“It was mushy,” Laura said. “If you can picture an overripe tomato, that’s what it felt like. I got scared.”
She called Susie at work, but Susie didn’t seem concerned. Susie said that John and Jim had been jumping on the bed the night before and Jim had fallen off. Laura said she thought Jim should see a doctor and offered to take him to the hospital. But Susie instructed her to bring the boys to her office and she would take care of it.
Instead of taking Jim to a doctor, Susie drove the boys to Irene’s house and asked if she would look after them for a few hours because the baby-sitter couldn’t keep them. Irene didn’t notice Jim’s injury.
Tom saw the lump on Jim’s head when he got home from work, and expressed concern. One of Jim’s eyes was beginning to blacken. Susie told him that John had pulled Jim off the bed at the baby-sitter’s while Jim was sleeping. Worried, Tom called his friend Jerry, who told him that he should have Jim checked. Susie went with Tom when he took Jim to Presbyterian Hospital.
“I could tell that the doctors suspected something was not right,” Tom recalled later. “You could kind of feel that they were looking at you weird.”
Jim had suffered a mild concussion and facial bruises, and the doctors wanted to keep him overnight for observation. Susie didn’t want that and argued with the doctors. When the doctors and nurses strongly suggested that this might not have been an accident, Susie got even more upset.
“I got kind of upset, too,” Tom said, “because I couldn’t believe that. I can’t imagine anybody hitting a kid hard enough to hurt them. I said, ‘No, this is just an accident.’”
Jerry came and looked at Jim, and he didn’t think it was an accident. The injuries didn’t seem compatible with a fall. They were compatible, he thought, with blows from a fist. He suspected they had come from Susie’s hand, but he didn’t press the matter with Tom.
“It was hard for me to believe,” Tom said. “I’d never seen her act that way, never saw her even spank the kids very much, never saw that kind of violence. If I’d seen that, I’d have sent her packing immediately.”
Irene didn’t hear until the next day that Jim had been at the hospital. Susie told her that John had knocked Jim over in his high chair. Later, when she learned from Tom that Susie told him that Jim had been hurt at the babysitter’s, she was furious because she knew the boys had been with her that afternoon.
“I was extremely indignant,” Irene said.
When she asked Susie about it, Susie said the doctors suspected child abuse and indicated that the baby-sitter might have done it. “She said, ‘There’s not anything I can do.’ I said, ‘The hell there isn’t.’ She
wouldn’t
do anything about it.”
Irene’s suspicions about Susie were provoked. “I started watching her,” she said. “I know damn well that she did it.”
But not until later did she admit that to Tom.
Soon after Jim was hurt, Susie did something that astonished everybody.
In the nearly nine years that Tom and Susie had been married, Delores had never spent a night in her son’s house. Several months earlier, Delores had flown to California to drive back to Kentucky with Janie so that Janie could begin preparing for dental school. They planned their trip through Albuquerque, and they arrived to find that Susie had booked a room for them at the Sheraton. Even Janie was offended. “We weren’t even offered the floor,” she said.
During that visit, Delores realized that things were not going well between Tom and Susie, and through her regular telephone calls since that time, she knew that the situation had deteriorated.
After Jim was hurt, Delores called Tom and suggested that Susie and the boys come to Kentucky to visit until things calmed down. Chuck would pay the plane fares. Tom said she would have to talk to Susie. Surprisingly, Susie accepted.
“I think she just wanted to get out of town,” Tom said later.
Delores told all of her friends that Susie was coming.
“They’re having problems and she’s going to come with the boys and stay a few days,” Delores said to Joyce Rose.
During Susie’s stay, Delores took her and the boys to visit in Joyce’s homey kitchen. After all the derogatory things that Joyce had heard Delores say about Susie, she couldn’t believe how friendly they acted to one another. “This was a person Delores hated more than anybody in the whole wide world,” Joyce recalled. “She said Susie thought she came from royalty because her family had so much political power. ‘She’s got more power than I’ve got money,’ Delores said. She felt like she was a wealthy spoiled brat, but she had to tolerate her.”
