From that moment forward, Dallas never shied away from performing. Over the next few months, she’d jump onstage whenever the opportunity presented itself, never needing my permission. One night, she belted out “God Bless America” with such conviction that it gave me chills, especially when she hit those big notes of “My home … sweet … home!” Completely uninhibited and confident, she’d always bow to the audience before walking offstage. Her natural instincts confirmed what my heart already knew—showbiz was in her future.
Those were the good days. We even handled the odd hiccups of life on the road without too much fuss, though none of us were prepared to have our fiddle player whisked away from us at the Canadian border for owing child support back in Oklahoma. Thankfully, he was able to go home, take care of business, and fly back without missing a show. Night after night, we played our hearts out, hoping against hope for a big break.
About six months into the tour, near the end of summer, we got what we asked for, though it was more literal in meaning. Instead of arcing to stardom, we started breaking apart. Late one night, I went out to the tour bus between sets to check on Dallas, but when I knocked on the door, no one answered. “Pat? You in there?” I cried. I tried again, but there was no answer. The silence made me panic. I ran back into the club and grabbed Rick.
“You gotta help me,” I pleaded.
“I got you,” he replied, motioning for me to follow him. Once we got to the bus, he fished out his key and unlocked the door. Pushing Rick aside, I raced down the aisle. “Dallas,” I cried, spying her on a bed in the back of the bus, where she was playing with her toys.
“Mama!” she said, stretching out her arms toward me.
“Where’s Daddy?” I asked. She stuck out her finger and pointed to another bunk. There was Pat, flat on his back and snoring with the stench of whiskey rising like mist around him.
“Patrick, wake up!” I screamed. “You’re supposed to be watching Dallas.”
“Huh?” he mumbled before rolling over and closing his eyes.
“Never mind,” I hissed. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
Rick prodded me to pick up Dallas, and we left the bus. Then he headed straight toward a cute waitress and sweet-talked her into watching Dallas until the show was over. I put on a smile and sang like always, but I was seething inside. From that moment forward, I knew I couldn’t trust Pat to be responsible for our child. But until we could figure out a plan B, he was in charge of Dallas while I went onstage. All I could do was hope that nothing terrible would happen.
Things got ugly pretty fast. No more nice clubs, no more adoring fans. And no one seemed to notice or care, except for me. We plugged along from one godforsaken town to the next, and night after night, the guys in the band partied after the closing song like we’d just been nominated for a Grammy. While everyone else downed shots of whiskey and lit up joints, I retreated to take care of Dallas. My mood quickly soured and so did Pat’s. It seemed every detail of the tour that went awry became my fault. Pat cursed and shouted at me like I was the most incompetent human being to walk the face of the earth. The rest of the band, except for Rick, seemed to agree, which made arguing pointless.
By the time we pulled into a band house in South Dakota, my mood was as bleak as the landscape. My simmering discontent spilled into a heated argument after the show, which pushed Pat to storm off with two other band members. I looked at Dallas sleeping peacefully back in the bedroom, and my world snapped in two. This is no life for my baby, and it’s no life for me, either. It was all so clear: Turning my back on my dream would be tough, but staying would be toxic. I needed to go.
But I couldn’t move. No matter how hard I tried, my feet, which felt like they were encased in concrete, wouldn’t budge. As panic rushed in, my body started shaking. Every breath ushered in a wave of violent tremors.
“Rick,” I shouted. “Help me!”
He took one look and knew something was terribly wrong. Racing through the house, he ripped a blanket off one of the beds. “Put this around you,” he insisted. But I wasn’t cold. “Breathe,” he insisted. “Can you do that for me?” I couldn’t. As my shivering continued, he whisked me into the kitchen and put me on a chair in front of the oven.
“Look at me,” he said, taking my face in his hands. “Now breathe in and breathe out.”
