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Piqued, Heather asked, “What’s wrong with your perfume? You have dozens to choose from. Why do you use mine?”
“You spend too much time on the phone with Tanner,” Darcy said, ignoring Heather’s complaint.
“I do not.”
“Boys don’t like girls who are too available.”
“Mother, please don’t meddle in my jewelry box. You leave it in a mess every time you open it.” Reaching around Darcy, Heather flipped down the lid.
Darcy pushed her aside and defiantly reopened the lavender velvet box. “What have you got stashed away in here that you don’t want me to see?”
“Nothing!”
“If you’re smoking joints…”
“I’m not!”
Darcy rifled through the contents of the jewelry box but found only an assortment of earrings, bracelets, rings, pendants, and a strand of pearls that Fergus had bought for Heather the day she was born.
“See? I told you.”
“Don’t sass me, young lady.” She slammed down the lid and scrutinized Heather with a critical eye. “And before we leave, wipe off about half of that eye shadow. You look like a tramp.”
“I do not.”
Darcy popped a Kleenex from the box and shoved it into Heather’s hand. “You’re probably behaving like one, too, every time you’re out with Tanner Hoskins.”
“Tanner respects me.”
“And pigs fly. He wants to get in your pants, and so will every other man you ever meet.”
Dismissing Heather’s protests to the contrary, Darcy left the room and went downstairs. She felt pleased with herself. She believed parents should never let their kids get the upper hand and so she stayed on Heather like fleas on a hound. Every minute of Heather’s day was reported to Darcy, who insisted on knowing where her daughter was, whom she was with, and for how long she was with them. According to Darcy Winston, only an informed parent could exercise the control necessary to raise teenagers.
By and large, Heather was obedient. Her active school schedule didn’t allow much time during which she could get into trouble, but in the summer, when free time was easier to come by, opportunities for mischief-making were plentiful.
Darcy’s vigilance wasn’t based so much on maternal instinct as it was on memories of her own adolescence. She knew all the
tricks a youngster could pull on gullible parents because she had pulled each one herself. Hell, she’d invented them.
If her mother had been more strict, more observant of her comings and goings, Darcy’s youth might not have been so short-lived. She might not have been married at eighteen.
Her father had deserted her mother when Darcy was nine, and although she was at first sympathetic with her mother’s dilemma, Darcy soon became contemptuous of her. Over the years, her contempt grew into open rebellion. By the time she was Heather’s age she was running with a wild crowd that got drunk every night and frequently traded sex partners.
She graduated high school by the skin of her teeth—actually by giving a blow-job to a biology teacher with thick glasses and damp hands. During the summer following commencement, she got pregnant by a drummer in a country-western band. She tracked him to De Ridder, Louisiana, where he denied he’d ever met her. In a way, Darcy was glad he claimed no responsibility. He was a no-talent loser, a dopehead who spent his piddling portion of the band’s earnings on substances he could smoke, snort, or shoot into his veins.
When she returned to Eden Pass, her future looked dim. Fortuitously, she stopped for breakfast at The Green Pine Motel. Flashing his horsy, toothy grin, Fergus Winston, who was settled into middle-aged bachelorhood, greeted her at the door of the busy coffeeshop.
Instead of perusing the menu, Darcy watched Fergus ring up the cash register receipts. Halfway through her first cup of coffee, she reached a life-altering decision. Within two hours she had a job. Two weeks beyond that, she had netted a husband.
On their wedding night, Fergus believed with all his heart that he’d married a virgin, and several weeks later, when Darcy announced that she was pregnant, it never occurred to him that her child had been sired by anyone except himself.
In all the years since, it still hadn’t occurred to him, although Heather had been almost eight weeks “premature” and had still weighed in at a healthy seven and a half pounds.
Fergus didn’t have time to dwell on these inconsistencies because Darcy kept his mind on the motel. Over the years she had convinced him that a clever businessman spent money in order to make it. He had revamped the food service, updated the motel’s decor, and leased billboards on the interstate.
On one point Fergus stood firm. Only he had access to The Green Pine Motel’s ledgers. No matter how persuasively Darcy cajoled, he alone did the bookkeeping. She surmised that he wasn’t reporting all his profits to the IRS, which was all right with her. What annoyed her was that, given access to the books, she probably would have been able to find loopholes that he’d overlooked. But in sixteen years of marriage he hadn’t budged from his original position. It was one of the few arguments between them that Darcy lost.
Having remained a bachelor for so long, he was totally smitten with his young, pretty, redheaded wife and their daughter and considered himself the luckiest man alive. He was a generous husband. He’d built Darcy the finest house in Eden Pass. She’d had carte blanche to furnish it out of design studios in Dallas and Houston. She drove a new car every year. He was an adoring parent to Heather, who had twined him around her little finger as easily as her mother had.
