LITMIR.BIZ

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listened to Barker when he came to her, saying he was sorry for all their problems. If she’d only give him another chance, he pledged to be a new man.

      Betty, wanting desperately to believe the roofer whom she had fought with during their first marriage, remarried him the following year. Her family told her they couldn’t understand why she’d remarry someone who had caused her so many problems. She tried to allay their fears by saying, “We’ve talked over our relationship and we know what our troubles were before. This time it’ll be different. We’re going to move.”

      Since Betty and Wayne Barker had frequently been guests of the Kuykendalls at their Cedar Creek home, that was the area where Betty wanted to live. She promised to buy a densely wooded, half-acre lot in the Cherokee Hills section for $8,800 if Barker would match that amount for a new trailer. Betty had her eye on a cream-and-brown, two-bedroom trailer. Barker agreed, and they moved to Cedar Creek Lake at the edge of Gun Barrel City.

      Betty had never lived in anything brand new before, and she delighted in decorating the trailer. She bought a matching gray sofa and chair that looked pretty on the fresh-smelling new tweed carpet. She created silk flower arrangements in dainty vases and placed them on tables. In one corner, and perhaps reminiscent of stories her mother had told her of the lovely homes she had cleaned, Betty bought a round table and skirted it with a heavy velvet tablecloth of cut red roses on a black background and fringed with heavy, looping cord.

      She enrolled Bobby in Mabank Junior High where he seemed to fit in well. Regardless of his mother’s many moves, he always kept up his high grades.

      At night, Seven Points was their playground. Seven Points, one of the few “wet,” or liquor-allowed regions of the lake, was labeled the honky-tonk of Cedar Creek. The parking lots of the one-story, neon-crested bars were frequently full. Although the majority of the lake’s permanent church-centered residents traditionally voted down bars and liquor stores for their areas, they had no hesitation in going to Seven Points to stock up.

      Wayne and Betty got along well at first, and they continued a close relationship with the Kuykendalls. Betty drove Wayne to Kuykendall’s home each morning at five o’clock for his ride to work with his boss. Each evening, Kuykendall dropped Wayne at his home.

      Jerry Kuykendall stood on his porch one morning as Betty drove up. “You know, he said, “this old Wayne of yours is probably as nice a person as you’d want to meet.”

      Betty smiled at her husband.

      “No, really,” Kuykendall continued, “my whole family thinks so. Besides, he’s an outstanding employee to boot. I can understand why you two get along so well. You both look very happy with each other.”

      Wayne Barker insisted on seeing his sons from his previous marriage. They were fourteen and sixteen now. Betty resented the time he spent away from her. The boys had been over to the trailer a few times, but Barker found it lessened tension if he arranged to meet them at the local McDonald’s, or a park; anywhere that Betty couldn’t interfere. He especially liked having them for an entire weekend, but taking the flak from Betty made him question if it was worth the trouble.

      When Betty confided to her children that Barker began slapping her again, they suggested that she divorce him.

      She told them, “Not yet. Let me handle this in my own way.”

      Her children liked Wayne. He was always nice to them, but just as they saw Betty become two different people, they wondered if Wayne Barker had been cut from the same cloth as she.

      On a rare, crisp evening in October 1981, Betty collected branches that had dropped from the hundred or so trees covering her large lot.

      The year-round residents enjoyed this time of year. Summer crowds were gone, having shied away from the colder lake water. However, with fewer visitors, restaurants and stores were nearly empty.

      Betty stacked the branches safely away from her trailer and struck a match.

      “Let’s hope this takes off the chill and keeps away the bugs. They’re the only bad thing about living near the lake.”

      Her daughter, now Shirley Thompson, nodded in agreement, remembering seeing curtains of webs spun over windows and doorways. She always hated to walk near the outlet to the lake that was at the rear of her mother’s property because spiderwebs smothered the area. Lake authorities disallowed insecticide spraying over the water for fear of harming fish, so insects reigned supreme. Shirley watched a fat-bodied spider scamper off a branch as the flames threatened it.

      Smoke curled upward and the wood crackled and popped. Shirley stretched out her hands toward the flames. “That feels good. I’ve always loved a bonfire and the smell of burning wood.”

      Except for Shirley’s voluptuous figure, she looked nothing like her mother. She possessed her father’s dark coloring and wore her straight black hair in braids, tied with tiny ribbons. She had driven down from her house in rural Van Zandt County to talk with her mother about Barker, hoping she would listen to her. Finally, she said, “Mama, what are you going to do about Wayne? I just hate to hear how he’s treating you.”

      “I’m going to kill him,” Betty said stoically.

      Shirley laughed. “No, don’t talk silly. I mean, really what are you going to do? You’ve got to leave him or he could really hurt you.”

      “So you think I want to take this shit?” Betty asked.

      “Mama, you’ve got to divorce him. That’s all there is to it.”

      Betty remained silent for a moment, then said, “Hell, I can’t do that. The trailer’s in his name. If I divorce him, he’ll get the damn trailer and I’ll be stuck with an empty lot. What good would that do me?”

      “Then buy a trailer. You told me you made good tips at the Cedar Club. If you start a little nest egg now, in a few months you might have the down payment. In the meantime, you could get a restraining order against him.”

      “I don’t relish getting put out in the damn cold with winter coming.”

      “Of course not. But you don’t mean you’re really going to kill him. What if you got caught?”

      “I won’t get caught. Hell, I’ve planned every detail enough to see to that. Look over there,” Betty said, turning to an open space in the trees behind them. “See that hole?” Betty pointed to a mound of loose soil that had been freshly turned.

      “What about it?”

      “That’s where he’s gonna be. No one will ever find him.”

      “You dug that yourself?”

      “No. Of course not. I was talking real nice to one of the construction guys who was fixing the street in the next block. I told him I was building a barbecue pit and needed a hole dug. I said, ‘I bet it wouldn’t take you but a few minutes to dig something about four feet deep with that big backhoe of yours.’ He said he guessed it wouldn’t, and offered to come by after work. I told him I’d have a cold one waiting for him. ’Course like most men he said he was hoping I’d have something warm waiting for him.” She laughed and gave Shirley a little jab with her elbow. “I couldn’t risk a toss in the bed, not with Wayne coming home about the same time. So I thought, what the hell, I’d pay him twenty dollars. I didn’t want to get messed up with anyone else right now.”

      “So somebody knows you had a hole dug?”

      “Yes, but he’s not the type to put two and two together. If he does, I’ll just have something warm waiting for him.”

      Shirley stood looking out her living room window, awaiting her mother’s arrival. She could picture her taking off in her orange-and-white Chevrolet pickup with Bobby, her youngest brother, in tow. By now they’d be bumping over the two-lane road to Shirley’s house.

      When Betty and Bobby walked through her front door, Shirley felt disappointed. She’d hoped her mother would have changed her mind. After Betty confirmed that

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