Three to Dance Read online

  Faye and Richard met shortly after she moved to Muleshoe. Showing her exotic origins, with high cheekbones and green eyes, Faye was a pretty teenager, vivacious despite her past. She was on her own, supporting herself as a carhop and sharing a small dumpy apartment with a girlfriend to make ends meet.

  As he had a penchant for young teen girls—her daddy’s first wife had been the tender age of thirteen when they’d had to get married—it was only natural that he’d go for the out of town girl. Local girls were boring, unworldly. Their biggest goals in life were to marry farm boys and raise a passel of brats.

  Her parents were instantly together. Faye liked that Richard worked hard, had parents who had roots in the town and were considered upper middle class, something that she’d never had in her life. For his part, Richard just wanted to get in Faye’s panties. It took him two years, and he finally succeeded when Faye was seventeen. And, as it happened to many girls before, Faye got pregnant her first time having sex.

  Though neither wanted to get married, Richard did halfheartedly propose. He was not really keen to have yet another kid, when he had four others. Faye, for her part did not want to marry him either. It was only when Judilyn, on one of her rare appearances in her life, threatened to take the child and raise it herself that Faye backed down and married Richard. Faye was only seventeen, had only a ninth grade education and no prospects of raising a baby on her own. In those days, the early seventies, the idea of abortion was still almost taboo.

  So they married, Faye and Richard. For the first few years, things were okay. Richard went to work. Faye stayed home and raised her kid. Then, four years later, a sibling, also unwanted, had come alone, Denise.

  It was then the storms in life began to brew, turning into a full-fledged hurricane through Kate’s teenaged years. Her parents were clearly two unhappy, mismatched people who had no business being married. Richard’s beer drinking had increased through the years, and though he went to work every day, the first thing he did in the evening when he got home was pop a top on a beer can. He never ate with the family, nor had any interaction with his kids, preferring to pass out in his chair in front of the TV. Kate’s mother would silently fume, trying to do her own thing and failing. Though her mother did not drink, she’d inherited Judilyn’s manic-depression and her fits of anger were terrifying to witness. Like a tornado hitting land, she would scream and throw things, going through the house tearing the place to pieces. Hands flying unrestrained, she was also physically violent, threatening to kill Richard or herself. It didn’t help that there were guns in the house. This was Texas after all, and it was not uncommon to pick up the paper and read that someone had died at the hands of their spouse the night before. Faye often threatened to shoot her husband, right in front of the kids. Fortunately, or perhaps not, she never pulled the trigger. Her father had the backbone of a jellyfish, never fighting back, never defending himself against his wife’s tirades. He preferred to pass his life in a quiet stupor, never really seeing the world through clear, sober eyes. And the more he drank, the more it infuriated her mother. Kate and her sister had suffered more than a few paddlings on the butt. Their mother’s favorite threat was her mother’s. The switch off the tree; one you had to get. Get one too small and Faye would pick her own, then beat your ass with it. Pick one too big and you were still going to get your ass whipped. A switch wasn’t the only thing Faye liked to hit with. Beach thongs were a prime weapon, and Fay was always quick to whip a shoe off her foot and tear back, arms, ass and legs in her fury.

  Still, their childhood wasn’t all bad. She and her sister had glasses, braces on their teeth, bicycles to ride, nice clothes to go to school in. In short, they thought they were like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. Family vacations? Nah, never happened. The biggest thing in their week was the regular Sunday BBQ. Daddy always did the cooking. The drunker he got, the better the meat tasted. If he dropped it in the dirt, he’d cook it anyway, not bothering to even wash it. Of course, there were times when daddy did get out of hand, like the time he shot the grill, putting three holes into it with his Smith and Wesson .45—the same one Clint Eastwood carried as Dirty Harry. He wanted more air flow for the meat. The neighbors had called the police and the sheriff had to come and explain that he couldn’t be shooting his gun inside city limits. That was only one of many memories Kate carried of her father doing stupid things when he was drunk, like setting off a whole box of fireworks and that set off grandma’s sugar cane field on fire, or dumping a whole loaf of bread in her sister’s fish tank and killing all the fish.

