Once, Narda actually heard Bart say that to Jenn, and it almost broke Narda’s heart. But Jenn had a light way of handling things, and later just shrugged and said she understood how Bart was, and that he really didn’t mean it when he said such things. “He just wants to be ‘The King,’ Mom,” Jenn said. “Don’t worry about it, please.”
It certainly wasn’t the kind of marriage that Narda and Max had, but Jenn seemed to be okay with it. And Bart did have his very likeable side. He was so funny, a lot more than Jenn was; he still made everybody laugh. When he behaved badly in public, Jenn made excuses for him, saying, “That’s just Bart. If I leave him alone, he’ll be fine in a while.”
Narda noticed that her new son-in-law reacted to “small, dumb little things” more than big things, such as a $10 charge he hadn’t authorized. Jenn never bought anything major without checking with him. In the beginning he had her on a very low budget, which had to cover groceries and everything else. In time, it increased. But Bart would still be enraged by some little thing Jenn did.
Half-laughing, Jenn once told her mother, “I could wreck the car and run over three kids, and I’d get no reaction from Bart—but if I bought something he didn’t think we needed, that would set him off.”
“It was always the same. He laid the line down,” Narda sighed. “In some ways, Bart could be very generous and very kind. Sometimes things were very good. We had some very sweet times.”
Jenn never thought of ending her marriage—not in the beginning. The good times more than made up for Bart’s sometimes autocratic ways.
He continued to work in his little office, or helping out more affluent dentists, saving and planning for the day when he would have his own perfectly appointed dental clinic.
It wasn’t too long after she got married that Jenn began to have an uneasy feeling about Dara Prentice, but she didn’t know if they had had a liaison that existed before she and Bart were engaged. And she soon realized that Bart had “secret” meetings with Dara. Ashamed, Jenn didn’t talk about it. She didn’t want to acknowledge it. She was so in love.
Jenn finally confided her fears about Dara to Heather. “We were having lunch in Applebee’s and Dara came in,” Heather recalled. “Jenn said, ‘I think Bart’s having an affair with her.’ I didn’t believe that at the time and I thought ‘No way!’ But as it turned out, Jenn was right.”
Bart always seemed to be on the telephone with Dara, although he had an explanation as to why. He said they had to talk about “situations at the office.”
He was fixated on his business finances. “He would be on the phone, ranting and raving and throwing things—it wasn’t natural,” Narda said. “I saw it more when we moved our houseboats together. One time, Dara told him that some cash had been deposited improperly and he was just tyrannical. People on the dock heard it. He was just furious.”
As for Dara, she tried to break away from Bart—not once, but several times. “Sometimes I threatened to tell Jenn,” she admitted. “But he knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to hurt her—or him, for that matter. I was just angry sometimes. When I called it off, he became unbearable to work with. I gave him my notice several times, but he just tore it up and told me I wasn’t going to quit my job. He would always, jokingly, say that he knew where I lived, and that he could always ‘get me back,’ but he smiled when he said it. He was a charmer.”
Dara Prentice knew a little more about Bart’s past relationships than Jenn did. He told Dara about a former college girlfriend who had come from New York—that would be Shelly. He also mentioned to Dara that a woman he’d dated “occasionally” in dental school had committed suicide. It never occurred to Dara that it might be dangerous to break off her relationship with Bart completely. It was a moot point, anyway. In the end, Bart was always able to get Dara to stay in their affair.
Jenn still didn’t know that Dolly had even existed. Bart never mentioned her, and Jenn had no idea that Bart had been questioned about her “suicide.” His dental student friends in Augusta had done their best to cushion the shock of Dolly’s sudden death for him, but he left them behind when he drove out of Augusta and headed back to Snellville in June 1990. For Bart Corbin, it was if his years with Dolly had never happened—as if her mysterious death never happened.
Apparently, Bart had simply erased Dolly from his memory.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1998
JENN FOUND OUT she was pregnant again in the late spring of 1998, and she told Heather before she told Bart.
“She was terrified to tell him,” her sister recalled.
