He suddenly pulled away from her and began walking around the side of the house toward the front. His steps were slightly unsteady, but considering how much he'd had to drink, he was doing pretty well. Holly Grace watched him for a moment. Six years had passed, but he still wouldn't let Danny go.
She rounded the front of the house in time to see him slump down on the top porch step. “You go on to your mama's now,” he said quietly.
“I'm staying, Dallie.” She climbed the steps, then pulled off her hat and tossed it over onto the porch swing.
“Go on, now. I'll come over and see you tomorrow.”
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.”
The sixties paranoia. She'd almost forgotten about it. When Gerry had learned about the FBI wiretaps, he'd believed that every shadow hid a cop, that every new recruit was an informer, that the mighty J. Edgar Hoover himself was personally searching for evidence of subversive activity in the Kotex the women in the anti-war movement tossed into the garbage. Although at the time there had been reason for caution, in the end the fear had been more exhausting than the reality. “Are you sure the police even care?” Naomi said. “Nobody looked at you twice when you got on the plane.”
He glared at her and she knew that she had insulted him by belittling his importance as a fugitive—Macho Gerry, the John Wayne of the radicals. “If I'd been by myself,” he said, “they'd have noticed fast enough.”
Naomi wondered. For all Gerry's insistence that the police were out to get him, they certainly didn't seem to be looking very hard. It made her feel strangely sad. She remembered the days when the police had cared a great deal about the activities of her brother.
The Cadillac topped a grade, and she saw a sign announcing the city limits of Wynette. A spurt of excitement went through her. After all this time, she would finally see her Sassy Girl. She hoped she hadn't made a mistake by not calling ahead, but she felt instinctively that this first connection needed to be made in person. Besides, photographs sometimes lied. She had to see this girl face to face.
Gerry looked at the digital clock on the dashboard. “It's not even nine o'clock yet. She's probably still in bed. I don't see why we had to leave so early.”
She didn't bother answering. Nothing ever had any importance to Gerry except his own mission to save the world single-handedly. She pulled into a service station and asked for directions. Gerry hunched down in the seat, hiding himself behind an open road map in case the pimply-faced kid standing by the gas pumps was really a crack government agent out to catch Public Enemy Number One.
As she pulled the car back out onto the street, she said, “Gerry, you're thirty-two years old. Aren't you getting tired of living like this?”
“I'm not going to sell out, Naomi.”
“If you ask me, running off to Mexico comes closer to selling out than staying around and trying to work inside the system.”
“Just shut up about it, will you?”
Was it only her imagination or did Gerry sound less sure of himself? “You'd be a wonderful lawyer,” she pressed on. “Courageous and incorruptible. Like a medieval knight lighting for justice.”
“I'll think about it, okay?” he snapped. “I'll think about it after I get to Mexico. Remember that you promised to get me over closer to Del Rio before nightfall.”
“God, Gerry, can't you think about anything but yourself?”
He looked at her with disgust. “The world's getting ready to blow itself up, and all you care about is selling perfume.”
She refused to get into another shouting match with him, and they rode in silence the rest of the way to the house. As Naomi pulled up in the Cadillac, Gerry glanced nervously over his shoulder toward the street When he saw nothing suspicious, he relaxed enough to lean forward and study the house. “Hey, I like this place.” He gestured toward the painted jackrabbits. “It gives out great vibes.”
Naomi gathered up her purse and briefcase. Just as she was getting ready to open the car door, Gerry caught her arm. “This is important to you, isn't it, sis?”
“I know you don't understand, Gerry, but I love what I do.”
He nodded slowly and then smiled at her. “Good luck, kid.”
The sound of a car door slamming woke Francesca. At first she couldn't think where she was, and then she realized that—like an animal going into a cave to die alone—she had crawled into the back seat of the Riviera and fallen asleep. Memories of the night before washed over her, bringing a fresh wave of pain. She straightened and moaned softly as the muscles in various parts of her body protested her change in position. The cat, who was curled up on the floor beneath her, lifted his misshapen head and meowed.
Then she saw the Cadillac.