  Around and around it goes, the cycle of abuse and neglect. A cycle that is hard to break out of, even harder to accept and deal with. Denial is the order of the day and Kate was a pro at it.

  She did what most kids raised by unstable parents did. She kept her head down, lost herself in her fantasies of being a great artist and just tried to get by. She never brought any other kids home from school. She could never be sure how her parents would act. Besides, who wanted the other kids to see your dad passed out in the living room, or your mom dumping a pot of spaghetti down the drain because you said you weren’t hungry? Come to think of it, she didn’t have that many friends to bring home.

  Scott was the sole exception. Because they were both ousted from the popular groups by the other kids was probably the reason they drifted together. Scott was not athletic, a skinny kid built like a twig with a shock of blonde hair and a face that could delicately be described as homely. His own family was in pieces, and his parents were going through a bitter divorce that would end in gunplay when Scott’s dad gunned his mother’s lover down on the front steps of the courthouse during their divorce. The man did not die, but Scott’s dad got a long prison sentence for aggravated assault, pleaded down from attempted murder.

  Kate, on the other hand, was a pudgy kid; no chest, big hips, a walking blob of baby fat. Scott liked to read, make up adventure stories. She liked to draw. Together they would spend many hours planning too write their own comic book series. Scott would write it, Kate would draw it. Like many childhood dreams, it never came into being.

  Like all school friends, they had drifted apart when childhood faded and real life rudely intruded. To escape his own tainted past, Scott had up and moved to Arizona after he’d graduated, the first of the many traveling construction jobs he would pursue through the years.

  Kate hadn’t quite managed to spread her wings and fly yet. She’d hung in a few more years, driving over to the community college in the neighboring state of New Mexico, working on an associates in graphic arts. She’d been lucky to be in school just as computers were coming into existence within the educational system, the old MS-DOS 1.0 operating system being the first. Computers captivated her and she quickly learned all she could about them, watching them change as technology advanced. For graphic artists, the Internet was a boon, the programs getting better all the time. She often made extra money designing logos and graphics for websites. Though designing ads for newspapers was by no means the most artistic work in the world, it was steady and paid well. Newspapers usually paid above average wages, offered benefits and were about the only businesses that didn’t fold when the economy waned. After all, people needed local and international information—especially those classified ads.

  Degree in hand, in debt from college loans, Kate had flown the small cage that was Muleshoe, Texas. The first time she’d moved she didn’t manage to get very far from home. She landed in the very town she’d gone to college in. Her first job was as an ad designer at a “Nickel” paper, one of those papers that were nothing but public advertising, one huge garage sale, basically. It was her first time designing ads for a newspaper—and she was a flaming failure at it. Believing that she should cram as much detail into the ad space the customer had paid for, she’d literally filled every inch with graphics and ad copy. The idea of white space and giving the eye a break was an unknown concept—she had to learn the ‘Z’ pattern, how an eye followed an
ad as a person read it. Her designs had always been big, bold, bursting in color. Now she had to learn to tone it down, go subtle where before she’d been brash.

  Thirty miles hadn’t been enough to escape her parents and family problems. By that time, the early nineties, her parents’ marriage had disintegrated into a separation. Her mother had packed up Kate’s teenage sister and moved to Silver City, where two of her older sisters had settled. That in itself was a disaster. Her mother was, at that time, having a massive nervous breakdown from the strains of a twenty-year marriage that was now no more than a hate fest. Her sister, Denise, had dropped out of school, soon to have the first of her three kids, each by a different father. The third child would come along while Denise was still married to husband number two—who had fathered child number two, and whose best friend had fathered number three. Her dad had moved in with grandma. By this time, his father had passed away and the old feed mill had been burned to the ground. Kate would find out years later it had been torched by the brothers for the insurance money. Turned out that old Grandpa John had left nothing for his widow and seven kids. What money he did have, he’d buried, not trusting banks. He left no maps, and no one knew whether or not the reported million dollars he’d gathered through his eighty years was even a true sum.