“And I said, ‘Jenn, you’re married! Why are you so upset?’
“So she bought a baby rattle or baby socks or something like that and wrapped it up in a box, and gave it to Bart. He was so mad that he threw the box.”
Nevertheless, Dillon Corbin was born in January 1999, just before his mother’s twenty-eighth birthday. He was a mellow baby, and Jenn handled two children as easily as she had managed one. Bart posed for pictures with his new son, and no one would have suspected that he wasn’t pleased to have another child.
Bart had been all smiles and “normal-acting,” according to Heather, when Dalton was a baby. But that changed when Dalton was about two. They had Dillon by then, and Bart was impatient with Dalton. Annoyed, he would turn to Jenn, and say, “Jenn, deal with him.”
Bart elected to have a vasectomy after Dillon’s birth, telling a friend that as far as he was concerned, both his children were “accidents.”
When their boys were small, Bart didn’t appear to resent Jenn’s devotion to them. But there was no question that he was jealous when she spent time with someone outside their immediate family. He often remarked that he wouldn’t share her with anyone but his sons. That caused some friction because Jenn was a woman who had always had time to listen to people’s problems, and Bart thought that was ridiculous.
THE BARBER GIRLS WERE all settling down. Heather was soon engaged to Doug Tierney, and theirs was a case of love at first sight. They had met in early 2000 through his work as a computer support technician.
Doug fit into the Barber family easily. He was very welcome the first time he met them, especially since it was in the middle of a crisis. Heather had received a call that Jenn and Bart’s houseboat was sinking at its slip. Doug and Heather arrived at Lake Lanier just in time to help bail out the boat. From then on, the younger couple were with the Corbins almost every weekend, playing croquet, volleyball, and board games.
Doug Tierney grew up in Baltimore, in a strict Catholic family. His family never had emotional scenes, and Doug was an easygoing man, so he was shocked at some of Bart’s behavior, especially when he was rough with his little boys.
“He had outbursts and got irritated with Jenn and the kids and he would just march off. He was a very short-tempered person. I’d seen it in other people—but not in someone so close to me.”
On December 30, 2000, after they had dated for nine months, Doug and Heather got married. They bought a home in Jenn and Bart’s neighborhood. Now that the two couples spent even more time together, Doug realized that Bart had virtually no friends, other than his brothers. The people the Corbins socialized with were all Jenn’s friends, or someone they met through Heather and Doug.
“I asked Bart once to invite some of his friends to go fishing with us,” Doug said. But he had no friends from college or anything. It was strange. He had no background, it seemed, no one from his past that he still saw.”
Doug was a genius when it came to computers, and he and Heather started a business together, troubleshooting for corporations. Doug was quite different from Bart, and very supportive of Heather. Even so, despite his new brother-in-law’s hair-trigger temper, Doug liked Bart well enough.
If Jenn talked to anyone, it was to Heather, and the few years between them didn’t matter much now that they were both married. Soon Heather and Doug had two children—Max and Sylvia—who were a few years younger than Dalton and Dillon.
Rajel’s children were quite a bit older, and she had lived away from Georgia for several years.
Much more than most families, the Barbers were often together, a loving and solid unit—perhaps because Max’s jobs as a sales manager had meant frequent moves, including six states in six years. They felt like perennial newcomers during that time and relied on each other. Even though they had lived in their house in Lawrenceville for many years and were fond of their neighbors, their family links were the most important to them.
As mothers of small children, Heather and Jenn made a pact. If anything should happen to either one of them, they vowed that the surviving sister would adopt the other’s children. Of course, they were both young and healthy, with no likelihood of trouble ahead, but they both felt more secure.
Heather knew of Jenn’s disappointments and frustrations in her marriage, but the word divorce hadn’t come up. Theirs was not a family where divorce was the easy answer. Jenn still believed that Bart would change—if only she could find what it took to make him happy.
