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He was speaking more distinctly than he usually did, a sure indication of just how drunk he really was. She sat down next to him and gazed out into the darkness, deciding to force the issue. “You know what I was thinkin' about today?” she asked. “I was thinkin' about how you used to walk around with Danny up on your shoulders, and he'd hold on to your hair and squeal. And every once in a while, his diaper'd leak so that when you put him down you'd have a wet spot on the back of your shirt. I used to think that was so funny—my pretty-boy husband goin' around with baby pee on the back of his T-shirt.” Dallie didn't respond. She waited a moment and then tried again. “Remember that awful fight we had when you took him to the barbershop and got all his baby curls cut off? I threw your Western Civ book at you, and we made love on the kitchen floor... only neither of us had swept it in a week and all Danny's Cheerio rejects got ground into my back, not to mention a few other places.”
He spread his legs and put his elbows on his knees, bending his head. She touched his arm, her voice soft. “Think about the good times, Dallie. It's been six years. You got to let go of the bad and think about the good.”
“We were crummy parents, Holly Grace.”
She tightened her grip on his arm. “No, we weren't. We loved Danny. There's never been a little boy who was loved as much as he was. Remember how we used to tuck him in bed with us at night, even though everybody said he'd grow up queer?”
Dallie lifted his head and his voice was bitter. “What I remember is how we'd go out at night and leave him alone with all those twelve-year-old baby-sitters. Or drag him along when we couldn't find anybody to stay with him— prop that little plastic seat of his up in the corner of some booth in a bar and feed him potato chips, or put Seven-Up in his bottle if he started to cry. Christ...”
Holly Grace shrugged and let go of his arm. “We weren't even nineteen when Danny was born. Not much more than kids ourselves. We did the best we knew how.”
“Yeah? Well, it wasn't fucking good enough!”
She ignored his outburst. She had done a better job of coming to terms with Danny's death than Dallie had, although she still had to look away when she caught a glimpse of a mother picking up a little towheaded boy. Halloween was the hardest for Dallie because that was the day Danny had died, but Danny's birthday was hardest for her. She gazed at the dark, leafy shapes of the pecan trees and remembered how it had been that day.
Although it had been exam week at A&M and Dallie had a paper to write, he was out hustling some cotton farmers on the golf course so they could buy a crib. When her water had broken, she had been afraid to go to the hospital by herself so she'd driven to the course in an old Ford Fairlane she'd borrowed from the engineering student who lived next door to them. Although she had folded a bath towel to sit on, she'd still soaked through onto the seat.
The greenskeeper had gone after Dallie and returned with him in less than ten minutes. When Dallie had seen her leaning against the side of the Fairlane, wet patches staining her old denim jumper, he had vaulted out of the electric cart and run over to her. “Shoot, Holly Grace,” he'd said, “I just drove the green on number eight—landed not three inches from the cup. Couldn't you have waited a while longer?” Then he'd laughed and picked her up, wet jumper and all, and held her against his chest until a contraction made her cry out.
Thinking about it now, she felt a lump growing in her throat. “Danny was such a beautiful baby,” she whispered to Dallie. “Remember how scared we were when we brought him home from the hospital?”
His reply was low and tight. “People need a license to keep a dog, but they let you take a baby out of a hospital without asking a single question.”
She jumped up from the step. “Dammit, Dallie! I want to mourn our baby boy. I want to mourn him with you tonight, not listen to you turn everything bitter.”
He slumped forward for a moment, his head dropping. “You shouldn't have come. You know how I get this time of year.”
She let the palm of her hand come to rest on the top of his head like a baptism. “Let Danny go this year.”
“Could you let him go if you were the one who'd killed him?”
“I knew about the cistern cover, too.”
“And you told me to fix it.” He stood up slowly, wandering over to the porch railing. “You told me twice that the hinge was broken and that the neighborhood boys kept pulling it off so they could throw stones down inside. You weren't the one who stayed home with Danny that afternoon. You weren't the one who was supposed to be watching him.”
“Dallie, you were studying. It's not like you were passed out drunk on the floor when he slipped outside.”
She shut her eyes. She didn't want to think about this part—about her little two-year-old baby boy toddling across the yard to that cistern, looking down into it with his boundless curiosity. Losing his balance. Falling forward. She didn't want to imagine that little body struggling for life in that dank water, crying out. What had her baby thought about at the end, when all he could see was a circle of light far above him? Had he thought about her, his mother, who wasn't there to pull him safely into her arms, or had he thought about his daddy, who kissed him and roughhoused with him and held him so tight that he would squeal? What had he thought about at that last moment when his small lungs had filled with water?
Blinking against the sting of tears, she went over to Dallie and circled his waist from behind. Then she rested her forehead against the back of his shoulder. “God gives us life as a gift,” she said. “We don't have any right to add our own conditions.”
He began to shudder, and she held on to him as best she could.
Francesca watched them from the darkness beneath the pecan tree that stood next to the porch. The night was quiet, and she had heard every word. She felt sick... even worse than when she'd run from the Roustabout. Her own pain now seemed frivolous compared to theirs. She hadn't known Dallie at all. She had never seen anything more than the laughing, wisecracking Texan who refused to take life seriously. He'd hidden a wife from her... the death of his son. As she looked at the two grief-stricken figures standing on the porch, the intimacy between them seemed as solid as the old house itself—an intimacy brought about by living together, by sharing happiness and tragedy. She realized then that she and Dallie had shared nothing except their bodies, and that love had depths to it she hadn't even imagined.
Francesca watched as Dallie and Holly Grace disappeared into the house. For a fraction of a moment, the very best part of her hoped they would find some comfort with each other.
Naomi had never been to Texas before, and if she had anything to say about the matter, she would never come here again. As a pickup truck sped past her in the right lane going at least eighty, she decided that some people were not meant to venture beyond predictable city traffic jams and the comforting scent of exhaust being belched out by crawling yellow cabs. She was a city girl; the open road made her nervous. Or maybe it wasn't the highway at all. Maybe it was Gerry huddled next to her in the passenger seat of her rental Cadillac, scowling through the windshield like an ill-tempered toddler.
When she had returned to her apartment the night before to pack a suitcase, Gerry had announced that he was going to Texas with her. “I've got to get out of this place before I go crazy,” he had exclaimed, thrusting one hand through his hair. “I'm going to Mexico for a while—live undergro
und. I'll fly to Texas with you tonight—the cops at the airport won't be looking for a couple traveling together—and then I'll make arrangements to cross the border. I've got some friends in Del Rio. They'll help me. It'll be good in Mexico. We'll get our movement reorganized.”
She had told him he couldn't go with her, but he refused to listen. Since she couldn't physically restrain him, she had found herself boarding the Delta flight to San Antonio with Gerry at her side, holding her arm.
She stretched in the driver's seat, inadvertently pressing down on the gas pedal so that the car accelerated slightly. Next to her, Gerry plunged his hands deep into the pockets of a pair of gray flannel slacks he'd procured from somewhere. The outfit was supposed to make him look like a respectable businessman but fell somewhat short of the mark since he had refused to cut his hair. “Relax,” she said. “Nobody's paid any attention to you since we got here.”
“The cops'll never let me get away this easy,” he said, glancing nervously over his shoulder for the hundredth time since they had pulled out of the hotel garage in San Antonio. “They're playing with me. They'll let me get so close to the Mexican border that I can smell it, and then they'll close in on me. Frigging pigs.”