Helen Stewart, Delores’s maid, was equally surprised at the visit. “She said Susie stole her son but she had to put up with it until TJ could get out of the mess,” Helen said.
Helen and Chuck kept the boys while Delores and Janie took Susie to the spring production at the Little Colonel Theater.
Later, Delores reported that Susie had acted very strange during the visit. She hardly let Jim out of her sight. She insisted on sleeping with him and wouldn’t even let him go out to play. When Delores suggested that Susie take the Lynches’ car and spend the day shopping, Susie chose to stay at the house with the children.
On the second day of her visit, Tom called.
“How are things going?” he asked.
“Well, not too good,” Susie said.
She and the boys flew home the next day.
Soon after her return, Tom and Susie were called in for consultation by the doctors who had treated Jim. They said they believed Jim’s injury was more than an accident.
“I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it,” Tom said. “I told them, ‘I don’t think what you guys are thinking is right.’”
Tom and Susie heard no more about the matter, and not until much later did Tom learn that they had been reported to authorities as suspected child abusers, although he was never aware of an investigation.
Matters did not improve between Tom and Susie, and that summer, when Paw-Paw suffered a series of small strokes and was hospitalized in Winston-Salem, Susie decided to take the boys home to see him. She told Irene and Joy that they would be gone a couple of weeks. Joy volunteered to drive them to the airport, and on the morning of July 16, when she came to pick them up, she realized that something was wrong.
“It was tense,” she recalled later. “Susie was sort of strung out. She was really nervous. She didn’t talk much. I felt bad for the boys. John was worried. He kept asking, ‘Mommy, are we coming back?’”
Joy suspected that Susie might be planning to not return, and she was right. It had not been spoken between Tom and Susie, but they both understood that she probably was leaving for good, and before he left for work that morning, Tom took snapshots of the boys.
A week after she got back to North Carolina, Susie called to confirm what Tom already knew. She and the boys would not be coming back.
21
Word spread quickly through the Sharp and Newsom families that Susie had returned to stay, her marriage at an end. As Susie told it, Tom asked her to leave and take the children. He simply didn’t want to be married anymore, she said.
Tom had undergone a personality change, Susie told her friend Annette Hunt. She thought it might be related to medicine he had been taking. He’d been diagnosed as having high blood pressure soon after their move to Albuquerque and had been taking pills for it since. The medicine wasn’t supposed to be taken over a long period, Susie said, and she wondered if it could be responsible for the changes she perceived in Tom.
“He just wasn’t the same person I married,” Susie said.
“She blamed everything on that,” said Annette, who thought Susie was seizing it as an excuse.
Susie’s aunt Su-Su, who, due to mandatory age restrictions, stepped down as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court only two weeks after Susie returned home, suggested that she hire an attorney. She recommended a young lawyer in Reidsville, Alexander P. Sands III, called Sandy. Sands was a Sharp family friend. He’d grown up in Reidsville, where his father operated tobacco warehouses. After his graduation from Duke University, he went to law school at the University of North Carolina and worked a year for a corporate firm in Winston-Salem before returning home to join a group of Reidsville lawyers. One member of that group was Norwood Robinson, who as a young lawyer had practiced with Susie’s grandfather, Jim Sharp. Sands was Susie’s age, and he and his wife, Ginny, had two children, a son, Andy, who was three, and a daughter, Anna, just a year old.
Sands drew up a separation agreement that gave full custody of the children to Susie, with Tom to pay $200 a month for support of each. Tom also was to pay Susie $100 a month in permanent alimony, plus full expenses to attend graduate school for four years. Additionally, he was to pay her for half the equity in their house, plus $1,500 for home furnishings Susie had left behind and half of their accumulated interest in forty acres of desert land Tom had bought, sight unseen, for $5,000 at $49 down and $49 a month. She would relinquish any claim to his dental practice.
