Fancy Pants

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  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.

  After she left, he spent several months so drunk that he couldn't play golf, even though he was supposed to be getting ready for qualifying school for the pro tour. Skeet eventually called Holly Grace, and she came to see Dallie. “I'm happy for the first time in a long time,” she told him. “Why can't you be happy, too?”

  It had taken years for them to learn to love each other in a new way. At first they had tumbled back into bed together, only to find themselves caught up in old arguments. Occasionally they had tried to live with each other for a few months, but they wanted different things from life and it never worked out. The first time he saw her with another man, Dallie wanted to kill him. But a cute little secretary had caught his eye, so he kept his fists to himself.

  Over the years they talked about divorce, but neither of them did anything about it. Skeet meant everything in the world to Dallie. Holly Grace loved Winona with all her heart. But the two of them together—Dallie and Holly Grace—they were each other's real family, and people with childhoods as troubled as theirs didn't give up family easily.

  Tempest-Tossed

  Chapter

  19

  The building was a squat white rectangle of concrete with four dusty cars parked at the side next to a trash dumpster. A padlocked shack stood behind the dumpster, and fifty yards beyond that was the thin metal finger of the radio antenna that Francesca had been walking toward for nearly two hours. As Beast went off to explore, Francesca wearily climbed the two steps to the front door. Its glass surface was nearly opaque with dust and the smear of countless fingerprints. Decals advertising the Sulphur City Chamber of Commerce, the United Way, and various broadcasting associations covered much of the left side of the door, while the center held the gold call letters KDSC. The bottom half of the C was missing, so it might have been a G, but Francesca knew it wasn't because she had seen the C on the mailbox at the end of the lane when she turned in.

  Although she could have positioned herself in front of the door to study her reflection, she didn't bother. Instead, she rubbed the back of her hand over her forehead, pushing aside the damp strands of hair that had stuck there, and brushed off her jeans as best she could. She couldn't do anything about the bloody scrapes on her arms, so she ignored them. Her earlier euphoria had faded, leaving exhaustion and a terrible apprehension.

  Pushing open the front door, she found herself in a reception area overstuffed with six cluttered desks, nearly as many clocks, an assortment of bulletin boards, calendars, posters, and cartoons fixed to the walls with curling yellowed tape. A brown and gold striped Danish modern couch sat to her left, the center cushion concave from too much. use. The room contained only one window, a large one that looked into a studio where an announcer wearing a headset sat in front of a microphone. His voice was piped into the office through a wall speaker and the volume was turned low.

  A chubby red-haired chipmunk of a woman looked up at Francesca from the room's only occupied desk. “Can I help you?”

  Francesca cleared her throat, her gaze traveling from the swaying gold crosses hanging from the woman's ears down over her polyester blouse, and then on to the black telephone sitting by her wrist. One call to Wynette and her immediate problems would be over. She would have food, a change of clothes, and a roof over her head. But the idea of running to Dallie for help had lost its old appeal. Despite her exhaustion and fear, something inside her had been unalterably changed back on that deserted dirt road.
She was sick of being a pretty ornament getting blown away by every ill wind that swept in her direction. For better or for worse, she was going to take control of her own life.

  “I wonder if I might speak with the person in charge,” she said to the chipmunk. Francesca spoke carefully, trying her best to sound competent and professional, instead of like someone with a dirty face and dusty, sandaled feet who didn't have a dime in her pocket.

  The combination of Francesca's bedraggled appearance and her upper-class British accent obviously interested the woman. “I'm Katie Cathcart, the office manager. Could you tell me what this is about?”

  Could an office manager help her? Francesca had no idea, but decided she would be better off with the man at the top. She kept her tone friendly, but firm. “It's rather personal.”

  The woman hesitated, then got up and went into the office behind her. She reappeared a moment later. “As long as you don't take too long, Miss Padgett'll see you. She's our station manager.”

