that Pearce’s teenage daughter seemed a bit out of the mainstream compared to other kids.
“Fashion tastes can be a generational thing,” Anne suggested, seeking a reply that wouldn’t set them at odds at the outset. “I remember trying to convince my mom to let me have a tattoo when I was about fifteen. I just couldn’t understand why she refused to let me do it. It was going to be a butterfly…” With a smile, Anne lifted her hair and pointed. “…right here. Now I’m truly grateful that she put her foot down. Wouldn’t it look ridiculous when I’m all dressed up for a formal event and there’s an insect on my neck?”
“I think it would be way cool.” Paige lifted her clingy little T-shirt beneath the heavy black coat and bared her tummy. Curling around her navel, which had a silver ring in it, was a snake.
“Oops.” Anne covered her mouth to hide her dismay. “Guess your mom didn’t put her foot down fast enough, huh?”
Paige gave another disgusted huff. “I don’t know why Claire is so paranoid about my behavior considering what a real hellion she was at fourteen.”
Anne wondered if Claire knew Paige referred to her by her first name. “How many tattoos does she have?”
“None. And if she had done it, my dad would have forced her to remove it. He doesn’t want any of us to have an original thought or do anything without consulting him.”
“Let me guess. He takes exception to…ah, the way you dress?”
“It drives him wild. But at least I have the guts to do stuff out in the open, which Claire could never get up the gumption to do.”
“For example…” Anne held her breath, not having a clue what the girl would say next.
“Well, she objects to me smoking a few cigarettes,” Paige continued, “while she goes through a pack a day.”
Bad grades, smoking, tattoos, body piercing and what else, Anne wondered, feeling sympathy for “the parents.” “Maybe she’s trying to help you avoid making the mistakes she made.”
“And maybe when she quits, I might listen. And how about Dad throwing away those smelly cigars? No way, Jose. Anything he does is fine.” Paige threw open a door revealing steep stairs. “The archives and stuff are down here,” she said, taking the stairs with surprising grace in her clunky boots. “Over there on those shelves is the stuff I’m working on that came from that old professor who croaked. Good luck trying to figure out the rest of what’s in here.”
Along with the archival material boxed and stacked to the ceiling, pictures of significant happenings in Tallulah lined the walls of the long and narrow room. The light was bad, air circulation poor and the dust thick enough to clog the sinuses. Anne didn’t wonder that Paige was grumpy if she spent much time alone down here.
Studying the wall of pictures, she instantly recognized a photo of John Whitaker posing with a past governor. This was definitely the place to fill in the gaps about Buck’s family before interviewing Pearce.
Paige looked around, wrinkling her nose. “Pretty bad, isn’t it?”
“I would say that we have our work cut out for us,” Anne said. “We’ll just think of it as a treasure hunt.”
“Huh?”
“Going by these photographs, there’s probably oodles of stuff about your dad’s family here…and since I married into it, I’m pretty curious, too.”
Paige looked around as if viewing the place from a different perspective. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” Anne looked at her, expecting a question about the archives.
“What’s it like being married to somebody like Uncle Buck? I mean, besides being famous and the Jacks star pitcher, he’s like, really hot. Isn’t it exciting just being his wife and getting to be with him every single day?”
Anne smiled. “Sounds like you see that as a wonderful life.”
“Well, sure. At school, all the boys want to be like Uncle Buck. They want to know all about him. I get a lot of that because I’m his niece.” She made a face. “I know it’s not about me.”
“But you do like baseball?”
“Sure, don’t you?”
“I’ll tell you a secret. Just because I’m married to a man who plays baseball doesn’t mean that I have to love the game, too.”
“But you go to the games. I see you on TV when they show special people in the stands, wives and all.”
“I go because Buck’s fans expect to see his wife at the games. And besides, I’ve learned to appreciate many aspects of baseball. But when I met Buck, it was a different story. I was a reporter and I knew next to nothing about sports. I wrote human interest pieces for the features section of the paper.”
“Then how did you ever meet him?”
“I was assigned to cover a Special Olympics event and Buck was one of the athletes scheduled to appear. I was interested in meeting him, not because I cared anything about baseball, but because I knew he was from Tallulah, Mississippi.”
Paige wrinkled her nose, puzzled. “Why did that matter? This place is, like, nowhere, the end of the universe.”
“Oh, I think many people would argue with you there, my dad, for one. I grew up hearing him talk about the Mississippi Delta. The civil rights movement interested him, so when he came down with a PBS crew from Boston, what he saw made such an impact that he wrote a book about it.”
“I know about the book. We had to read it in honors English.”
“Did you like it?”
Paige nodded. “It was, like, way cool. All the stuff that happened back then seems like something out of a bad movie. So, what happened when you met Uncle Buck that day? Was it love at first sight?”
Anne’s gaze shifted from the young girl’s face to the gold band on her finger. Buck had bought her a large yellow diamond after signing his first million-dollar contract in St. Louis but it was in the wall safe back in St. Louis. Even in her disillusionment, she couldn’t bring herself to take off her wedding band. “I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but it was certainly something very powerful.”
“Like a wild crush or something, huh?”
Smiling, she looked at Paige. “Have you ever had a wild crush?”
Paige shrugged. “Not really, but I can understand how it would happen, especially if the boy was like Uncle Buck. Which is impossible because there’s nobody at school like Uncle Buck. He is so cool. I think you’re just about the luckiest woman in the world to be married to him.”
Anne’s opportunity to interview Pearce came sooner than expected. When it was time for Paige to leave that day, it was her father, not Claire, who came to pick her up. When Anne asked if he had time to answer a few questions for an article in the Spectator, he was more than ready to make time.
“Before we get started,” he said, making himself comfortable
