Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(93)

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.