  Francesca's nervousness took a quantum leap. Why did the station manager have to be a woman? At least with a man, she would have stood half a chance. And then she reminded herself that this was an opportunity for a fresh beginning—a new Francesca, one who wasn't going to try to slide through life using the tired old tricks of her former self. Straightening her shoulders, she walked into the station manager's office.

  A gold metal nameplate on the desk announced the presence of CLARE PADGETT, an elegant name for an inelegant woman. In her early forties, she had a masculine, square-jawed face, softened only by the remains of a dab of red lipstick. Her graying brown hair was medium-length and blunt-cut. It looked as though it received nothing more than shampooing by way of attention. She held a cigarette like a man, pushed into the crook between the index and middle finger of her right hand, and when she lifted the cigarette to her mouth she didn't so much inhale the smoke as swallow it.

  “What is it?” Clare asked abruptly. She spoke in a professional broadcaster's voice, rich and resonant, but without the slightest trace of friendliness. From the wall speaker behind the desk came the faint sound of the announcer reading a local news report.

  Even though she hadn't been offered it, Francesca took the room's single straight-backed chair, deciding in an instant that Clare Padgett didn't look like the sort of person who would respect anyone she could step all over. As she gave her name, she positioned herself on the edge of the seat. “I'm sorry to appear without an appointment, but I wanted to inquire about a possible job.” Her voice sounded tentative instead of assertive. What had happened to all that arrogance she used to carry around with her like a cloud of perfume?

  After a brief inspection of Francesca's appearance, Clare Padgett returned her attention to her paperwork. “I don't have any jobs.”

  It was nothing more than Francesca had expected, but she still felt as if she'd had the wind knocked out of her. She thought of that dusty ribbon of road stretching to the rim of the Texas horizon. Her tongue felt dry and swollen in her mouth. “Are you absolutely certain you don't have something? I'm willing to do anything.”

  Padgett sucked in more smoke and tapped at the top sheet of paper with her pencil. “What kind of experience do you have?”

  Francesca thought quickly. “I've done some acting. And I have lots of experience with—uh—fashion.” She crossed her ankles and tried to tuck the toes of her scuffed Bottega Veneta sandals behind the leg of the chair.

  “That doesn't exactly qualify you for a job at a radio station, now, does it? Not even a rat-shit operation like this.” She tapped her pencil a little harder.

  Francesca took a deep breath and prepared to jump into water much too deep for a nonswimmer. “Actually, Miss Padgett, I don't have any radio experience. But I'm a hard worker, and I'm willing to learn.” Hard worker? She'd never worked hard in her life.

  In any case, Clare was unimpressed. She lifted her eyes and regarded Francesca with open hostility. “I was kicked off the air at a television station in Chicago because of someone like you—a cute little cheerleader who didn't know the difference between hard news and her panty size.” She leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrow with disenchantment. “We call women like you Twinkies—little fluff balls who don't know the first thing about broadcasting, but think it would be oh-so-exciting to have a career in radio.”

  Six months before, Francesca would have swept from the room in a huff, but now she clamped her hands together in her lap and lifted her chin a shade higher. “I'm willing to do anything, Miss Padgett—answer the telephones, run errands...” She couldn't explain to this woman that it wasn't a career in broadcasting that attracted her. If this building had held a fertilizer factory, she would still have wanted a job.

  “The only work I have is for someone to do the cleaning and odd jobs.”

  “I'll take it!” Dear God, cleaning.

  “I don't think you're right for it.”

  Francesca ignored the sarcasm in her voice. “Oh, but I am. I'm a wonderful cleaner.”

  She had Clare Padgett's attention again, and the woman seemed amused. “Actually, I'd wanted someone Mexican. Are you a citizen?” Francesca shook her head. “Do you have a green card?”

  Again she shook her head. She had only the vaguest idea what a green card was, but she was absolutely certain she didn't have one and she refused to start her new life with a lie. Maybe frankness would impress this woman. “I don't even have a passport. It was stolen from me a few hours ago on the road.”