WHEN HIS SONS WERE TODDLERS, Bart showed little interest in them, but as they grew just old enough to participate in peewee league athletics, he stepped in to be sure they would reflect well up on him. He and Jenn had entirely different parenting styles. He thought she was too easy on their boys, and she felt he demanded far too much of them. As young as they were, he wanted them to be stars and he shouted angrily at them when he felt they weren’t trying hard enough in school or Little League games. Jenn taught them they could do anything they wanted, and she gathered them to her with hugs and kisses while Bart glowered at her.
When Dalton was up to bat at a game, he couldn’t concentrate because every time he swung, Bart would yell, “Dalton get your hands up! Get your legs apart!”
Jenn stopped sitting with Bart at Dalton’s games.
Heather tended now to agree with Jenn’s suspicions that Bart was cheating on her. He did spend a lot of time talking to Dara on the phone, but he always said they were talking about things important to his dental clinic.
Dara kept turning up at the kids’ ball games, but there was an explanation for that, too. Her own boys played ball, although they were much older than Dalton and Dillon. It wasn’t that Bart was blatant about his interest in Dara or any other woman.
As time passed, Jenn couldn’t erase her uneasy feeling about Dara. If nothing else, it was the fact that Dara kept agreeing to come back and work for Bart from time to time when most of his other female employees couldn’t wait to quit.
Dara Prentice made no move to leave her husband, recalling that it was not a viable option for her. “And Bart never asked me to leave,” she said. “He seemed perfectly content with the way things were, so I guess I thought that maybe someday the time would be right.”
And Dara knew that if her husband found out, he would leave her. Bart wouldn’t want any scandal that might hurt his business, so he would undoubtedly refuse to hire her on a full-time basis. She would need a job to support her sons. Bart seemed to enjoy having two women in love with him, and so Dara continued to drift along with him, hoping for a future commitment.
There were occasional long periods when Jenn believed Bart had broken it off completely with the woman she sometimes called his “office wife.”
Jenn kept trying to be the perfect wife for him, the perfect mother for his children, and even tried to convince herself that Bart loved her more than any other woman because she was the one he had married. She believed him when he told her that he had stopped seeing any other woman.
Jenn had never known about Harriet Gray, who had been missing for a long time after vanishing in 1996 on the weekend after she and Bart got married. Or about Shelly Mansfield, and especially not about Dolly Hearn.
Harriet Gray never came home. As it turned out, she couldn’t. Eighteen months after she disappeared, a scuba diver discovered the hulk of a car at the bottom of Lake Tuscaloosa in Alabama. The car’s registration came back listed to Harriet Gray. Her body was floating inside the car, her hands duct-taped to the steering wheel. That obliterated even the slightest chance that she had committed suicide.
Harriet’s murder is still unsolved today.
JENN’S OCCASIONAL MUSING to Heather about how much a wife should know about her husband’s background was an indication that she sensed some darkness in Bart’s past. “He won’t look me in the eye,” Jenn told her sister. Still, she never tried to probe back through the years before she knew him; she had enough trouble trying to figure out the combination to the emotions that he kept locked away from her.
When Dillon was old enough to go to preschool, Jenn went back to work, teaching the classes at Sugar Hill Methodist Church. She enjoyed it, made a little money of her own, and she was able to keep up her chores at home and do things for Bart without any extra effort. Although they had hoped that things might get better, Jenn’s mother, sisters, and her father had to accept that her marriage was not happy. Almost from the beginning, Bart had seemed determined to destroy his wife’s self-confidence.
That hadn’t been easy to do because Jenn Barber Corbin had gone into her marriage as a woman who knew who she was: strong, popular, and talented. If she had a vulnerable area, it was about men. When her longtime teenage boyfriend had betrayed her, it came at a vulnerable stage in her life and left a lasting impression.
“Bart was still trying to make Jenn feel inferior,” Narda said. “He shouted at her, and called her names. She didn’t let on how much it hurt her, but we could tell it did. Heather knew more than I did—but she didn’t tell us. I think she was trying to protect Max and me.”
The Barbers invited Bart’s family for holidays, outings, and celebrations, and occasionally they accepted. But Bart’s father never came, not since Jenn’s wedding. By 1997, he had a whole new life with his younger woman and the son who wasn’t much older than Dalton and Dillon.
