Twist of Faith Page 16

  LaWonna was visiting us that week, and as we left the house, she could tell something wasn’t right. She asked a few questions, and finally Jonas just said, “We’re going to see Doc and Priscilla.”

  LaWonna stopped for a moment.

  “What did Mom do this time?”

  I have to smile now when I think back to that question.

  “You know, Anne,” Doc said as we sat on his screened-in porch on that warm summer night, “this could be your last chance. Three strikes and you’re out.”

  I knew he was right. I couldn’t understand why Jonas still loved me after all of my mistakes. I’d hurt him deeply—I knew I had. Yet I could also feel the same slipping into the abyss that I’d felt back in 1995 when LaWonna told me about her abuse, when the company overwhelmed me, when I found myself in the middle of an affair. Feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and depression tugged on my sleeve, telling me their road was my road.

  “Jonas,” I said, “first I have to tell you how sorry I am that I did this to you. I know God has forgiven me—I only hope that you can too. But I refuse to let myself go down the path of guilt and shame again, because that will only take me back into that black hole. I’ve punished myself enough. I want to move ahead, the two of us, together.”

  Jonas freed me from those worries. He assured me he wouldn’t leave. He wanted to work with me on our relationship.

  “I’ve felt strongly tempted to do the same thing,” he told me later that night. “How can I blame you for having the affair I’ve nearly had many times?” He continues to amaze me.

  Discussing that last secret with Jonas and Doc stirred up so many things, kind of like walking through a shallow, muddy stream. Just the thought of walking through that old stream scared me at first, but it was always there—I knew I had to cross it some day. The debris, the overturned rocks, the slimy critters dashing this way and that. But then, just when you reach the middle and everything seems as murky as it can get, the water begins carrying things downstream, washing the muck away. I crossed that river in 2003; the e-mail forced me to do that. But now I feel free from all that dirt, cleaner than ever, and ready to leave the past behind.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Secret Is Told

  Good family life is never an accident, but always

  an accomplishment by those who share it.

  —JAMES H. S. BOSSARD

  I had never seen our family like this.

  It was a warm night in 1976, about eight months after Angie died. Outside my parents’ large stone farmhouse, things probably appeared rather normal for a spring evening: the sun was setting out across the fields, the outbuildings stood calm and austere, a few of the windows were open to let the fresh spring air through. The place on the drive where Angie had died remained unmarked, as unassuming as ever. Only one thing was different and could have clued someone in to the possibility that something was wrong. Pastor sat in his car, parked in the shadows of our driveway. The snake had entered the garden.

  Rumors and whispers of improper behavior spread through our church, claims that Pastor was not all he seemed to be. Our congregation, after experiencing five years of spiritual renewal, found itself caught in the midst of a tornado of suspicion and lies. Some believed the yet-unofficial charges that Pastor was acting improperly with church money and that he had been seen in questionable situations with a number of the church women. Some defended him vehemently. The church split down the middle. Our family found itself at the center of the controversy, and the fracture found its way through what was once an unbreakable family bond. Of the eight siblings, four of my brothers believed the charges that Pastor acted indecently and thought he should go; one of my brothers, my two sisters, and I refused to believe the rumors. Four versus four.

  I acted in a state of denial. There were many reasons I refused to believe the rumors: first, because I was involved with him, and in spite of the nature of our first encounter, I couldn’t imagine that he would be with anyone but me! Second, if I took the side of those charging Pastor, I was sure my own guilt would be exposed. I was trapped in a tangled web of silence, and only my own confession could have freed me, but I wasn’t prepared to come clean, and that fact forced me to side with someone who deep down I knew was probably guilty of all charges. By staying with him and keeping quiet about what happened, I allowed him to steal my voice. Meanwhile, Pastor kept control of my two sisters and one brother by convincing them in one-on-one meetings that he was innocent.

  Eventually we decided to call a family meeting.

  “It can’t be true! They are all just rumors,” four of us maintained.

  “But look at the people who are saying these things!” my brothers argued back. “These people are our friends—they wouldn’t lie about something like this!”

  “But this is Pastor. Why would he lie?” we replied.

  And so the night went, back and forth, back and forth. The tension grew to an unbearable level. Loud voices rang out followed by long periods of silence. Some of us paced the room; others stood leaning against the counters. The air in the room felt as if it would explode with the introduction of a single spark.

  At one point my brother Merrill (second to youngest), seeing Pastor’s car in the drive, went out to him. He crawled into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door. Turning to Pastor, he pleaded, demanded, that he come in and make things right.

  “Don’t you see what’s happening in there? Don’t you see what’s happening to our family? You have to come inside. You have to come clean, make it right.”

  But Pastor just sat there, shaking his head as if the whole thing saddened him immensely. He was such a good actor.

  “Merrill,” he said firmly, “there are some things you can’t really deal with. Some things you can’t make better. You just have to let them go. You just have to let them run their course.”

