Missing Signs

Looking back, Wanda realized she should have noticed the early signs. There was the time when she was eighteen, sitting in the passenger seat with her pregnant belly obscuring the view of her feet, as Pete drove along an old back road that stretched from Fredericksburg to Abilene. They'd left San Antonio early in the morning in order to get to his parents' house by dusk. Somewhere between Mason and Brady, Wanda asked him to stop, and he'd said, "No time to stop."

"But Pete, I really have to pee, and besides my legs are cramping- I gotta get out and stretch."

"You wanna get out? I'll let you out, but you ain't gettin' back in," he said.

"Come on, Pete. It will just take a minute. Isn't there a gas station coming up soon?"

Pete swerved to the side of the road, cussing and yelling that he wasn't about to stop at a gas station- that if she had to take a piss so badly, she could do it on the side of the road.

"If you ain't back in exactly 3 minutes, I'll leave your fat ass."

Wanda began to cry, making Pete all the angrier. The car screeched to a stop, so she heaved herself out and headed for a bush. Just as she squatted, she heard the car engine rev.

"Surely he's playing around- he wouldn't leave me- 8 months pregnant- out here in the middle of nowhere," she thought. Wanda finished in time to see Pete pull away, leaving her behind, struggling to pull her pants back on. Sobbing, she sat down in the grass, not knowing what to do. After a few minutes, she got up, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and started to walk. Because she felt humiliated and afraid, she didn't want anyone to see her, but the land along the road was barren save for a tree here and there, leaving her no choice but to stay within sight of the street. It didn't much matter- no cars appeared in either direction for as far as she could see. She walked for what seemed like forever...

Wanda had forgiven him and would continue to forgive him for the next eight long years. She realized now Pete had had some kind of hold on her, and she'd stayed with him through 2 more babies, through his awful temper and his drunken rages, through his physical and emotional abuse, through her isolation. But now she sat on the floor of her tiny apartment, her college degree, earned on weekends and nights, in one hand- and her divorce decree in the other, and all she felt was relief.