me. Dusty definitely wasn’t a nerd. He’d even volunteered at the hospital as an orderly, the act of a sucker, I’d thought: working for nothing. I was certain he was only doing it for show, barnstorming his charitable works for Rita’s delight and the nodding approval of the town.
Together, Rita and Dusty had celebrity wattage and star power. They turned heads and seized attention. They fired up old withered hearts in Hartsfield, and beyond, when they announced they were going to go to Hollywood to be in the movies. Surely if anyone could make it on TV or in the movies, they could.
But they never made it to Hollywood. Dusty went to Penn State on a football scholarship, but blew his knee out his freshman year. Dispirited, and a poor student, he’d dropped out and moved back to Hartsfield to work at the factory. Rita enrolled at the community college at Riverton to get a teaching degree. After a year or so, Dusty got restless, so he and Rita left Hartsfield, probably to save face, as my mother said. They moved to Oklahoma, where Dusty went to work with his father in the family construction business.
When Rita’s and Dusty’s daughter was born, Dad sent me a clipping from the local Hartsfield paper.
Darla Hayworth Palmer has the fortunate beauty and blond hair of her mother and the gentle spirit of her father, it was reported by a family friend. ‘She’s just the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ Rita’s mother, Betty Fitzgerald, was quoted as saying.
I sighed, angling a look at Jack’s, reconsidering my decision to go inside, pondering whether I should skip breakfast altogether and just drive to the house. I had plenty to do. I had an appointment to meet the real estate agent and auctioneer that afternoon. Dad had waited much too long to sell the place. The real estate market had been bludgeoned and I was sure the house would bring much less than it was worth a few years earlier, despite the added baths, antiques, extensions to the bedrooms, and remodeled kitchen. But the auctioneer had been upbeat and positive, of course.
For a man with an inborn practicality and gift for numbers, Dad also had a great fear of change. He’d become sentimental and melancholy at the thought of vacating his family home, because of a vow he’d made to his father many years ago, and because he simply liked living in Hartsfield.
“I’d be like a damned retreating general,” he once said. “No sir. I will not retreat. This is where I’ll die. This house was built in 1870 and, God willing, it will be here until 2870.” He said this only a month before the stroke buckled him to his knees, causing him to spill his coffee and drop his hardback copy of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin .
Dad had had to retreat after all, and during my last visit, I saw the disgrace of his retreat written on his gaunt, narrow face, as he sat on Judy’s living room couch, diminutive and shaky.
As I stared vacantly ahead at the garish neon lights of Jack’s Diner, I felt the rise of apprehension and dread. Surely Rita had changed. Had the tragedy blunted her beauty and zest for life? Did I really want to see her defeated and small, working as a waitress at Jack’s Diner? Did she really want to see me?
I reached for my umbrella, zipped up my brown leather jacket and hesitated once more before pushing out. Retreat suddenly sounded good.
But I wanted to know, first hand, and not from gossip, newspapers or TV, why Dusty Palmer, the guy with that easy smile and gentle nature, entered their living room on that chilly September Sunday morning with a .45 caliber colt handgun.
In the past few days, I’d reread several accounts of the incident and had produced a movie in my head about the terrible sequence of events.
From the living room, Dusty walked deliberately into the kitchen, where he found his daughter, Darla, and his wife, Rita. His full head of hair had rapidly thinned and he was nearly bald. The Viking body had morphed into a
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