  One day during the summer of 2004, Sam Beiler came into my office. Sam proved himself as one of our most dedicated employees through the years, starting in Florida as a store support representative when we opened our first stores in Florida. Then we convinced him to move to Chicago as a regional director to oversee our growth in the Midwest, even though he wanted to move back home to Pennsylvania. Finally he came back to our head office as operations director, moving up through the ranks, eventually taking over as president of the company. Sam always jumped at any opportunity, seemed willing to do whatever was required, and impressed me greatly throughout the years. I was never disappointed with the way he ran my company.

  “Anne, do you have a second?” he asked and, not waiting for an answer, pulled up a chair and leaned forward. I laughed. Sam always went straight to the point.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “If I can make the financial side work, would you sell Auntie Anne’s to me?”

  In the years leading up to that moment, Jonas and I both felt the need to begin planning for the future of the company. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t going to be around forever, and so many companies fail after their founder is no longer involved, so we thought it important to plan for a transition. At that point we weren’t planning specifically on selling the company, just on putting together some kind of systematic handover for when I either retired or decided to step back from my involvement with Auntie Anne’s.

  First we explored the possibility of passing on ownership to our daughters, the type of ownership in which one or both of them would be involved hands-on in the growth and direction of the company on a daily basis. After a few months of exploring these options and trying to figure out what that would look like, it became apparent that neither of our daughters was interested in moving in that direction.

  Another option we explored was passing on ownership of the company to the employees. At this point the models we looked at started to lean more and more toward our selling the company, but with my continued involvement, albeit minimal. But the more we explored this option, the more I realized I would have the same headaches without
the advantages of owning the company, so that option faded.

  Finally, at one stage Jonas and I began to talk about selling the business outright, just finding a buyer and walking away. The topic came about as the result of the whole process and not really as a sudden moment of inspiration or as the result of specific circumstances. During what became years of exploring what I thought the future of the company should look like, eventually the idea of selling the company surfaced, and we began pursuing that option, but still only as a possibility, not as a foregone conclusion. I still had many questions: Did I want to sell? Would the company keep my name if I sold? How would it feel to walk up to an Auntie Anne’s location and not own the company? How much could we sell the company for? And I still wasn’t even sure that was the road I wanted to take.

  As more time passed, I began to realize that my life’s purpose was leading me farther and farther away from the business—I began to feel the pressures and responsibilities of the business getting in the way of other very important things that I felt called to do, such as speaking to people about my story, being more involved in the lives of my children and grandchildren, and supporting Jonas as he continued in his counseling endeavors.

  One day Jonas asked me a tough question.

  “At what age can you see yourself still running Auntie Anne’s?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Certainly not seventy,” I said, groaning inwardly at the thought of being that old and still having so much responsibility.

  “What about sixty-five?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “I’d want to be finished by then.”

  “Sixty?” he asked.

  “Hmmm,” I said, thinking. “Maybe.”

  “Well,” Jonas said, “it’s going to have to be sixty, because if we start the process now, you will probably be sixty by the time it’s all said and done.” I was around fifty-five at the time of that conversation.

  I hated the thought of reaching the age of sixty-five or seventy and feeling that I still provided value to the company when in fact I might not. I saw it happen so often, in nonprofit organizations or churches or other businesses: people retaining their leadership positions, thinking they were still important to the growth of the organization, when in fact their old ways of seeing things were holding the group back. I didn’t want that to be me. I didn’t want to outlive my usefulness at Auntie Anne’s.

  Jonas, Sam Beiler, and I announced to the employees that succession planning was under way, and we also began meeting with the appropriate people to try to see what sort of options were out there for us. This more serious approach to selling the business began in the summer of 2004, and I settled in for what I expected to be a long process—an assumption that could not have been further from what we were about to experience. But as had happened so many times in my life, God’s timing proved to be distinctly different from the time frame I planned. In a few short months, Sam came forward, someone I hadn’t even thought about, and Jonas and I found ourselves preparing for the sale of Auntie Anne’s.

  Yet even after we made the final decision to sell the company to Sam, things felt strange: I still hadn’t told anyone else in my family about the decision to sell. Through the years my siblings formed a vital part of my decision-making process, whether it be at the one-on-one meetings we occasionally had or at our once-a-month sibling gatherings. I asked Sam, Jonas, and the counselors walking us through the process of the sale when we should tell my siblings, and their decision was unanimous: to involve everyone at this point would only muddy the waters, possibly confuse the issue. It would be best to wait until everything was finalized before making the announcement. I accepted their guidance, but something inside me felt guilty, something felt my silence was a form of betrayal to my brothers and sisters.

