I can't handle happy families. They make me far too suspicious.
"Frannie, what the fuck is going on?"
She strides over to the doorway with a hard look on her face, Darry hanging off her skirt, and he thinks back to how pretty she'd been when she was eighteen, how delicate her features were. Now her hands are cracked and dry, and there are already creases beginning to form across her forehead. She's calcified. "Don't you run your dirty mouth in front of our son." She pats Darry on the head. "Hon, go to your room for a bit, okay? Mama an' Daddy need to have a grown-up talk."
"Is Daddy in trouble?" Darry asks her. "Is that why you threw his drawers out the window?"
"Nah, champ." He ruffles his hair, flashing him a grin he doesn't really feel, and sends him off with a light swat to the behind. "Everything's good. You listen to your mama now."
Darry scurries away, and the second he hears his bedroom door close and the sound of some trucks being crashed around, he turns straight back to his wife. "Kid's gone. Frannie, what the fuck is this?"
"You don't like the mess, you can clean it up," she says sweetly. "Won't make us even by a long shot, but it'd sure be a start."
"Quit talkin' in riddles," he demands, his chest tight where he's got a bundle of cash hidden. He's still a little soused, a little whacked out from the adrenaline, and now Frannie's acting like an asylum escapee— just what he needed. "You got something to say, spit it out."
"You know, at first I thought about leaving," she says, her voice eerily calm. "Taking Darry and going to my mother's. But then I figured—" She laughs. "Why should I be the one to leave? I ain't the one who fucked up."
She can swear better than half the guys in the army when she's in a mood, he remembers with a jolt— and in the army, the word 'fucking' usually just means that a noun is coming up. "So you threw all my shit out onto the lawn?"
"Uh-huh." She smirks without a shred of warmth. "You want the swingin' gang life so much, you can choke on it. But don't expect me to let my babies get exposed to that."
"Babies?" he sputters. "Babies, as in plural babies? You got one stashed in the closet I don't know about?"
"Did I mention I'm pregnant?" she says coolly, like she hasn't dropped a bomb the size of Little Boy on his head.
"We ain't got the money for no more babies." Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit, he hadn't thought that a (second) time without a rubber would do any harm. They've barely got enough to feed Darry and put some clothes on his back, much less—
"I guess we keep forgetting that sex is where babies come from," she says with a shrug. "But it don't really matter anymore, does it? This one won't know you, and Darry will probably forget soon enough."
"You can't just take a man's kids away from him." His head's spinning like he's just been on a week-long drinking binge, complete with a few rounds at the slot machine. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Well, I don't want to have to tell them that Daddy's not comin' home 'cause he got his dumb ass shot. That's what's wrong." Her accusing finger, jabbing an inch away from the sloppily bandaged wound near his hip, hurts worse than the bullet did. For the first time, he sees tears brimming in her eyes, but she blinks them back so fast he thinks it must've been the light.
"Baby," he starts, unsure of where to go after that. He reaches out to touch her arm, but she shrinks away from him. "Baby, shit, I can handle myself. This was just a one time thing. An accident. And my jobs keep the lights on."
"The lights on in this place?" She moves that same finger all around their tiny house— the leaking ceiling he can't manage to patch up properly, the ramshackle furniture, the moldy carpets— and sits down heavily at the kitchen table, putting her face in her hands. "Is that really money worth dyin' for?"
"Well, excuse me, princess." He's got absolutely no right to be indignant, but here he goes anyway, his temper blazing up like a wildfire. "Sorry these digs just ain't pretty enough for you, even when I'm out gettin' shot to pay for 'em. I forgot I was talkin' to a real refined and genteel lady here."
"I don't give a shit about where we live. Don't you get it?" She slams her hands down on the table. "We could live in a roach-infested motel, for all I care. We could live in a tent on the side of the road. As long as you're with me and the kids, not dead or in the slammer."
"I'm not gonna get caught," he tries to pacify her, forcing images of those who have gotten caught out of his head, those who've bled out on the ground. "Baby, I'll cool it with the drinkin' and everything, honest. Stay at home with you and the... kids more. Listen, the new Sears spring catalogue's gonna be out soon— why don't I buy you somethin' real nice to wear?"
"This how you want your son growin' up?" she demands. "Like you did? Throw your own life away if you don't care about it, but I want better for him than dealing. No— he's getting better than this. You decide if that's with you or not."
Darry— shit, it hurts to think about Darry right now, like pressing down on a bruise. He loves that kid more than he's ever loved anything in his life, even Frannie, though Darry wasn't initially the good kind of surprise. The day he was born, all tiny and and squishy-faced and helpless, he'd gotten plastered out of his skull and promised, between hiccups, that he'd be a better father than his own drunken scumbag had ever been to him. Darry wouldn't go hungry, or wear rags, or stay up late asking Mama when Daddy was coming home.
So much for that one.
"I can't just leave," he mutters, more to himself than to her. "They'll find me and gut me like a pig." He misses the army; the army was easy. Put on your uniform, son, we're killing Japs. Shine your shoes. Make your bed. Load your gun. It's everything after the army that's left him so goddamn angry, and bored, and empty— spoiling for a new fight.
She stands up and takes him by the biceps; she can't be much taller than 5'3, but she still dwarfs him right now. "We'll go somewhere else," she says, her grip on him crushing. "We don't have to stay in Lubbock; we don't even have to stay in Texas. I got an aunt way up in Tulsa we could crash with, 'til we get back on our feet. But I ain't livin' like this for another day."
"For Darry," he finally says, trembling. He doesn't know how he's going to slip out of town unnoticed, or how he's going to support a family of four, or how he's going to make his way through life with anything other than his fists, but unlike his father, he keeps his promises. If one thing separates them, it has to be that. "And for the baby."
"Anything you wanna do for me? Or am I just Mama to you now?"
"Frannie," he says, his mouth bone-dry and his clothes too tight. He loves her. On whatever godforsaken island they'd stationed him on, back when the mosquitoes and the muggy heat and the nonstop terror had kept him awake at night, he'd used to flick on his flashlight and stare at a picture of her; teasing half-smile, her blonde hair gleaming like the sun. He'd named his gun after her.
"I remember how much you wanted me," she says into his ear, and he swears there's magma running through his veins. "You used to climb up to my bedroom window at night when I still lived in my daddy's house, for Chrissakes. Couldn't get off me for a minute."
He pushes her up onto the kitchen counter, grabs a hold of her hair with one hand and reaches up her skirt with the other. She kisses him hard, the tears spilling over and running down her face now. "I love you," he says out loud. Not too. "I love you. I love you."
I won't be a shit husband, either, he tells himself with the force of a blow. Things are going to change.