Fancy Pants (27 page)
"Of course I'm mad. As a matter of fact, I just told Bobby Fritchie I'd
go out with him tonight for surf and turf instead of waiting around for
you." She pulled her purse off her shoulder and let it dangle from her
fingers. "Did you find out anything about that little British girl?"
"Nobody's seen her. I don't think she's still in Wynette. Miss Sybil
gave her the money I left, so she should be on her way back to London
by now."
Holly Grace could see he was still worried. "I think you care more
about her than you're letting on. Although to tell you the truth—other
than the fact that she's knockout gorgeous—I don't see exactly why."
"She's different, is all. I'll tell you one thing. I never in all my
life got involved with a woman so different from me. Opposites may
attract in the beginning, but they don't stick together too well."
She looked at him, a brief sadness in her eyes. "Sometimes people who
are the same don't do too good a job of it, either."
He walked over to her, moving in that slow, sexy way that used to melt
her bones. He pulled her into his arms to dance, humming "You've Lost
That Lovin' Feelin'" into her ear. Even with improvised music, their
bodies moved together perfectly, as if they'd been dancing with each
other for a million years. "Damn, you're tall when you wear those
shoes," he complained.
"Kinda makes you nervous, doesn't it? Having to look at me straight on."
"If Bobby walks in here and sees you wearing those high heels on his
new basketball floor, you're on
your own."
"It's still hard for me to think of Bobby Fritchie as Wynette's
basketball coach. I remember hanging around the office door
while the two of you served morning detention."
"You're a liar, Holly Grace Beaudine. I never served a morning
detention in my life. I used to take swats instead."
"You did, too, and you know it. Miss Sybil raised so much hell every
time any of the teachers gave you swats that they got tired of tangling
with her."
"You remember it your way, and I'll remember it mine." Dallie rested
his cheek against hers. "Seeing you here reminds me of that homecoming
dance. I don't think I ever sweat so much in my life. All the time we
were dancing, I kept having to put more space between us because of the
effect you were having on me. All I could think about was getting you
alone in that El Dorado I'd borrowed, except I knew that even after I
had you alone, I couldn't touch you because of the way we'd talked.
Most miserable night I ever spent in my life."
"As I remember, your miserable nights didn't last too long. I must have
been the easiest girl in the county. Damn, I got so I couldn't think
about anything except having sex with you. I needed to wash the feel of
Billy T off me so bad I was willing to go to hell for it. . . ."
Holly Grace lay back on the narrow bed in Dallie's shabby room, her
eyes pressed shut as he pushed his finger up inside her. He groaned and
rubbed himself against her thigh. The denim of his jeans felt rough
against the bare skin of her leg. Her panties lay on the linoleum floor
next to the bed along with her shoes, but other than that she was still
more or less dressed—white blouse unbuttoned to the waist, bra
unfastened and pushed to the side, wool skirt modestly covering
Dallie's hand while it explored between her legs.
"Please . . ." she whispered. She arched against his palm. His
breathing sounded heavy and strangled in her ear, his hips moved
rhythmically against her thigh. She didn't think she could stand it any
longer. Over the past two months, their petting sessions had grown
heavier and heavier until they could think of nothing else. But still
they held back— Holly Grace because she didn't want him to think she
was fast, Dallie because he didn't want her to think he was like Billy
T.
Suddenly she crumpled her hand into a fist and hit him behind the
shoulder. He jerked away, his lips wet and swollen from kissing her,
his chin red. "Why'd you do that?"
"Because I can't stand this anymore!" she exclaimed. "I want to do it!
I know it's wrong. I know I shouldn't let you, but I just can't stand
it anymore. I feel like I'm on fire." She tried to make him understand.
"All those months, Billy T made me do it. All those months he hurt me.
Don't I have the right, just once, to choose for myself?"
Dallie looked at her for a long time to make sure she was serious. "I
don't want you to think— I love you, Holly Grace. I love you more than
I ever loved anybody in my entire life. I'll still love you even if you
say no."
Sitting up, she pulled off her blouse and slipped her bra straps down
over her shoulders. "I'm tired of saying no."
Even though they had touched each other everywhere, they'd made it a
rule to keep most of their clothes on, so it was the first time he'd
seen her bare from the waist up. He looked at her with awe and then
reached out and stroked a gentle finger down over her breast. "You're
so beautiful, baby," he said, his voice choked.
A surge of wonder shot through her at the emotion in his expression and
she found that she wanted to give everything she had to this boy who
treated her with so much tenderness. She leaned forward, thrust her
thumbs into the tops of her knee socks, and stripped them off. Then she
unfastened the waistband of her skirt, lifting up her hips to slip it
down. He pulled off his T-shirt and his jeans, then slid down his
briefs. She drank in the beauty of his thin young body as he lay down
beside her and tenderly wound his fingers through her hair. She lifted
her head off the crumpled pillow to kiss him and slid her tongue into
his mouth. He groaned and accepted it. Their kisses grew deeper until
they were moaning and sucking on each other's lips and tongues, their
long legs twisting together, their blond hair dampened with sweat.