  “How unfortunate.” Clare Padgett was no longer making the smallest effort to hide how much she was enjoying the situation. She reminded Francesca of a cat with a helpless bird clasped in its mouth. Obviously Francesca, despite her bedraggled state, was going to have to pay for all the slights the station manager had suffered over the years at the hands of beautiful women. “In that case, I'll put you on the payroll at sixty-five dollars a week. You'll have every other Saturday off. The rest of the time you'll be here from sunup to sundown, the same hours we're on the air. And you'll be paid in cash. We've got truckloads of Mexicans coming in every day, so the first time you screw up, you're out.”

  The woman was paying slave wages. This was the sort of job illegal aliens took because they didn't have a choice. “All right,” Francesca said, because she didn't have a choice.

  Clare Padgett smiled grimly and led Francesca out to the office manager. “Fresh meat, Katie. Give her a mop and show her the bathroom.”

  Clare disappeared and Katie looked at Francesca with pity. “We haven't had anyone clean for a few weeks. It's pretty bad.”

  Francesca swallowed hard. “That's all right.”

  It wasn't all right, of course. She stood in front of a pantry in the station's tiny kitchenette, looking over a shelf full of cleaning products, none of which she had the slightest idea how to use. She knew how to play baccarat, and she could name the maître d's of the world's most famous restaurants, but she hadn't the faintest idea how to clean a bathroom. She read the labels as quickly as she could, and half an hour later Clare Padgett discovered her on her knees in front of a gruesomely stained toilet, pouring blue powdered cleanser on the seat.

  “When you scrub the floor, make certain you get into the corners, Francesca. I hate sloppy work.”

  Francesca gritted her teeth and nodded. Her stomach did a small flip-flop as she prepared to attack the mess on the underside of the seat. Unbidden, she thought of Hedda, her old housekeeper. Hedda, with her rolled stockings and bad back, who'd spent her life on her knees cleaning up after Chloe and Francesca.

  Clare sucked on her cigarette and then deliberately tossed it down next to Francesca's foot. “You'd better hustle, chicky. We're getting ready to close down for the day.” Francesca heard a malevolent chuckle as the woman moved away.

  A little later, the announcer who'd been on the air when Francesca arrived stuck his head in the bathroom and told her he had to lock up. Her heart lurched. She had no place to go, no bed to sleep in. �
��Has everybody left?”

  He nodded and ran his eyes over her, obviously liking what he saw. “You need a lift into town?”

  She stood and wiped her hair out of her eyes with her forearm, trying to seem casual. “No. Somebody's picking me up.” She inclined her head toward the mess, her resolution not to begin her new life with lies already abandoned. “Miss Padgett told me I had to finish this tonight before I left. She said I could lock up.” Did she sound too offhand? Not offhand enough? What would she do if he refused?

  “Suit yourself.” He gave her an appreciative smile. A few minutes later she let out a slow, relieved breath as she heard the front door close.

  Francesca spent the night on the black and gold office sofa with Beast curled against her stomach, both of them poorly fed on sandwiches she had made from stale bread and a jar of peanut butter she found in the kitchenette. Exhaustion had seeped into the very marrow of her bones, but still she couldn't fall asleep. Instead, she lay with her eyes open, Beast's fur pushed into the V's between her fingers, thinking about how many more obstacles lay in her way.

  The next morning she awakened before five and promptly threw up into the toilet she had so painstakingly cleaned the night before. For the rest of the day, she tried to tell herself it was only a reaction to the peanut butter.

  “Francesca! Dammit, where is she?” Clare stormed from her office as Francesca flew out of the newsroom where she'd just finished delivering a batch of afternoon papers to the news director.

  “I'm here, Clare,” she said wearily. “What's the problem?”

  It had been six weeks since she'd started work at KDSC, and her relationship with the station manager hadn't improved. According to the gossip she'd picked up from members of the small KDSC staff, Clare's radio career had been launched at a time when few women could get jobs in broadcasting. Station managers hired her because she was intelligent and aggressive, and then fired her for the same reason. She finally made it to television, where she fought bitter battles for the right to report hard news instead of the softer stories considered appropriate for women reporters.