“All my mother wants is someone to help her. The only reason she wants Brian there is for the Social Security. The only reason Uncle Bill wants Brian is for the Social Security.”
“I’m tired,” said Lisa. “My mom came in again last night and woke me up, crazy, yelling, acting stupid. What’s the worst thing your mom’s ever done?”
Chris furrowed his brow and looked away. “One time, my mom tried to stab me. Another time, she tried to shoot me. Another time, she tried to run over me. You know,” he said, looking back at Lisa, “I love your mother to death, but when she’s drinking, I can’t stand her. It’s my mom all over again.”
He shook his head. To Chris Hatton, alcohol meant abuse. Holly and Chris had had talk after talk about such things when his uncle Bill was away at National Guard school. He sat there in silence, but his aunt Holly’s words were loud in his memory: “You have a history of alcoholism in the family. Keep in mind that it is hereditary. You have a tendency to become an alcoholic. Be careful.”
Lisa Pace had been smoking weed socially since she was twelve years old. To her, it was no big deal—one joint shared among five friends resulting in two puffs each.
“What drugs have you done?” Hatton asked her. He turned to spit a long, golden drip of tobacco juice into his Dr Pepper can. He dipped Copenhagen tobacco morning, noon, and night, even while in school.
At school, rather than put a pinch in his lip, he tucked it in the chubby part of his cheek so that his teachers couldn’t spot it, and he swallowed the juice.
He spat again. “How’d they affect you? Where were you when you were doing them?”
Lisa looked at her beautiful beau. To her, he seemed to love to hear her wild drug stories.
He’s not known for his particularly exciting life,
thought Lisa,
but he seems to like to live vicariously through others.
So, she told him.
Two weeks before Valentine’s Day, 1992, Chris wrote Lisa two Valentine’s love poems and a letter. Letters, he said, were the best way for him to express himself.
He professed that he’d never loved anyone before, that the eight months they’d been together were the best time of his life, and that Lisa had brought more happiness into his life than he’d ever expected.
“I know that we’ve both had our problems in the past with life,” he wrote, “but it looks to me like we’ve overcome them. Remember last night when you asked me to make a list of things that really bother [me about you]?
“Well, there isn’t really much that bothers me except when you talk about drugs and people that you still know that use them. What I’m trying to say is that drugs scare me. And before I moved here, I lost two good friends to drugs.”
As their relationship grew more and more serious, time and again, Chris Hatton begged Lisa Pace to get away from her drug-using friends and never do drugs again.
Lisa felt that that demand then extended to wanting her to sit by the phone, waiting for Chris to call. Not doing drugs—Lisa could handle. Sitting at home waiting—she couldn’t go for that. But she loved Chris.
He added: “As of today I will no longer promise to quit dipping. I will quit dipping, but not for me but for you.” He also promised to be more sensitive to the things he said that Lisa disliked.
“One other thing which has bothered me is that when I leave for the Navy, I worry that you’ll find someone else while I’m gone because of our age difference and you’re still in school and I want you to know that I’ll be there for you when I’m gone.”
He signed it, “I love you, Lisa, with all my heart, the good and the bad.”
The phone rang in the Hatton house. It was Brian calling from Alabama.
“She put a loaded gun to my head last night,” he told his Texas relatives. He looked around to see if his mother was coming. If she knew he was on the phone, he said, she listened on the extension. He told them that Rhonda Hatton had flipped a couple of vehicles, including a brand-new Corvette, with him in them.
Holly and Bill called Child Protective Services in Alabama.
“There’s nothing we can do because there’s no physical evidence,” said the caseworker. “It’s just your word against hers.”
Chris sat down with Lisa. “I don’t like Brian being so far away from me. I want him to move to Texas.”
Brian’s school called next.
“Brian came to school with a stab wound in his leg and came to school crying,” said his school counselor. “His mother was home all weekend, and she stabbed him in the leg with a screwdriver.”
In Dadeville, everyone knew everyone’s business, and the school counselors knew the Hatton boys’ lives. They helped the Texas Hattons take Rhonda Hatton to court and get custody of Brian.
With the boys together, Chris and Brian finally felt free to talk about the many times their mother, who was fascinated by guns, had placed a gun to their heads.
As much as Aunt Holly tried to protect the boys, she couldn’t. Holly, who’d served years in the military herself, felt that Bill treated the boys like buck privates. To her, it was abusive.
To Lisa Pace, it came across as jealousy—Chris and Lisa were having fun; Bill and Holly weren’t; so no one’s going to be happy.
Lisa and Chris made plans. Bill gave Chris a list of chores to do: clean the house, wash the car, mow the lawn. Bill Hatton lived in a black or white, right or wrong world. There were no grays, absolutely no mitigating circumstances. If the lawn wasn’t mowed the way Bill wanted it, Chris had to mow it again.
Chris constantly was late for dates. He constantly didn’t have money for dates. His excuses seemed bizarre—Bill’s constant petty chores and remown lawns—that Lisa thought he was using his uncle to get out of doing things with her.
But Chris found a way. “Uncle Bill, I’m going running,” he’d say as he jogged out the door, then he’d sprint two blocks. Waiting at the corner was either Glenn Conway or Lisa Pace. Chris would jump in the vehicle and they were gone—to a movie, McDonald’s, or Old Settler’s Park to sit and talk by the water.