I focused on his commands until the shaking slowed. “D-d-do I ne-e-e-d to go-o to the hos-pi-tal?” I stuttered.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But you need to listen to what I’m saying.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “Look, I want this job as much as you do, but I don’t know if this is the best thing for you. The tour started off good, but now it’s taking too much of a toll on you. Everyone can see it.”
“I’m scared all the time,” I confessed. “And Pat’s drinking too much and getting meaner.”
“End the tour and get him some help,” he suggested.
But I didn’t want to be the reason for the guys losing their jobs. They had families to support, too. And that’s when I started praying in earnest. Surely God could figure out a solution. After ignoring him for years, I hoped he was listening.
My answer came in New Mexico, shortly after landing in a small desert town where we were scheduled to play in another bleak bar that was next to a seedy motel. It was beastly hot, and when I looked at our raunchy, mosquito-infested room that didn’t have working air-conditioning, I knew I had to speak up. “Excuse me, sir,” I said to the hotel owner, “our air-conditioning isn’t working.” His blank expression never changed. Just as I was about to repeat what I said, he cocked his head and fired back, “What do you want me to do about it?” When I asked if there was another room available, he walked away bellowing, “It was good enough for the last band, so it’s good enough for YOU.”
I spied Rick toward the back of the venue and hoped he’d have a solution. Walking to him with Dallas in my arms, I noticed a terrible smell and wondered what it was.
“Hey, Rick!” I yelled, “I—”
I never finished my sentence. The moment my shoe landed in something gooey, I started to slide forward. With one arm around Dallas, the other seesawed up and down as I lurched and wobbled trying to regain my balance. I did everything possible not to land in the sea of vomit surrounding me. Just as I started gagging from the smell, Dallas started wailing, “I’m hungry.” And that was it—the moment when every broken promise, every dead end, and every frazzled hope welled up inside of me and exploded. “I’m done,” I shouted. “I’m going home!”
“But we can’t just take off; we have to play tonight,” the guys sang in chorus.
“You can, but I’m not,” I said, catching a glint of amusement in Rick’s eyes.
“I’m going with you,” Rick hollered, giving me the boost I needed.
With Rick in my court, the band followed. We hauled our belongings out of the hotel and threw everything onto the bus, including Pat, who once again was passed out from too much whiskey. “Let’s get out of here,” I cheered, urging Harold to get behind the wheel. One by one, heads turned as the manager started chasing the bus, but I told everyone to look away. “That guy should have given us a box fan when I asked,” I snorted.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“He was kind and compassionate—until he drank. Then he became a completely different person. That’s when the anger would come out—an anger that was violent and scary.”
My journey through hell wasn’t over. Once again we were back in New Mexico, living in the one-room cottage behind Pat’s parents’ house. Every day I prayed for help. Staying together still seemed important, though I had little understanding that the darkness consuming our lives was no match for prayer alone. Each day was like another spin of the wheel in Vegas. On Monday, we’d place our luck on getting sober and finding jobs in New Mexico, only to decide by Tuesday that our best solution would be to down a six-pack and head back to Texas. We never did hit the jackpot. The only goal we stuck to was staying m
arried. I kept telling myself that two adults were stronger than one.
“Pat, please get some help,” I begged often, but he always refused. One night he finally agreed to attend an AA meeting but insisted I come along. Since this was a new experience for both of us, we shuffled into the room trying not to look at anyone. Pat grabbed a chair closest to the exit and stared at the floor. Halfway through the session, he stood up and walked out. Curious, I followed, only to watch him head to the car and pull out a bottle of whiskey. By the time I pulled into our driveway, he was passed out.
Surely God can turn our situation around, I told myself. Drinking was the enemy, not my husband. That is until one evening in September.
It had been a fun day with my grandparents, who had driven ten hours to visit us, but as I stood alone in the driveway and watched them leave, weariness and homesickness blew through me like a cold wind. By the time I returned to the cottage, I was ready to pick a fight. Thankfully, Dallas had decided to join Pat’s parents, who were headed to the nearby military commissary to buy food, because the moment I looked at Pat, anger poured out.