  Far away. Instinct had told her long ago that she needed to get far away from these people. With the taint of alcoholism and manic-depression haunting her bloodline, she needed a sense of normalcy. A job, a home. That was always her goal. And so, she kept moving further and further away from Texas, cutting ties with the past, trying to weave new ones for her future.

  As long as she stayed away from men, she had few problems in life. The minute she let a man into her life, like William, she lost everything.

  Inevitably, her mind flashed back over a couple of the more recent men in her life. Thinking of them, she scrunched up her face. Losers. Definitely nothing to make a fuss about.

  There was Don, the one mom called “the stalker”.

  Don was a definite no, a man so desperate to settle for anyone who said “hi” to him, that he’d asked her to move in with him an hour into their first date. Don was a sweet man, her age, and would have married her within ten minutes if only she’d have said yes. But there were a couple of problems with him. For one, he was two inches shorter than she was. And two, he was chinless with an overbite. Her best friend Beth had set them up, a blind date. After a few phone calls, Kate had agreed to meet him. He seemed nice enough on the phone, was always polite, even if he did tell bad jokes.

  What Beth was thinking, I don’t know.

  Don just wasn’t her type. She’d cut him lose after three dates. He had earned the stalker moniker because he’d started following her around. If she went to work, there was Don. If she went for groceries, there, too, was Don. He just kept showing up where ever she was at. She’d finally been forced to make it clear to him that he needed to hang around elsewhere.

  Ok, so she was no princess. But she had her standards.

  Michael had met her standards. Well. Tall, rangy, a little bookish, he was just what she liked in a man. He was a writer, too, and they’d met at the library when he was giving a reading of his work. She’d enjoyed his short novella about invading aliens, and had said so. Michael had asked her out for coffee and that night they’d talked for hours, both reluctant to go home.

  Their relationship had taken off from there. Michael was at her place every weekend, and the times they spent together were to be treasured. Older than her by ten years, he seemed content to ease slowly into a new relationship. Like herself, he was recently divorced, and so wasn’t too eager to jump into anything intense. He also had two kids to think of, two little girls who lived with their mother. His ex had recently packed up the kids and taken them to Florida, so he only saw the girls during summer vacations. Because of his child support and keeping two households, Michael was usually strapped to the max. A movie was all he could usually spring for, so she’d ended up providing most of the entertainment.

  And just when she was ready to ask the asshole to move in and make that jump from just dating to couple-hood, Michael had dumped her! It didn’t hurt that he’d found another woman. That was the way the heart worked. What really hurt was the way he broke up with her. First he’d told her he’d met someone else—then he’d asked to spend the night at her house. Stupidly, she’d let him. Michael had then tried his damnedest to fuck her, using everything he knew that turned her on. To her credit, she didn’t relent. Oh, she’d been tempted. But somehow she’d kept her legs together and kicked his ass out, saying she never wanted to see him again. Ever.

  She began to chomp her pizza harder. Swallowing, a piece almost lodged in her throat. She coughed and pounded on her chest. Every time she thought of that asshole, she got angry. What a useless piece of shit. Why did I ever let him into my life?

  In retaliation, Michael had stolen her stereo. She’d made it easy for him, because he knew where she hid the spare key to her apartment. After that, it had just gotten messier. She had to call the cops, but since she couldn’t prove Michael had taken it, there was nothing she could do except replace the machine. It didn’t occur to her until after he was gone that he’d been leeching off her. Food, a free place to crash on the weekend, sex. Hell, was there anything else she could do for him? Anything else to demean herself? Had she really been that needy? Was it because she had such a generous heart and gullible nature that she was easy to take advantage of? Sometimes it seemed as if she had the word ‘sucker’ tattooed across her forehead in big bold letters. After that, though, she had made damn sure no man knew where she kept her spares. Not that it really mattered. From that point on, she didn’t allow any men to come into her house, much less stay overnight.