Connie Corbin and Bart’s brothers did join Jenn’s family from time to time, but the visits were a little strained. Narda and Connie had virtually no shared interests. They had nothing at all in common, except that their children were married to each other. Narda felt an invisible wall between herself and Bart’s mother, some transparent blockade that Connie hid her real feelings behind. Probably Connie felt the same way.
Brad Corbin, Bart’s twin, was quite removed, too—either shy or out of his element. But their younger brother, Bobby, was friendly. “Bobby seemed to have a good heart,” Narda said. “It was hard to read the others in Bart’s family.”
Many families—probably the majority—fail to mesh completely when their children marry. And Bart’s and Jenn’s families were no different. Jenn was always the one who tried to bring them together, and went out of her way to visit Bart’s relatives. Jenn loved to throw parties and oversee family celebrations, and she did that with Bart’s family as well as with her own. She and Bart appeared smiling and united at Bobby’s wedding to Suzanne. And Jenn loved Bobby’s children—Zachary and Riley—who were Dalton and Dillon’s first cousins and almost the same age. Jenn got along fine with her mother-in-law and with both Brad and Bobby and their wives.
Max Barber made it a point to attend Dalton’s and Dillon’s ball games as often as he could. Everyone had noted that Bart was “different, somehow” after the little boys were born. He seemed to love his sons, but he had such impossibly high expectations for children so young. It got worse as the boys grew older. On one occasion, Max was a witness when Dalton struck out in a Little League baseball game, and Bart was furious. As he often did, he screamed at Dalton, who was then only about six, calling him a “loser” and “an idiot.”
Max was disturbed enough by Bart’s behavior that he stepped between Bart and Dalton in an attempt to stop the tirade against his grandson. He knew he was stretching a grandfather’s duties, but he couldn’t stand seeing Dalton’s shoulders slump as he fought back tears. Yet Max also excused Bart. He thought that this was the way Bart and his brothers had been raised. Maybe Bar
t just didn’t know any better. For Bart, winning was the most important goal in sports—and in life.
Bart demanded as much of himself. The once-overweight teenager worked out to hone his body to top condition. He rode and raced mountain bikes. Fishing was about the only leisure activity Bart was involved in that didn’t require a lot of physical effort. He was a desultory golfer, although he recognized that that was a sport almost required of a young dentist on his way up. So he played golf and pretended to enjoy it.
Bart urged Dalton to ride bikes with him, but his oldest son didn’t match up to Bart’s expectations there, either, and he whined when his father insisted he go.
A SEA CHANGE was coming over Jenn. She had been able to cope with Bart when he picked at her and criticized her. But she would not allow him to undercut the boys’ confidence. At six, Dalton had begun to beg not to go places with his father. Would Dillon be far behind?
By Christmas 2003, Jenn and Bart were still making stabs at saving their marriage, but she couldn’t hide the sadness she felt. She had long since accepted that she had not married her “soulmate.” She and Bart had had such a romantic trip to Italy once. Now, he treated her and their sons to a Caribbean cruise and Max and Narda joined them. But Jenn was only acting, pretending to be having a good time. All the smiling photographs they took served only to mock her. The expensive trip didn’t make up for the isolation she felt in her marriage. Worse, she knew the cruise was something he could brag about to prove how successful he was.
Bart’s practice had grown slowly, but he got into financial trouble. He tried gimmicks to draw patients in, even giving away coupons that offered “Elite Care, without an Elite Price!” And, after moving his practice to Hamilton Mill, Bart made sure locals knew he had long been an active supporter of youth athletic teams. Although he was disappointed with what he considered his own sons’ lack of dedication to sports, he sponsored the 2002 Dacula Falcons’ twelve-year-olds’ football team. The next year, he was the assistant coach of the Indians’ T-ball team, and sponsored the Dacula/Mill Creek eleven-year-olds’ football team. In 2004 he sponsored the T-ball “Reds” team at Bogan Park and the Mill Creek eighth-grade football team. Bart liked baseball, and it was good for business, too.