“Well,” I snapped, “I hope your mom gets enough groceries for us, too, because there’s no money in our account.” Just for emphasis I pointed to our empty pantry shelves and slammed the doors shut.
“Well, since you walked off the job, you can’t blame it all on me,” Pat bit back.
“And if you didn’t drink all the time, you might actually get a job,” I screamed.
Then I saw it. Pat’s eyes darkened and his body stiffened. Then my skin began to crawl. Before I could move, Pat picked me up and threw me. Rail thin from not eating, I launched into the air like a rocket. My God, what’s happening? As I crashed onto the floor, my face smashed against a leg of the sofa, causing what felt like tiny fractures to ripple along my jawbone. Pain seared through my body. God, please make him stop! I jumped up and started to run. But as I reached for the screen door, I could feel Pat’s breath on my neck. His rage shook the air.
“You’re not getting away from me this time,” he snarled.
I guessed he was about to body slam the heavy wooden door to keep me from leaving, so I pulled back but it wasn’t in time. My left hand, which got stuck in the door, sliced open like a piece of fruit, causing my pinkie and ring fingers, just above the second knuckles, to rip away and fall to the floor.
“You cut off my fingers! You cut off my fingers!” I screamed over and over as blood spurted in every direction. My face, the floor, and even the walls were splattered in red.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Pat cried, stooping to pick up my fingers and running for the freezer.
A strange calm came over me as I realized that my hand didn’t hurt. The pain would come later, but at that moment, I was in shock. I raised my injured hand above my heart and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. Then I walked toward the phone to call an ambulance, all the while thinking: How can I dial without letting go of the pressure?
“Get in the car,” Pat yelled. “I’m driving you to the hospital.”
At the emergency-room entrance, Pat jumped out of the car and started running like a madman, his arms flailing in every direction. He went charging toward a young nurse who was standing outside enjoying a smoke. “She got her fingers cut off! Help! Help us!” he wailed. The nurse’s eyes went wide and her jaw dropped, causing the cigarette in her mouth to tumble to the ground. She looked as panicked as Pat did. And that fast, the two of them ran inside the hospital, leaving me behind. Shock must have been setting in, because I actually started laughing. “Think you forgot something,” I muttered into the night air.
When Pat returned, he eased me into a wheelchair, and we raced down the hallway. “An accident,” he said to every nurse we passed. “She had a terrible accident.” By the time we reached the X-ray room, Pat was apologetic. “I never meant for this to happen,” he pleaded, crouched by my side. “If you can forgive me, I swear on my life that I’ll never let anything happen like this again.”
I stared at him like he was a stranger.
* * *
My hand was throbbing so badly that I never even mentioned the pain in my jaw. I wouldn’t know about the hairline fractures I had sustained until years later when a dentist, after taking X-rays, asked, “When did you break your jaw?” That evening in the hospital, everyone was focused on my fingers. As they wheeled me toward surgery, I was caught off guard when two policemen introduced themselves. Full of questions, they obviously had waited until Pat wasn’t around. I listened but hesitated to speak.
“It was an accident,” I finally said, forcing myself to look them in the eyes. “The wind caught the heavy door and smashed my hand.” Skeptical, they asked me again. “That’s how it happened,” I stated. Too alone, too scared, and too confused, I refused to change my story or elaborate on the violent attack. If I didn’t believe in second chances, what else was there?
In that moment—when I refused to acknowledge my husband’s actions, when I excused his behavior, and when I lied for him—my life took a dangerous turn. No longer just a woman in a bad marriage, now I was also a victim—someone who had given away her voice and her power to the very man who had harmed her. Sadly, I was not alone. I’d eventually learn from agencies like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence that every nine seconds in the US a woman is assaulted or beaten and one in three women are physically abused by an intimate partner. Sadly, the violence often happens in the very place where women should feel safe—at home. And many, like me, never report the incident.