"I don't want you to get pregnant," he whispered into her mouth. "I'll
just—I'll just put it in a little bit."
But of course he didn't, and it was the best thing she'd ever felt. She
uttered a low moan deep in her throat as she came, and he quickly
followed, shuddering in her arms as if he'd been shot through with a
bullet. The whole thing was over in less
than a minute.
By graduation day they were using rubbers, but by that time, she was
already pregnant and he refused to help her find the money for an
abortion. "Abortion is wrong when two people love each other," he
shouted, pointing his finger at her. And then his voice had softened.
"I know we planned to wait until I graduated from A&M, but we'll
get married now. Except for Skeet, you're the only good thing that's
ever happened to me in my life."
"I can't have a baby now," she cried. "I'm seventeen! I'm going to San
Antonio to get a job. I want to make something of myself. Having a baby
now will ruin my whole life."
"How can you say that? Don't you love me, Holly Grace?"
"Of course I do. But loving's not always enough."
As she saw the agony in his eyes, that familiar helpless feeling closed
around her. It stayed with her right through the wedding in Pastor
Leary's study.
Dallie quit humming in the middle of the chorus to "Good Vibrations"
and came to a stop on the free-throw line. "Did you really tell Bobby
Fritchie you'd go out with him tonight?"
Holly Grace had been performing an intricate harmony, and she continued
singing for a few measures without him. "Not exactly. But I thought
about it. I get so aggravated when you're late."
Dallie let her go and gave her a long look. "If you really want a
divorce, you know I'll go along with it."
"I know." She walked over to the bleachers and sat down, stretching out
her legs in front of her and putting a small scratch in Coach
Fritchie's new varnish with the heel of her shoe. "Since I don't have
any plans to get married again, I'm happy with things just like they
are."
Dallie smiled and walked forward along the center court line to sit on
the bleachers beside her. "I hope New York City works out for you,
baby. I really do. You know I want to see you happy about more
than I
want anything in the world."
"I know you do. Same goes for me."
She began to talk about Winona and Ed, about Miss Sybil and the other
things they usually discussed whenever they were together in Wynette.
He only listened with half his mind. The other half was remembering two
teenagers with troubled pasts, a baby, and no money. Now he realized
that they hadn't had a chance, but they had loved each other, and they
had put up a good fight. . . .
Skeet took a construction job in Austin to help out as much as he
could, but it wasn't union work so it didn't pay too well. Dallie
worked for a roofer when he wasn't in class or trying to pick up some
extra cash on the golf course. They had to send Winona money, and there
was never enough.
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."
"As 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.
go out with him tonight for surf and turf instead of waiting around for
you." She pulled her purse off her shoulder and let it dangle from her
fingers. "Did you find out anything about that little British girl?"
"Nobody's seen her. I don't think she's still in Wynette. Miss Sybil
gave her the money I left, so she should be on her way back to London
by now."
Holly Grace could see he was still worried. "I think you care more
about her than you're letting on. Although to tell you the truth—other
than the fact that she's knockout gorgeous—I don't see exactly why."
"She's different, is all. I'll tell you one thing. I never in all my
life got involved with a woman so different from me. Opposites may
attract in the beginning, but they don't stick together too well."
She looked at him, a brief sadness in her eyes. "Sometimes people who
are the same don't do too good a job of it, either."
He walked over to her, moving in that slow, sexy way that used to melt
her bones. He pulled her into his arms to dance, humming "You've Lost
That Lovin' Feelin'" into her ear. Even with improvised music, their
bodies moved together perfectly, as if they'd been dancing with each
other for a million years. "Damn, you're tall when you wear those
shoes," he complained.
"Kinda makes you nervous, doesn't it? Having to look at me straight on."
"If Bobby walks in here and sees you wearing those high heels on his
new basketball floor, you're on
your own."
"It's still hard for me to think of Bobby Fritchie as Wynette's
basketball coach. I remember hanging around the office door
while the two of you served morning detention."
"You're a liar, Holly Grace Beaudine. I never served a morning
detention in my life. I used to take swats instead."
"You did, too, and you know it. Miss Sybil raised so much hell every
time any of the teachers gave you swats that they got tired of tangling
with her."
"You remember it your way, and I'll remember it mine." Dallie rested
his cheek against hers. "Seeing you here reminds me of that homecoming
dance. I don't think I ever sweat so much in my life. All the time we
were dancing, I kept having to put more space between us because of the
effect you were having on me. All I could think about was getting you
alone in that El Dorado I'd borrowed, except I knew that even after I
had you alone, I couldn't touch you because of the way we'd talked.
Most miserable night I ever spent in my life."
"As I remember, your miserable nights didn't last too long. I must have
been the easiest girl in the county. Damn, I got so I couldn't think
about anything except having sex with you. I needed to wash the feel of
Billy T off me so bad I was willing to go to hell for it. . . ."