She caught her breath. For as long as she could remember, big, expensive cars had always brought wonderful things into her life—expensive men, fashionable places, glittering parties. An illogical surge of hope swept through her. Maybe one of her friends had tracked her down and come to take her back to her old life. She brushed her hair from her face with a dirty, shaking hand, let herself out of the car, and walked cautiously around to the front of the house. She couldn't face Dallie this morning, and she especially couldn't face Holly Grace. As she crept up the front steps, she told herself not to get her hopes up, that the car might have brought a magazine writer to interview Dallie, or even an insurance salesman—but every muscle in her body felt tense with expectation. She heard an unfamiliar woman's voice through the open door and stepped to one side so she could listen unobserved.
“... have been looking everywhere for her,” the woman was saying. “I was finally able to track her down through inquiries about Mr. Beaudine.”
“Imagine going to all that trouble just for a magazine advertisement,” Miss Sybil replied.
“Oh, no,” the woman's voice protested. “This is much more important. Blakemore, Stern, and Rodenbaugh is one of the most important advertising agencies in Manhattan. We're planning a major campaign to launch a new perfume, and we need an extraordinarily beautiful woman as our Sassy Girl. She'll be on television, billboards. She'll make public appearances all over the country. We plan to make her one of the most familiar faces in America. Everyone will know about the Sassy Girl.”
Francesca felt as if she had just been given back her life. The Sassy Girl! They were looking for her! A surge of joy pulsed through her veins like adrenaline as she absorbed the astonishing realization that she would now be able to walk away from Dallie with her head held high. This fairy godmother from Manhattan was about to give her back her self-respect.
“But I'm afraid I don't have any idea where she is,” Miss Sybil said. “I'm sorry to have to disappoint you after you've driven so far, but if you'll give me your business card, I'll pass it on to Dallas. He'll see that she gets it.”
“No!” Francesca grabbed the screen door handle and pulled it open, illogically afraid the woman would vanish before she could get to her. As she rushed inside, she saw a thin, dark-haired woman in a navy business suit standing next to Miss Sybil. “No!” Francesca exclaimed. “I'm here! I'm right—”
“What's going on?” a throaty voice drawled. “Hey, how ya doin', Miss Sybil? I didn't get a chance to say hi last night. You got any coffee made?”
Francesca froze in the doorway as Holly Grace Beaudine came down the stairs, long bare legs stretching out from beneath one of Dallie's pale blue dress shirts. She yawned, and Francesca's altru
istic feelings toward her from the night before vanished: Even bare of makeup and with sleep-tousled hair, she looked extraordinary.
Francesca cleared her throat and stepped into the living room, making everyone aware of her presence.
The woman in the gray suit audibly gasped. “My God! Those photographs didn't do you justice.” She walked forward, smiling broadly. “Let me be the first to offer my congratulations to our beautiful new Sassy Girl.”
And then she held out her hand to Holly Grace Beaudine.
Chapter
16
Francesca might have been invisible for all the attention anyone paid her. She stood numbly just inside the doorway while the woman from Manhattan clucked over Holly Grace, talking about exclusive contracts and time schedules and a series of photographs that had been taken of her when she appeared at a charity benefit in Los Angeles as the date of a famous football player.
“But I sell sporting goods,” Holly Grace exclaimed at one point. “At least I did until I got involved in a small labor dispute a few weeks back and staged an unofficial walkout. You don't seem to realize that I'm not a model.”
“You will be when I've finished with you,” the woman insisted. “Just promise me you won't disappear again without leaving a phone number. From now on, always let your agent know where you are.”
“I don't have an agent.”
“I'll fix that, too.”
There would be no fairy godmother for her, Francesca realized. No one to take care of her. No magical modeling contracts appearing at the last moment to save her. She caught sight of her reflection in a mirror Miss Sybil had framed with seashells. Her hair was wild, her face scraped and bruised. She looked down and saw the dirt and dried blood streaking her arms. How had she ever thought she could get through life on the strength of her beauty alone? Compared to Holly Grace and Dallie, she was second rate. Chloe had been wrong. Looking pretty wasn't enough— there was always someone prettier.