Once the surgeon started putting my hand back together, all the chaos and turmoil of the past few years replayed in my head like a movie in slow motion. What had I gotten myself into? Where had I gone wrong? Why couldn’t I make it better? But the one question that really haunted me was: How could I keep this secret from my family? There was no way I wanted to tell them that my husband had hurt me. That would be too humiliating and dangerous, as my brothers might retaliate and hurt Pat. To escape my thoughts, I stared at the drab walls around me as the doctor sewed me back together. First, he reattached my pinkie finger, a tedious process that required fusing all of the bones together. Then he moved on to my other finger, but quickly stopped. “Nothing I can do about that one,” he muttered. “There’s too much damage.”
And just like that, as though he was removing a pile of dust, the doctor threw the remains of my finger into the trash. I didn’t know what was worse—the throbbing pain from the tourniquet squeezing my arm; the disappointment that my one finger would never look normal; or the realization that a small, damaged part of me was discarded like garbage. As I stared at my hand, I wondered how significant it was that my missing piece of flesh was once the resting spot for my perfect wedding ring.
CHAPTER NINE
“Life had slapped me in the face, and my new reality was simply trying to survive.”
The next morning, Pat and I hung a pair of forest green curtains in the kitchen to replace the blood-spattered yellow ones. “A reminder of new beginnings,” he declared.
But as fall descended on us, I wondered if we, too, were entering a season of slow death rather than rebirth. Life had slapped me in the face, and my new reality was simply trying to survive as a constant stream of nervousness trembled beneath my skin. I wanted to trust Pat, but I couldn’t. He must have sensed my unease, because he made every effort to sprinkle kindness on Dallas and me.
Unless you’ve lived with an addict, there’s no way to comprehend how charming and sincere Pat could be when he was sober and worrying that I might leave. He wasn’t a monster. Sometimes he’d smile and pat me on the shoulder when I seemed depressed, or he’d make repairs on the house the moment I asked. He even splurged on new toys for Dallas on his way home from work. Small overtures, but I knew they were his way of showing me that he was honoring his promise to never hurt me again. Each act of tenderness was a lifeline. I held on as tightly as I could, because about two months after my night in the eme
rgency room, I learned I was pregnant again.
It’s easy to look back and wonder why I didn’t leave, but another pregnancy made my life seem unmanageable. How would I survive without a husband or an income? In New Mexico, at least I had the support of Pat’s parents. No one in my family even knew about our problems. I still worried that if I admitted my life wasn’t perfect, no one would love me. The isolation I had created wasn’t good for me, but I didn’t know how to reach out for help. If I unraveled the myth of our supposed happy existence, what would happen then? Lying, manipulating, and keeping secrets seemed safer. The only positive step I took was to start eating again because I didn’t want to harm my baby.
* * *
Months later, I walked into the kitchen one morning and all I could see was a mass of curly, dark hair. “Why, Ricky Mitchell,” I exclaimed. “What a pleasant surprise!” I was overjoyed to see someone from Texas, especially since he was the brother of Melody Mitchell, one of my closest friends. “Your husband’s business is doing so well that he asked me to lend a hand,” Ricky explained. Just looking at him made me feel less homesick. Thankfully, Ricky’s arrival reset something in my marriage, because for a long stretch of time, Pat’s behavior improved.
Even though my husband’s work was steady, we needed extra money with another baby on the way, so I sang on the weekends and took a temporary secretarial job at the largest Ford dealership in Albuquerque. It made me feel like I was taking some control over my circumstances, and it gave me lots of time to think about baby names. I was sure that I was having a boy, so I rolled a list of possibilities across my tongue. Austin? Brooklyn? Fort Worth? I needed a name that would sound cute with Dallas’s name. Ultimately, I ditched the idea of using another city name and settled on Dylan. It sounded perfect.
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