Mirror Image

Dorothy Rae struggled to get out of her chair and follow him. The hem of her robe trailed behind her.
    “Don’t try to deny it,” she said with a sob. “I was watching you. All through dinner, you were drooling over Carole and her pretty new face.”
    Jack removed his shirt, balled it up, and flung it into the clothes hamper. He bent over to unlace his shoes. “The only one who drools in this family is you, when you get so drunk you can’t control yourself.”
    Reflexively, she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. People who had known Dorothy Rae Hancock when she was growing up wouldn’t believe what she had become in middle age. She’d been the belle of Lampasas High School; her rein had lasted all four years.
    Her daddy had been a prominent attorney in town. She, his only child, was the apple of his eye. The way he doted on her had made her the envy of everybody who knew her. He’d taken her to Dallas twice a year to shop at Neiman-Marcus for her seasonal wardrobes. He’d given her a brand new Corvette convertible on her sixteenth birthday.
    Her mother had had a fit and said it was too much car for a young girl to be driving, but Hancock had poured his wife another stiff drink and told her that if he’d wanted her worthless opinion about anything, he would have asked for it.
    After graduating from high school, Dorothy Rae had gone off in a blaze of glory to enter the University of Texas in Austin. She met Jack Rutledge during her junior year, fell madly in love, and became determined to have him for her very own. She’d never been denied anything in her life, and she didn’t intend to start with missing out on the only man she would every truly love.
    Jack, struggling through his second year in law school, was in love with Dorothy Rae, too, but he couldn’t even think about marriage until after he finished school. His daddy expected him not only to graduate, but to rank high in his class. His daddy also expected him to be chivalrous where women were concerned.
    So when Jack finally succumbed to temptation and relieved Dorothy Rae Hancock of her virginity, he was in a quandary as to which had priority—chivalry toward the lady or responsibility toward parental expectations. Dorothy Rae spurred him into making a decision when she weepily told him that she was late getting her period.
    Panicked, Jack figured that an untimely marriage was better than an untimely baby and prayed that Nelson would figure it that way, too. He and Dorothy Rae drove to Oklahoma over the weekend, wed in secret, and broke the glad tidings to their parents after the fact.
    Nelson and Zee were disappointed, but after getting Jack’s guarantee that he had no intention of dropping out of law school, they welcomed Dorothy Rae into the family.
    The Hancocks of Lampasas didn’t take the news quite so well. Her elopement nearly killed Dorothy Rae’s daddy. In fact, he dropped dead of a heart attack one month after the nuptials. Dorothy Rae’s unstable mother was committed to an alcohol abuse hospital. On the day of her release several weeks later, she was deemed dried out and cured. Three days later, she ran her car into a bridge abutment while driving drunk. She died on impact.
    Francine Angela wasn’t born until eighteen months after Dorothy Rae’s marriage to Jack. It was either the longest pregnancy in history or she had tricked him into marriage.
    He had never accused her of either, but, as though in self-imposed penance, she had had two miscarriages in quick succession when Fancy was still a baby.
    The last miscarriage had proved to be life-threatening, so the doctor had tied her tubes to prevent future pregnancies. To blunt the physical, mental, and emotional pain this caused her, Dorothy Rae began treating herself to a cocktail every afternoon. And when that didn’t work, she treated herself to two.
    “How can you look yourself in the mirror,” she demanded of her husband now, “knowing that you love your brother’s wife?”
    “I don’t love her.”
    “No, you don’t, do you?” Leaning close, she poisoned the air between them with the intoxicating fumes of her breath. “You hate her because she treats you like dirt. She wipes her feet on you. You can’t even see that all these changes in her are just—”
    “What changes?” Instead of hanging his pants on the hanger in his hand, he dropped them into a chair. “She explained about using her left hand, you know.”
    Having won his attention, Dorothy