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family, Debbie's eighteen-year-old daughter, Dawn, was getting
married.
Debbie asked Susan to take the pictures at the wedding and Susan
promised she would, all the time wondering how on earth she was going
to get dressed up, wear heels, and stay on her feet throughout the
ceremony and reception.
Dawn's wedding was March 10, 1990. She was a beautiful blond bride,
and although she was a little queasy with early pregnancy, she was not
as nauseated as her aunt Susan was. Somehow, Susan managed to take a
complete set of wedding pictures and stay on her feet. Barely. "I
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didn't think I'd make it," she said. "But I did. I plastered on
makeup to give me some color, but I could see it didn't work in the few
photographs I was in."
Susan wore a white silk dress that was way too big for her, but she
cinched the belt over four notches. The circles under her eyes made
her look ten years older than she was. Boppo wore a lovely pale pink
crepe dress. Pat wore her "marrying and burying dress"-the turquoise
dress that had once been Susan's maternity dress. Debbie wore a very
expensive white satin brocade and lace dress. She wore it very
carefully; she returned it to the store the next day.
It was, Susan acknowledged, a typical family wedding, at least for her
family. On the surface, everything seemed lovely. Underneath, there
were secrets, lies, evasions, and fears eating away at the very
foundation of the family.
Although not one of them would ever have admitted it, Susan and Bill
Alford and their children had lived a life-style that all of the
SilerRadcliffe clan envied. None of them knew how very close the
Alfords had come to losing it all at Christmas, 1988. It was a matter
of pride with Susan and Bill that they had handled their own problems,
pulled out of their economic quicksand, and gone on.
They almost made it. But by the spring of 1990, there was not much
about the Alfords' lives that their relatives would have wanted to
emulate. Bill's new company was in the midst of a buy-out too, and
Bill and Susan doubted that they could survive another job loss-even
after Susan's health improved enough for her to go back to work. They
argued continually, and one or the other would storm out of the
house.
They were scared, worried sick about finances, worried about Sean's
mediocre grades, and worried about the future. The emotional tension
was crushing.
"We grounded Sean too much and made him study," Susan remembered
regretfully. "But we thought we were doing the right thing. He was
sick of the tension and the fighting in our house-and I didn't blame
him. It was such a bad time."
Sean was in love, and far more caught up in his girlfriend's family
than his own. He graduated from high school in June, and Bill-who
found it difficult to let go of grand gesturesrented Sean a Cadillac to
drive to the prom. Sean posed in his prom tuxedo for his mother's
camera.
It was to be one of the last happy pictures. When he turned eighteen,
Sean moved into his girlfriend's family's home and completely turned
his back on his own family. He wanted nothing more to do with them,
with their arguments, their worries, their lives.
"We wouldn't let him take his truck, and I felt guilty about that-that
was wrong-and I lost my temper and screamed at Sean," Susan said, her
voice full of pain. Sean was her firstborn, her beautiful little boy
grown to manhood, and he he stepped out of his family's life as if he
had never was gone; been part of it at all. hapter 7
Next-and very rapidly next-the Alfords filed a C bankruptcy petition.
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They had no other choice. The wonderful nouse in the Brookstone
Country Club complex was gone, and Bill was back on the road as a
salesman. "We had no place to live," Susan said. "We had no place to
go-except to Boppo and Papa's.
I was depressed. Sean and everything we'd worked for was gone, and I'd
had to see Adam and Courtney give up their ittle girl, Boppo was always
rooms, their home. When I was a l' the one who came to our rescue-but
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