past Salesianum School, Baynard Stadium, the old Wanamaker’s department store, and over the Augustine cutoff into Forty Acres and Trolley Square. In June, it was a lovely walk; home owners were sprucing up their yards, watering the grass, planting flowers, pulling weeds. Everything smelled fresh and new.
    The June air in Wilmington smelled of honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass; of submarine sandwiches wrapped in waxy off-white butcher paper to keep in the juices of tomatoes, peppers, and onions; of the Delaware River; and of sweat and suntan oil. It was perhaps, of all seasons, the best time for a new beginning.
    O N June 14, St. Anthony’s festival drew its usual crowds. Anne Marie took her nephews during the day and ran into a man she had worked with in the congressional offices down in Washington. “I saw her with her nephews at the carnival,” he recalled. “I have to say I was taken aback. I recognized her, but she was not the Anne Marie that I had known—she was always very effervescent, just a happy person, generally. She was still the same happy person at the St. Anthony’s festival, but she had lost a lot of weight, and her hair was straight, lightened, and brittle looking.” She had in fact reached bottom only two days before, but was rapidly rebounding.
    That Friday night, Anne Marie and Mike had fixed Kim upwith a blind date with Mike’s friend Dan, thinking how great it would be if they hit it off, too. They all met at Anne Marie’s apartment, and it was apparent to both Dan and Kim that there was no magic, but when they went to the festival, there was so much energy, light, and music that it didn’t matter.
    Kim and Anne Marie had a chance to talk when the men walked ahead through the crowd. “Oh my God,” Anne Marie whispered suddenly.
    “Who?”
    “Tom
—quick, walk the other way!”
    They reversed their steps before Tom saw them. He was with his daughters.
    “She said that she had passed out at work,” Kim recalled. “She was faint at work, and she called Capano to come pick her up—she reluctantly shared that with me. She was a little sheepish about it to say that she actually called him to pick her up.”
    The two women managed to hide their concern about the close encounter from Mike and Dan.
    Anne Marie had avoided Tom at the St. Anthony’s festival, but his E-mail continued. He was still trying to lend her money, buy her things, leave food for her, be
with
her. When she mentioned that her apartment was roasting, he bought her an air conditioner. She was trying hard not to say anything in her cautious E-mail that might give him an idea of something else to buy her.
    She had accepted too much from Tom and admitted to herself that it had been nice, back in the days when he “treated her like a princess,” to have his presents, his continual concern for giving her what she wanted and needed. No more. And her natural tendency for self-deprecation made her feel that the trap he’d caught her in was her own fault.
    I T was June 19, and Anne Marie was having her weekly session with Dr. Sullivan. Sullivan had tried