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Dallie had lived with poverty for so long it didn't bother him too much, but it was different for Holly Grace. She got this helpless, panicked look in her eyes that sank right into his veins and froze his blood. It made him feel that he was failing her, and he started arguments—bitter fights where he accused her of not doing her share. He said she didn't keep the house clean enough, or he told her she was too lazy to cook him a good meal. She countered by accusing him of not providing for his family, insisting that he should quit playing golf and study engineering instead.
“I don't want to be an engineer,” he retorted during an especially fierce argument. Banging one of his books down on the scratched surface of the kitchen table, he added, “I want to study literature, and I want to play golf!”
She threw the dish towel at him. “If you want to play golf so bad, why are you wasting money studying literature?”
He threw the towel right back. “Nobody in my family ever graduated from college! I'm going to be the first.” Danny started to cry at the angry sound of his father's voice. Dallie picked him up, buried his face in the baby's blond curls, and refused to look at Holly Grace. How could he explain that he had something to prove when even he didn't know what it was?
As similar as they were in so many ways, they wanted different things from life. Their fights began to escalate until they attacked each other's most vulnerable spots, and then they felt sick inside because of the way they hurt each other. Skeet said they fought because they were both so young that they were pretty much raising each other right along with Danny. It was true.
“I wish you'd stop walking around with that surly look on your face all the time,” Holly Grace said one day as she dabbed Clearasil on one of the pimples that still occasionally popped out on Dallie's chin. “Don't you understand that the first step toward being a man is to stop pretending to be one.”
“What do you know about being a man?” he replied, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her down on his lap. They made love, but a few hours later he was scolding her for not standing up straight.
“You walk around with your shoulders hunched over just because you think your breasts are too big.”
“I do not,” Holly Grace retorted hotly.
“Yes, you do and you know it.” He tilted up her chin so she was looking him straight in the eye. “Baby, when are you going to stop blaming yourself for what ol' Billy T did to you?”
Eventually, Dallie's words took hold and Holly Grace let go of the past.
Unfortunately, all of their confrontations didn't end as well. “You've got an attitude problem,” Dallie accused her at the end of several days of arguing about money. “Nothing is ever good enough for you.”
“I want to be somebody!” she countered. “I'm the one stuck here with a baby while you go to college.”
“Ás soon as I'm done, you can go. We've talked about it a hundred times.”
“It'll be too late by then,” she said. “My life will be half over.”
Their marriage was already rocky, and then Danny died.
Dallie's guilt after Danny's death was like a fast-growing cancer. Right away they moved from the house where it happened, but night after night he dreamed about the cistern cover. In his dreams he saw the broken hinge and he turned away toward the old wooden garage to get his tools so he could fix it. But he never made it to the garage. Instead, he found himself back in Wynette or standing next to the trailer outside Houston where he had lived while he was growing up. He knew he had to get back to that cistern cover, had to get it fixed, but something kept stopping him.
He would wake up covered with sweat, the sheets tangled around him. Sometimes Holly Grace was already awake, her shoulders shaking, her face turned into the pillow to muffle the sound of her crying. In all the time he'd known her nothing had ever made her cry. Not when Billy T hit her in the stomach with his fist; not when she was scared because they were just kids and they didn't have any money; not even at Danny's funeral where she had sat as if she was carved out of stone while he cried like a baby. But now that she was crying, he knew it was the worst sound he had ever heard.
His guilt was a disease, eating away at him. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw Danny running toward him on chubby legs, one strap of his denim coveralls falling down off his shoulder, bright blond curls alight in the sun. He saw those blue eyes wide with wonder and the long lashes that curled on his cheeks when he slept. He heard Danny's squeal of laughter, remembered the way he had sucked his fingers when he got tired. He saw Danny in his mind, and then he heard Holly Grace crying, and as her shoulders quaked helplessly, his guilt intensified until he thought he might die right along with Danny.
Eventually, she said she was going to leave him, that she still loved him but she'd gotten a job on the sales staff of a sports equipment company and she was leaving for Fort Worth in the morning. That night, the sound of her muffled crying awakened him again. He lay there for a while with his eyes open, and then he jerked her up out of the pillow and hit her across the face. He slapped her once, and then he slapped her again. After that, he pulled on his pants and ran right out of the house so that in years to come, Holly Grace Beaudine would remember she had a son of a bitch husband who hit her, not some stupid kid who had made her cry because he'd killed her baby.
After she left, he spent several months so drunk that he couldn't play golf, even though he was supposed to be getting ready for qualifying school for the pro tour. Skeet eventually called Holly Grace, and she came to see Dallie. “I'm happy for the first time in a long time,” she told him. “Why can't you be happy, too?”
It had taken years for them to learn to love each other in a new way. At first they had tumbled back into bed together, only to find themselves caught up in old arguments. Occasionally they had tried to live with each other for a few months, but they wanted different things from life and it never worked out. The first time he saw her with another man, Dallie wanted to kill him. But a cute little secretary had caught his eye, so he kept his fists to himself.
Over the years they talked about divorce, but neither of them did anything about it. Skeet meant everything in the world to Dallie. Holly Grace loved Winona with all her heart. But the two of them together—Dallie and Holly Grace—they were each other's real family, and people with childhoods as troubled as theirs didn't give up family easily.
Tempest-Tossed
Chapter
19
The building was a squat white rectangle of concrete with four dusty cars parked at the side next to a trash dumpster. A padlocked shack stood behind the dumpster, and fifty yards beyond that was the thin metal finger of the radio antenna that Francesca had been walking toward for nearly two hours. As Beast went off to explore, Francesca wearily climbed the two steps to the front door. Its glass surface was nearly opaque with dust and the smear of countless fingerprints. Decals advertising the Sulphur City Chamber of Commerce, the United Way, and various broadcasting associations covered much of the left side of the door, while the center held the gold call letters KDSC. The bottom half of the C was missing, so it might have been a G, but Francesca knew it wasn't because she had seen the C on the mailbox at the end of the lane when she turned in.
Although she could have positioned herself in front of the door to study her reflection, she didn't bother. Instead, she rubbed the back of her hand over her forehead, pushing aside the damp strands of hair that had stuck there, and brushed off her jeans as best she could. She couldn't do anything about the bloody scrapes on her arms, so she ignored them. Her earlier euphoria had faded, leaving exhaustion and a terrible apprehension.
Pushing open the front door, she found herself in a reception area overstuffed with six cluttered desks, nearly as many clocks, an assortment of bulletin boards, calendars, posters, and cartoons fixed to the walls with curling yellowed tape. A brown and gold striped Danish modern couch sat to her left, the center cushion concave from too much. use. The room contained only one window, a large one that looked into a studio where an announcer wearing a headset sat in front of a microphone. His voice was piped into the office through a wall speaker and the volume was turned low.
A chubby red-haired chipmunk of a woman looked up at Francesca from the room's only occupied desk. “Can I help you?”
