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“You know if you ever touch her again, I'll come and get you, don't you?”
“Yes... I—”
“You know I'll kill you if you ever touch her again.”
“I know! Please—”
Dallie did what he'd been wanting to do since he'd first looked into the storage room. He drew back his fist and slammed it into Billy T's fat pig face. Then he hit him half a dozen more times until he saw enough blood to make himself feel better. He stopped before Billy T passed out, and got real close to his face. “You go ahead and call the police on me, Billy T. You go ahead and have me arrested, because while I'm sitting in that jail cell over at the sheriffs office, I'm going to be telling everybody I know about the dirty little games you've been playing in here. I'm going to tell every cop I see, every do-good lawyer. I'm going to tell the people who sweep out my cell and the juvenile officer who investigates my case. It won't take long for the word to spread. People'll pretend not to believe it, but they'll be thinking about it every time they look at you and wondering if it's true.”
Billy T didn't say anything. He just lay there whimpering and trying to hold his bleeding face together in the palms of his pudgy hands.
“Come on, Holly Grace. You and me have somebody we got to talk to.” Dallie scooped up her shoes and her tights and, taking her gently by the arm, led her from the storage room.
If he had expected gratitude from her, she quickly let him know exactly how wrong he was. When she heard what he intended to do, she started to yell at him. “You promised, you liar! You promised you wouldn't tell anybody!”
He didn't say anything, didn't try to explain, because he could see the fear in her eyes and he figured if he were in her place, he'd be scared, too.
Winona Cohagan. twisted her hands in the ruffle of her frilly pink apron as she sat in the living room of Billy T's house listening to Dallie talk. Holly Grace stood by the stairs, her mouth white and pinched as if she wanted to die of shame. For the first time Dallie realized that she hadn't cried once. From the moment he had burst into the storage room, she had remained dry-eyed and stricken.
Winona didn't spend any time cross-examining either of them, so Dallie got the idea that someplace deep in her heart she might have suspected Billy T was a pervert. But the quiet misery in her eyes told him that she had no idea her daughter had been his victim. He also saw right away that Winona lòved Holly Grace and that she wasn't going to let anyone hurt her daughter, no matter what it might cost her. When he finally walked toward the front door to leave the house, he figured Winona, for all her flightiness, would do what was right.
Holly Grace didn't look at him as he left, and she didn't say thank you.
For the next few days she was absent from school. He, Skeet, and Miss Sybil paid an after-hours visit to Purity Drugs. They let Miss Sybil do most of the talking, and by the time she was done, Billy T had gotten the idea that he couldn't stay in Wynette any longer.
When Holly Grace finally came back to school, she stared right through Dallie as if he didn't exist. He didn't want her to know how much he was hurt by her stuck-up attitude, so he flirted with her best friend and made sure there were good-looking girls around him whenever he thought he might run into her. It didn't work as well as he'd hoped, because every time he ran into her, she had a rich college-prep boy at her side. Still, sometimes he thought he caught a flicker of something sad and old in her eyes, so he finally swallowed his pride and went up to her and asked her if she wanted to go to the homecoming dance with him. He asked her like he didn't much care whether she went with him or not, like he was doing her a big fat favor by even thinking about taking her. He wanted to make sure that when she turned him down, she would understand he didn't really give a damn and that he'd only asked her because he didn't have anything better to do.
She said she'd go.
Chapter
18
Holly Grace looked up at the anniversary clock on the mantel and swore under her breath. Dallie was late as usual. He knew she was leaving for New York City in two days and that they wouldn't see each other for a while. Couldn't he be on time just once? She wondered if he had set out after that British girl. It would be just like him to go off without saying a word.
She had dressed for the evening in a silky peach-colored turtleneck, which she'd tucked into a pair of brand-new stretch jeans. The jeans had tight cigarette legs whose length she had accented with a pair of three-inch heels. She never wore jewelry because putting earrings and necklaces near her great mane of blond hair was, she felt, a clear case of gilding the lily.