Holly Grace lay back on the narrow bed in Dallie's shabby room, her
eyes pressed shut as he pushed his finger up inside her. He groaned and
rubbed himself against her thigh. The denim of his jeans felt rough
against the bare skin of her leg. Her panties lay on the linoleum floor
next to the bed along with her shoes, but other than that she was still
more or less dressed—white blouse unbuttoned to the waist, bra
unfastened and pushed to the side, wool skirt modestly covering
Dallie's hand while it explored between her legs.
"Please . . ." she whispered. She arched against his palm. His
breathing sounded heavy and strangled in her ear, his hips moved
rhythmically against her thigh. She didn't think she could stand it any
longer. Over the past two months, their petting sessions had grown
heavier and heavier until they could think of nothing else. But still
they held back— Holly Grace because she didn't want him to think she
was fast, Dallie because he didn't want her to think he was like Billy
T.
Suddenly she crumpled her hand into a fist and hit him behind the
shoulder. He jerked away, his lips wet and swollen from kissing her,
his chin red. "Why'd you do that?"
"Because I can't stand this anymore!" she exclaimed. "I want to do it!
I know it's wrong. I know I shouldn't let you, but I just can't stand
it anymore. I feel like I'm on fire." She tried to make him understand.
"All those months, Billy T made me do it. All those months he hurt me.
Don't I have the right, just once, to choose for myself?"
Dallie looked at her for a long time to make sure she was serious. "I
don't want you to think— I love you, Holly Grace. I love you more than
I ever loved anybody in my entire life. I'll still love you even if you
say no."
Sitting up, she pulled off her blouse and slipped her bra straps down
over her shoulders. "I'm tired of saying no."
Even though they had touched each other everywhere, they'd made it a
rule to keep most of their clothes on, so it was the first time he'd
seen her bare from the waist up. He looked at her with awe and then
reached out and stroked a gentle finger down over her breast. "You're
so beautiful, baby," he said, his voice choked.
A surge of wonder shot through her at the emotion in his expression and
she found that she wanted to give everything she had to this boy who
treated her with so much tenderness. She leaned forward, thrust her
thumbs into the tops of her knee socks, and stripped them off. Then she
unfastened the waistband of her skirt, lifting up her hips to slip it
down. He pulled off his T-shirt and his jeans, then slid down his
briefs. She drank in the beauty of his thin young body as he lay down
beside her and tenderly wound his fingers through her hair. She lifted
her head off the crumpled pillow to kiss him and slid her tongue into
his mouth. He groaned and accepted it. Their kisses grew deeper until
they were moaning and sucking on each other's lips and tongues, their
long legs twisting together, their blond hair dampened with sweat.
"I don't want you to get pregnant," he whispered into her mouth. "I'll
just—I'll just put it in a little bit."
But of course he didn't, and it was the best thing she'd ever felt. She
uttered a low moan deep in her throat as she came, and he quickly
followed, shuddering in her arms as if he'd been shot through with a
bullet. The whole thing was over in less
than a minute.
By graduation day they were using rubbers, but by that time, she was
already pregnant and he refused to help her find the money for an
abortion. "Abortion is wrong when two people love each other," he
shouted, pointing his finger at her. And then his voice had softened.
"I know we planned to wait until I graduated from A&M, but we'll
get married now. Except for Skeet, you're the only good thing that's
ever happened to me in my life."
"I can't have a baby now," she cried. "I'm seventeen! I'm going to San
Antonio to get a job. I want to make something of myself. Having a baby
now will ruin my whole life."
"How can you say that? Don't you love me, Holly Grace?"
"Of course I do. But loving's not always enough."
As she saw the agony in his eyes, that familiar helpless feeling closed
around her. It stayed with her right through the wedding in Pastor
Leary's study.
Dallie quit humming in the middle of the chorus to "Good Vibrations"
and came to a stop on the free-throw line. "Did you really tell Bobby
Fritchie you'd go out with him tonight?"
Holly Grace had been performing an intricate harmony, and she continued
singing for a few measures without him. "Not exactly. But I thought
about it. I get so aggravated when you're late."
Dallie let her go and gave her a long look. "If you really want a
divorce, you know I'll go along with it."
"I know." She walked over to the bleachers and sat down, stretching out
her legs in front of her and putting a small scratch in Coach
Fritchie's new varnish with the heel of her shoe. "Since I don't have
any plans to get married again, I'm happy with things just like they
are."
Dallie smiled and walked forward along the center court line to sit on
the bleachers beside her. "I hope New York City works out for you,
baby. I really do. You know I want to see you happy about more
than I
want anything in the world."
"I know you do. Same goes for me."
She began to talk about Winona and Ed, about Miss Sybil and the other
things they usually discussed whenever they were together in Wynette.
He only listened with half his mind. The other half was remembering two
teenagers with troubled pasts, a baby, and no money. Now he realized
that they hadn't had a chance, but they had loved each other, and they
had put up a good fight. . . .
Skeet took a construction job in Austin to help out as much as he
could, but it wasn't union work so it didn't pay too well. Dallie
worked for a roofer when he wasn't in class or trying to pick up some
extra cash on the golf course. They had to send Winona money, and there
was never enough.
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."
"As 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.
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