  After that family meeting in 1976, there seemed no possibility of reconciliation. The four boys and my parents, all of whom believed the rumors circulating about Pastor, became less involved in the church. My other brother, my two sisters, and I each became more and more convinced of his innocence, once again because of the one-on-one time he spent with each of us. His smooth talking and ability to maintain composure under the most implicating of circumstances convinced us. Yet Pastor wasn’t content to just divide us four from four—he continued the division until the four of us on his side could barely spend time together.

  Eventually the pressure on him to leave the church, as well as mounting evidence of his wrongdoing, forced him out, and in November 1976 he left Pennsylvania, moved to another state, and started a church there. Still I didn’t feel free from him: we spoke on the phone, and he remained the one person I shared everything with, whether it was my increasing unhappiness in Pennsylvania or my deteriorating relationship with Jonas. I still felt trapped and controlled by Pastor. Shortly after he left, my sister Fi and her husband, Mike, also moved to that state.

  I didn’t think life could get any worse. Not only had our family split, our church crumbled, and my confidant fled, but now the singing group formed by my two sisters and me dissolved. We had sung together for ten years, and now that was over, too, yet another destruction brought about by Pastor. I felt an overwhelming desire to leave Lancaster County, to escape all of these horrible events, to try to find a new beginning in a faraway place. Then a job opportunity arose for Jonas and my brother-in-law Aaron in Texas—finally something to grasp onto, something to carry us through life. Becky, Aaron, Jonas, and I decided to leave these old fields and rolling hills. Too much pain surrounded us.

  As I mentioned earlier, the most difficult part for me about leaving Pennsylvania was leaving Angie buried at the church. I felt I was abandoning her. As I boxed all of her little clothes and toys, I couldn’t help but wonder if her death hadn’t led to all of the other horrible things that had happened to me and my family. I didn’t think I would ever be close to her again, and I was frightened that my memories of her would somehow fade if we left the place she had lived her short life.

  So torn was our family that my parents didn’t even help us pack. I don’t think any of my brothers came by to help, and even though we lived right next door, Daddy didn’t come to help us load the truck. Not that I blame them—I probably didn’t even want to see them anymore at that point. My mom came down to say good-bye but couldn’t stop crying and eventually went back to the house.

  “It’s just too sad,” she said as she walked out the door. She spent an entire week in bed after we left, her heart completely broken. I remember thinking that the whole concept of family as I knew it up to that point in my life was over. I couldn’t imagine how things could possibly heal.

  Eventually we finished packing and the four of us got into the car: Jonas, LaVale, LaWonna, and me. It was June 1977. We may have said a quick good-bye to Mom and Dad, I can’t remember, but if we did, it certainly wasn’t anything big. Soon we hit the road, driving the twenty-four-plus hours that separated us from a new life. I hoped it would be a better life.

  I don’t think we talked to any family in Pennsylvania for a couple of months after we got to Texas. Jonas settled into his new job; LaWonna started school. I think the first call we got was from Daddy. His mother, my grandmother, was deathly ill—could we come home?

  “I’m sorry, Daddy, we just don’t have the money,” I explained quietly.

  She died soon after, and we didn’t go back for the funeral either. For a family who only a few short years earlier would have done anything to be together during a difficult time, this lack of response on our part can only serve to show just how bad things had become. With each such circumstance we grew further and further apart.

  Then another call a few months later.

  “Your mother has taken ill,” Daddy said quietly over the phone. “She can’t get out of bed. She’s not doing well.”

  Still we stayed away. Eventually Mom recovered, but I can’t think back on those years without a heavy heart regarding the way we treated my parents, the di
sregard and almost contempt with which we handled those family situations. And all because we allowed a pastor to come into our family, take us into his confidence, and then pit us one against the other.

  My sister Fi and her husband, Mike, decided to join us in Texas, and then came the news that filled me with such strange emotions: word reached Jonas and me that Pastor planned a move to Texas, to our area. My heart felt as torn as my family: on one hand, I felt ecstatic that I would once again have someone to talk to; on the other hand, I could feel the oppression and enslavement that my life with him had brought about. I was scared that the secret would come out.

  The secret didn’t feel right. The sale of the company continued moving ahead, the company did well, Thanksgiving 2004 came and went. The more I thought about the history of Auntie Anne’s, the more strongly I felt I should tell my brothers and sisters about the sale agreement.

  I thought of Aaron and Becky and how, as my very first employees, they played such a huge role in the early days. I thought of Fi and how supportive she’d always been through the years. I thought of Merrill and how, as director of franchising, he interviewed and brought in so many excellent franchisees. I thought of Dale, my brother and director of purchasing, and Jake, our VP of land development as well as my very first franchisee. Sure, Jonas and I owned Auntie Anne’s the company, but there was a spirit about the place that couldn’t be limited to shares—everyone who ever did anything to advance our company held emotional ownership.

  Yet my advisors kept saying, “Wait.” Finally I prayed.

  “God, I feel terrible about not telling my brothers and sisters about the sale. I want to tell them. But I’m torn between what I feel is right and what everyone else is saying. I need a sign.”