Free Possessed by Kathryn Casey

keeping the house in order. “There was a lot of tension.”
    For the most part, they lived a quiet life. A homebody, Fox enjoyed staying in on weeknights. On weekends, they sometimes went out to dinner or with friends. When they did, they drank socially. If there was music, Ana loved to dance. And there were those nights when he wanted to leave, and she argued that they stay and close up the bar.
    At the house, she decorated with her artwork, paintings and drawings she did on her days off. Jim paid for the house and other expenses, and Ana was responsible for thegroceries. More often than not, however, she ran out of funds before the end of the month. “She’d take the girls shopping, and she’d be overly generous,” Fox said. “She went through money. After a while, I understood that it was just Ana, the way she was.”
    Along with the heated discussions over money, there continued to be tension between Fox and Ana’s oldest, Siana, who would later say that she found her stepdad to be “anal.” Admitting that he could be fastidious about the house, Fox said his relationship with Ana’s oldest was strained, and she would later describe it as the two of them “bickering a lot.”
    For the most part, Fox got along well with Ana’s family. He liked Trina, Gene, and Ana’s siblings, and they quickly meshed. When his son visited, Ana worked hard to connect with the boy, taking him places with her girls. When he left, she was generous with him as well, coaxing Jim into gifting his son with $20 for his wallet. “She was a good woman, always concerned about others. She didn’t cook much, so I did. Things were really normal,” Fox said later, thinking back to their marriage and trying to put the Ana he knew in context with the future that awaited her. “There are things, well, yes there were problems, but the way she changed, that’s something I still don’t understand.”
    Yet there were those issues from her growing-up years that seemed to haunt her. At times, Ana talked about all she believed she’d missed out on from such a young age, charged as she was with looking after her younger siblings, saying she’d been robbed of a childhood. On Sundays, Jim took the girls to church, but Ana refused. “Ana hated churches,” he said. “She talked about being a Jehovah’s Witness, and how she wasn’t even allowed to play sports, how she said she was shunned by the other kids. Never celebrating holidays, even Christmas or her birthday. She said it ruined her childhood.”
    Perhaps, then, it wasn’t surprising when four years into the marriage, in January of 2006, when Jim Fox said he wanted to move to Houston to be closer to his son, Ana decidedto make changes as well. Once his transfer was approved, they drove the two hours into the city to find a home. On the shores of Lake Houston, Ana fell in love with Summerwood, a heavily treed subdivision cut from the forest, half an hour northeast of the city. The area was under construction, a brand-new development, and they picked out a lot on Baron Creek Lane. For the house, they chose a plan for a 3,100-square-foot, four-bedroom, two-story. The design had a stately look, with a column leading to a high arch over the front door.
    Their home under construction until the fall, Ana didn’t wait to give notice at Coca-Cola. Later, she said, “I’d worked all my life. My girls were getting older, and I wanted to be more flexible. I wanted a stress-free environment.”
    For his part, Fox agreed to the plan when Ana laid it out. She’d been unhappy for months, complaining about one of the men at work. “I thought it was a little odd. She’d been at Coke about ten years,” Jim Fox said. “But I didn’t push.”
    Rather than work at Coke, she enrolled in a school to become a massage therapist, her plan to open a studio close to their new home.