I ended my affair with the Beverly Hills painter only to begin a new one—this one with my wife. With counseling behind us, each of us moved several giant steps in the other’s direction. I kept both hands in the art business but traveled less and spent more time with Deborah, Carson, and Regan. I also began to take spiritual matters more seriously. Deborah, meanwhile, continued her volunteer work and her pursuit of God, but committed time to the things that interested me.
Chief among those became Rocky Top, the 350-acre ranch we bought in 1990. Perched on a three-hundred-foot mesa overlooking a shimmering arc of the Brazos River, the ranch house became a refuge for our family. We decorated it cowboy-style, from the buffalo head over the stone fireplace to the autographed his-and-hers boots from Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to the herd-sized trestle table we parked in the kitchen, big enough to seat fifteen hungry hands. So authentic and picturesque were the architecture and decor that style magazines photographed the house for feature stories, movie directors paid to use it as a set, and Neiman Marcus began shooting its Christmas catalogs there.
But for Deborah, the kids, and I, Rocky Top was a place to escape the clamor of the city. Bald eagles soared and dived above the Brazos, their high keen startling the deer that frequented the river’s edge. In a verdant pasture below the house, we kept twenty-eight longhorn cattle. (Every year, Deborah gave their babies terribly un-cowboyish names like Sophie and Sissy, and I let her.) And during the spring, lush thickets of bluebonnets covered the rolling chaparral like a violet quilt.
Carson and Regan were teenagers when we settled in at Rocky Top, and they spent their last few years before college importing carloads of friends, hunting, fishing, and exploring miles of winding trails on horseback.
At the ranch, Deborah and I cemented our relationship as best friends and ardent lovers, growing so close that we began to joke that we felt “velcroed at the hearts.” The ranch also became our geographical anchor, a place that, wherever else we might move, we knew we would always call home.
As it turned out, we did move. In 1998, tired of the Park Cities, the Dallas rat race, and what Deborah would later describe as “twelve years of exile in the ‘far east,’” we returned to Fort Worth. We moved into a French mansard-roofed rental home on a golf course and began building our new home on a secluded lot near a nature preserve on the Trinity River. Then we began to plan what we thought would be the last half of our lives.
We hadn’t been in Fort Worth for more than a few days when Deborah spied an item in the Star-Telegram about homelessness in the city. The piece mentioned a place called the Union Gospel Mission. At the time, an insistent voice in Deborah’s heart told her it was a place she might fit. Not long afterward, a letter arrived from Debbie Brown, an old friend, inviting us to join “Friends of the Union Gospel Mission,” a circle of philanthropic donors. Deborah immediately told me that not only did she want to join, she also intended to inquire about volunteering at the mission itself.
“I was hoping you’d go with me,” she said, smiling and tilting her head in a way so irresistible I sometimes thought she should register it for a patent.
The mission, on East Lancaster Street, was tucked deep in a nasty part of town. While it was true that the murder rate in Texas had been falling, I was sure that anyone still doing any murdering probably lived right around there.
I smiled back. “Sure I’ll go.”
But secretly, I hoped that once she actually rubbed shoulders with the kind of scuzzy derelicts that had robbed my gallery, Deborah would find it too scary, too real, to volunteer on East Lancaster. Then we could revert to doing our part by dropping off some old clothes or furniture—or, if she really found it tough to tear herself away, more money.
I should’ve known better, for other than yellow jackets and black-diamond ski slopes, Deborah feared only one thing.