Read Online Fancy Pants by Susan Elizabeth Phillips - Free Book Online Page B

... a no-account . . . until he hadn't been able to stand it
anymore and had run away at fifteen.

From what he'd been able to see in a few old photos, Dallie got most of
his good looks from his mother. She, too, had run off. She had fled
from Jaycee not long after Dallie was born, and she hadn't bothered
to leave a forwarding address. Jaycee
once said he heard she'd gone to Alaska, but he had never tried to find
her. "Too much trouble," Jaycee had told Dallie. "No woman's worth that
much trouble, especially when there are so many others around."

With his thick auburn hair and heavy-lidded eyes, Jaycee had attracted
more women than he knew what to do with. Over the years at least a
dozen had spent varying amounts of time living with them, a few even
bringing children along. Some of the women had taken good care of
Dallie, others had abused him. As he grew older, he noticed that the
ones who abused him seemed to last longer than the others, probably
because it took a certain amount of ill temper to survive Jaycee for
more than a few months.

"He was born mean," one of the nicer women had told Dallie while she
packed her suitcase. "Some people are just like that. You don't realize
it at first about Jaycee because he's smart, and he can talk so nice
that he makes you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. But
there's something twisted inside him that makes him mean right through
to his blood. Don't listen to all that stuff he says about
you, Dallie.
You're a good kid. He's just afraid you'll grow up and make something
of your life, which
is more than he's ever been able to do."

Dallie had stayed out of the way of Jaycee's fists as much as he could.
The classroom became his safest haven, and unlike his friends he never
cut school—unless he had a particularly bad set of bruises on his face,
in which case he would hang out with the caddies who worked at the
country club down the road. They taught him golf, and by the time he
was twelve he had found an even safer haven than school.

Dallie shook off his old memories and told Skeet it was time to call
it. a night. They went back to the motel, but even though he was tired,
Dallie had been thinking about the past too much to fall asleep easily.

With the qualifying round completed and the Pro-Am out of the way, the
real tournament began the next day. Like all major professional golf
tournaments, the Orange Blossom Open held its first two rounds on
Thursday and Friday. The players who survived the cut after Friday went
on to the final two rounds.
Not only did Dallie survive Friday's cut, but he was
leading the tournament by four strokes when he walked past the network
television tower onto the first tee on Sunday morning for the final
round.

"Now, you just hold steady today, Dallie," Skeet said. He tapped the
heel of his hand against the top of Dallie's golf bag and looked
nervously over at the leader board, which had Dallie's name prominently
displayed at the top. "Remember that you're playing your own game
today, not anybody else's. Put
those television cameras out of your
mind and concentrate on making one shot at a time."

Dallie didn't even nod in acknowledgment of Skeet's words. Instead, he
grinned at a spectacular brunette standing near the ropes that held
back the gallery of fans. She smiled back, so he wandered over to crack
a few jokes with her, acting like he didn't have a care in the world,
like winning this tournament wasn't the most important thing in his
life, like this year there wouldn't be any Halloween at all.

Dallie was playing in the final foursome along with Johnny Miller, the
leading money winner on the tour that season. When it was Dallie's turn
to tee up, Skeet handed him a three-wood and gave his final words of
advice. "Remember that you're the best young golfer on the tour today,
Dallie. You know it and I know it. How about we let the rest of the
world figure it out?" Dallie nodded, took his stance, and hit the kind
of golf shot that makes