  And she’d not had a date—or sex—in over almost two years. A very long dry spell, and self-induced celibacy had only served to heighten, not dull, her sexual awareness.

  Throwing the crust of the pizza back into the box, she knocked the box to the floor.

  I gotta end this losing streak.

  Once again she was starting over, and once again specters of the past were tugging at her. The past had ghosts, too many of them, ghosts who had come into being before she was even conceived. She supposed those ghosts had something to do with the fact that she was a naturally standoffish person and rarely exhibited the bonhomie that seemed to come so easily to other people. People knew her, but they didn’t really know her. She was always holding them at arm’s length, determined not to let them know that she’d grown up in a household where her mother screamed insanely and her father drank himself into a quiet stupor, a defeated shell of a man, corroded by failure, resentment and hate. Perhaps because she’d witnessed so little fun in her childhood was the reason why she did not know how to have fun as an adult. Footloose and fancy free didn’t seem to be words in her vocabulary.

  It was said a boy married a woman like his mother and a girl married a man like her father. In her case, that was certainly true. She’d married a man just like her father. William had been a nice man, appeared to work hard and seemed to be fairly reliable. Ah, he’d had her fooled. She had, indeed, in theory and practice, married a man who strongly mirrored her father. The only difference was that her father was a functioning alcoholic who went to work every day. William did not. But to be fair, William had also married a woman like his momma, one who spoiled him by doing everything for him, from keeping his clothes to paying the bills. The worst memory she had of William was not of his drinking or his sitting like a lump in front of the TV. It was the day they went down to fill out an application to replace his lost Social Security card. He needed it to get the delivery job he’d applied for. William had sat down and began to fill out the paperwork. Suddenly, he’d stopped.

  “Let’s go,” he’d said.

  “But you haven’t finished filling it out,” she’d said in surprise.

  “I can’t fill it out.”

  “Why?” s
he’d asked, puzzled. She knew William could read and write. He was, after all, a high school graduate.

  “I don’t know my mother’s maiden name.”

  It had astounded her. William didn’t know his mother’s last name before she’d married his father. An absolutely unpredictable revelation, but not surprising when given thought. After all, the only thing she’d seen William willingly read since they’d met was the comic section of the newspaper. The idea of reading a book or magazine was a totally foreign idea to him.

  Taking the application, Kate had finished filling it out for him. She knew more about his mother than he did, and they had only been dating a few months.

  Turned out there was a lot William did not know how to do. Like balance a checkbook. Given an ATM card, he assumed that the balance in the checking account was how much money they had on hand. He never thought about checks written to pay the bills. He’d simply take the money, assuming there was enough to cover everything. Credit cards were also another concept he did not seem to understand. It was almost like he thought creditors gave him credit for being a good person, not because they expected the money to be paid back, with interest. But because his mother had always handled his checkbook and money, he’d never gained a good grasp of how real life was supposed to work. She should have known it was not wise to go out with a man who still lived with his mom in his twenties. Perhaps if their attraction had been more than a physical one, she would have seen his flaws sooner. As it stood, lust was also a blinding factor when the heart made its choices.

  Instead of a husband, Kate had found herself raising a twenty-something man-child.

  She sighed. It was time to put away all those memories; not all of them horribly bad, but still hardly worth revisiting on a regular basis. It occurred to her that she’d spent a lot of time running away from her past, but no matter how far she want from that dusty Texas town, she’d never entirely escape it because she could not escape her own mind. At times, it seemed she was in danger of descending into that bi-polar nightmare that plagued her mother, something she struggled desperately to avoid. Depression was her personal enemy, and could sometimes put her into bed for an entire weekend.