Susie didn’t send the separation agreement to Tom immediately. Her friend Annette Hunt was convinced that she secretly hoped for reconciliation. Some family members, too, thought that Susie still loved Tom and that leaving him was just a dramatic gesture to get his attention. Her real dream, they thought, was to work things out and reunite her family, perhaps even to convince Tom to move back to North Carolina, where she could be happier. But her mother had no illusions about that possibility. She thought that Susie was too bitter toward Tom, that she wouldn’t accept any of the blame for the failure of the marriage, and that reconciliation was impossible as long as Susie maintained that attitude. She had argued with Susie about it.
Susie planned a trip back to Albuquerque early in September, ostensibly to retrieve her car and other possessions, but Annette thought that she clearly was excited about seeing Tom again.
“It was like the night before the prom,” Annette recalled. “She’d have gone right back out there with him if he’d just asked.”
But Tom had no intention of asking, and he made that clear with a cold reception upon Susie’s arrival. Scorned, hurt, and angry, Susie spent the night next door with her former neighbors, Hank and Irene.
Next morning, Tom told Susie to take what she wanted from the house but he expected her to be gone before he returned from work. Irene said later that she couldn’t remember seeing Susie so furious as she was when she went through the house piling up stuff to take with her. She cursed Tom and threw things at the walls. But before Tom got home, she had struck out for North Carolina in her blue 1974 Audi Fox, the car jammed with clothing, toys, household items, and personal treasures.
Tom followed the next day in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, pulling a U-Haul trailer loaded with furniture Susie’s family had given them, much of it made by Paw-Paw. He received a cordial welcome from Bob and Florence and spent two nights at their house visiting with his sons while Susie stayed away, avoiding further confrontation.
Soon after Tom returned to Albuquerque, Susie signed the separation agreement and forwarded it to him. He suggested a few minor changes and signed a final draft a few weeks later without consulting a lawyer.
Delores was pleased about these developments, and that fall, unannounced, she set out driving cross-country with Helen Stewart to visit her son. Few things suited her on the trip, and she complained most of the way. She talked a lot about Susie, about what a cold and cruel person she was and how lucky Tom was to finally be rid of her. From a motel in Oklahoma, after complaining to the manager that her room was not clean, she called Tom to tell him that she and Helen were on the way.
“We’ll be there tomorrow,” she said happily.
Helen was listening, and she realized that Tom must have asked where they were planning to stay, because Delores looked startled and said, “Why we’re staying with you!”
When they arrived for Delores to spend her first night ever under her son’s roof, Helen saw the reason for Tom’s question. Delores was startled to find another person at the house—Tom’s tall, long-haired, attractive, young dental assistant, Kathy Anderson, who’d come to Albuquerque from Nebraska and had gone to work for him in the spring of 1978. Tom and Kathy had become close friends as Tom talked about his problems at home. After Susie left, they began dating, and Kathy soon was spending a lot of time at Tom’s house.
Delores didn’t like that. She had thought that she was regaining her son, not simply losing him to another woman. She didn’t like the state of his house or his life-style, and after making her feelings known, she set about trying to straighten out his life while Helen cleaned house. On leaving, she hugged Kathy and told Tom she thought Kathy was good for him. But that was not what Helen heard on the way back.
Susie, too, had heard that her husband’s leggy dental assistant was spending a lot of time with him at what was still her house. She learned about it in a call to Irene, and she was outraged. She bitterly profaned Tom’s name to relatives and claimed he’d been fooling around all along. She vowed that she never would allow her children to go back and witness such shameful behavior.
After Susie accepted that her separation was permanent, she began trying to decide what to do with her life. “I was faced with a decision most women in my situation must be faced with: how to provide for my family,” she later wrote. “For me the answer would have to be either graduate school or another job in advertising or television production.”