In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

JO CARSON 99 THE LAST OF THE 'WALTZ ACROSS TEXAS' AND OTHER STORIES (1993) from Maybe [Dessa:] I am not telling this for sympathy. I don't like sympathy and I don't want any ofit. Harry'll say I made my own bed and I now have the honor of lying down in it. Well, maybe I did. If I did, what I'm doing right now is tucking in the corners like they ought to be tucked in. No call for sympathy here. A body feels sorry for somebody, they feel like they're better than that somebody, that's the truth. Now, I might feel different ifHarry had died, but Harry didn't die. Harry got mad at me, went to Nashville, stayed two weeks and come home married to somebody else. What I get is "Oh, poor Dessa, I feel so sorry for you ..." Well, don't. Feel sorry for Brenda ifyou want to feel sorry for somebody. She married Harry. [Brenda:] There probably isn't much I can say to keep from looking pretty crazy. Meeting a man in a bar and drinking and talking and after two weeks tying the knot is not what anybody I know thinks Dear Abby might call a good idea, me included, so I knew it was a tomfool thing to do and it was. But I'm not sorry I did it and if I was still just hanging out in Nashville, giving up whatever hopes I had-I am 37-I'd do it again in a minute. Don't get me wrong, marrying was not what I was hoping for, I don't know if! can say what I was hoping for, hope's such a mess spreading allover everything, but I was lonely and sick of trash jobs like waiting tables and getting up the next day and doing the same thing and then there was Harry and marrying Harry was the gift horse that stood grinning at me. I think I was sort ofa gift horse for Harry too, and a couple ofgift horses that are given to one another know better than to look each other in the mouth. [Harry:] Now, I am not real proud of myself. What I did was half-cocked and I knew Dessa wasn't going to like it. Even standing there in Nashville at the justice ofthe peace, I was thinking Dessa ain't gonna like this much. And then driving back up the interstate, Brenda's stuff in the back of the truck, I was doing strict 55. I never drove 55 since the law went in, but I did it coming north on 1-81 'cause it takes longer. I was driving with Brenda sitting next to me, and I was saying things a man says to a woman that just married him and he's taking her home, things about the house and who she's gonna like in the neighborhood, things like if she wants to go to chutch, I 100 LISTEN HERE reckon we could do that for awhile. But I'm thinking about what I really ought to be telling Brenda and 55 ain't slow enough to get it out. How do you say you have a common law wife you haven't talked about yet and you're getting a common law divorce right as you sit here saying it, only the common law wife doesn't know it yet? And then I'm thinking about how Dessa probably ain't gonna like Brenda even a little bit and she probably ain't gonna be very happy about my getting married. Dessa don't take up with people easy like I do. I stopped at one ofthose rest stops and I called her. I was going to say it but I couldn't think of how to start. She said "hello" and I couldn't push out a word. I just hung up. [Dessa:] Marriage is not what it's cracked up to be. I knew that right from the beginning. I knew what I was supposed to think it was and I knew what me and my friends wanted it to be. We wanted romance. Well, my mother made sure a youngun didn't get out ofher house without hearing something different. She had this list of names for daddy that began with hard-headed and ended with son-of-a-bitch and got pretty hot in between...

Share