“Holly Grace, honey,” Winona remarked from her armchair on the other side of the living room. “Have you seen my crossword puzzle book? I had it right here, and now I can't seem to find it.”
Holly Grace retrieved the book from beneath the evening newspaper and sat down on the arm of her mother's chair to offer her advice on twenty-three across. Not that her mother needed advice, any more than she had really lost her crossword puzzle book, but Holly Grace didn't begrudge her the attention she wanted. As they worked on the puzzle together, she put hef arm around Winona's shoulders and leaned down to rest her cheek on top of her mother's faded blond curls, taking in the faint scent of Breck shampoo and Aqua Net hair spray. In the kitchen, Ed Graylock, Winona's husband of three years, was puttering with a broken toaster and singing “You Are So Beautiful” along with the radio. His voice kept fading out on the high notes, but he came on strong as soon as Joe Cocker slid back into his range. Holly Grace felt her heart swell with love for these two—big Ed Graylock, who had finally given Winona the happiness she deserved, and her pretty, flighty mother.
The anniversary clock chimed seven. Giving in to the vague nostalgia that had been plaguing her all day, Holly Grace stood up and gave Winona's cheek a peck. “If Dallie ever gets here, tell him I'll be at the high school. And don't wait up for me; I'll probably be late.” She grabbed her purse and headed for the front door, calling out to Ed that she would invite Dallie for breakfast in the morning.
The high school was locked up for the night, but she banged on the door by the metal shop until the custodian let her in. Her heels clicked on the concrete ramp that led into the back hallway, and as the old smells assaulted her, her footsteps seemed to be tapping out the rhythm of “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” with the Queen of Soul wailing right in her ear. She started to hum the song softly under her breath, but before she knew it she was humming “Walk Away Renée” instead and she'd rounded the corner to the gym, and then the Young Rascals were singing “Good Lovin'” and it was homecoming 1966 all over again....
Holly Grace had barely said more than three words to Dallie Beaudine since he'd picked her up for the football game in a burgundy 1964 Cadillac El Dorado that she knew for certain didn't belong to him. It had deep velou
r seats, automatic windows and an AM/FM stereo radio blaring out, “Good love....” She wanted to ask him where he got the car, but she refused to be the one to talk first.
Leaning back into the velour seat, she crossed her legs and tried to look like she rode in El Dorados all the time, like maybe the El Dorado had been invented just for her to ride in. But it was hard to pretend something like that when she was so nerveus and when her stomach was growling because all she'd had to eat for dinner was half a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. Not that she minded. Winona couldn't really cook anything more complicated on the illegal hot plate they kept in the small back room they'd rented from Agnes Clayton the day they'd left Billy T's house.
On the horizon in front of them, the night sky glowed with a patch of light. Wynette was proud of being the only high school in the county with a lighted stadium. Everybody from the surrounding towns drove over to see Wynette play on Friday nights after their own high school game had ended. Since tonight was homecoming and the Wynette Broncos were playing last year's regional champions, the crowd was even bigger than normal. Dallie parked the El Dorado on the street several blocks away from the stadium.
He didn't say anything as they walked along the sidewalk, but when they reached the high school, he slipped his hand into the pocket of a navy blazer that looked brand new and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Want a cigarette?”
“I don't smoke.” Her voice came out tight with disapproval, like Miss Chandler's when she talked about double negatives. She wished she could speak the words all over again, say something like, “Sure, Dallie, I'd love a smoke. Why don't you light one up for me?”
Holly Grace spotted some of her friends as they headed into the parking lot and nodded at one of the boys she'd turned down for a date that evening. She noticed that the other girls wore new wool skirts or A-line dresses bought just for the occasion, along with low square-heeled pumps that had wide grosgrain bows stretched across the toes. Holly Grace had on the black corduroy skirt that she'd worn to school once a week since her junior year and a plaid cotton blouse. She also noticed that all the other boys held hands with their dates, but Dallie had shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks. Not for long, she thought bitterly. Before the evening was through, those hands would be all over her.