Lisa was charmed by the movie idol–gorgeous young man in ball caps and cowboy hats, who could tease her and trick her into believing most any story that he told with his handsome poker face. In fact, Chris Hatton almost always spoke with a straight face. After tricking Lisa, he’d break into laughter. He loved playing mind games.
On April 2, 1992, at 10:02
P.M
., just days away from his twentieth birthday, Chris Hatton sat in his bedroom writing Lisa Pace one more love letter. “I really don’t understand my uncle and his way of thinking. I think most of all he wants me out of his house. And I can’t blame him much because most people my age are out earning a living.”
Chris Hatton may have always smiled, but inside, his sorrow was strong. “I can’t wait until I get out on my own this summer so I can finally be a free man.” He forced his pen forward and wrote of how his grades were a struggle, how he didn’t want to lose his goal of graduating.
“Most of all I don’t want to lose you, trying to reach that goal. You’re very special to me and you’ve made a big difference in my life. And I want you to be a part of it forever. I hope you’ll stick by me until I get out of school and long after. But for now, until I graduate, it’s going to be hard to spend time together. And I want you to know that it’s not that you’re boring or anything like that. I have to play by my uncle’s rules until school’s out and then I’m on my own. And then it’s to hell with him.”
Chris Hatton pledged to see Lisa Pace that night, even if he had to sneak out.
Five
In the spring of 1992, twenty-year-old Chris Hatton finally graduated high school. That summer, just before he left for the Navy, he phoned Lisa Pace. “Can you come over right now? Can you come get me? Can I stay there?”
“Sure, but let me ask my mom.” Ten minutes later, Pace, in her mother’s truck, pulled up in front of the Hatton house.
“We have to hurry before my uncle gets home because I don’t want to look at him, I don’t want to talk to him, I don’t want to hear any shit. I just want to get my stuff and get the hell out of here.”
He smashed pillows, then crammed them under his covers, making it look like he was in bed. He grabbed his clothes, still on the hangers, threw them in a blanket, grabbed the blanket full of clothes, and threw it all in the back of the truck.
Lisa Pace noticed one item on top of Chris’s dresser, which he also took with him. It was the rose from her backyard that she’d given him almost a year earlier.
Aunt Holly couldn’t really blame her nephew for his exit. In her eyes, it was as though Bill didn’t even think the boys had a right to a life of their own.
As proof, Christopher Michael Hatton had developed ulcers while living with his uncle Bill. When he left Bill’s home, his ulcers left, too.
That fall, Holly also left. Brian was now alone with Bill.
Just home from work at Long John Silver’s, Pace walked into her bedroom. At her feet were Chris Hatton’s freshly packed bags.
“I can’t trust you,” he said, his dark eyes hard. “I was going through your things, and I found this bag of weed.” It was about a quarter bag of marijuana. “And I found these pipes.” He shoved the pipes into her face.
“Well, they’re not mine,” said Lisa. “I’m just keeping them for a friend of mine because his mom always snoops through his things.”
“You’re lying. You always lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. For real, it’s not mine.”
“I want you to get rid of it. I want you to flush it down the toilet.”
They argued until Pace stamped into the bathroom, opened the bag of marijuana, watched it fill the toilet bowl, flushed the toilet, and threw the pipes into the trash.
Hatton stomped out the door and didn’t return until late that night.
“Where’ve you been?” she questioned, now the angry one.
“Out.”
“You smell like smoke. Have you been at a bar?”
“No.”
Hatton eventually admitted that he’d been riding patrol with a Round Rock police officer. That ticked Lisa Pace off. Sometimes she got sick of him desperately looking for excitement.
There was that Navy SEAL dream of his; when in reality, the job he had applied for in the Navy involved a lot of mundane painting of the ship. She climbed into bed and went to sleep. So did Hatton. He slept till almost noon.
Hazel Franzetti, Lisa’s mother, couldn’t stand the way Chris Hatton slept all day and slept through everything, including roaring vacuum cleaners.
On July 20, 1992, Chris Hatton left for the Navy. That fall, he graduated from Navy boot camp in San Diego. Lisa Pace went to watch him graduate, and he gave her a sapphire-and-diamond ring for her birthday.
Several days later, he sent her flowers and a card, also for her birthday. By then, he was writing to her almost every day.
On October 3, 1992, at 9:40
P.M
., on board ship, Hatton wrote Lisa: “I’m getting really good at this type of work.... If I could only manage money, too, I’d be the perfect housewife.” He added, “There’s only seventeen more days, and I’ll get to see you.”
From the time he hit ship, Chris Hatton hated the Navy and hated the ship—it was cold, it was dark, the food was horrible, he constantly had bronchitis due to the mold and stale air in the sleeping quarters. He hated the hours—painting all day, on watch all night, with only three hours of sleep. He could no longer watch TV all night and sleep all day. It was a far cry from swimming and fighting as a Navy SEAL.
On October 6, 1992, he wrote that he believed he and Lisa were truly meant for one another, that he wanted her to go to college, for him to get a “good-paying civilian job,” and then he “would ask for your hand, actually all of you, in marriage.”
On October 20, Chris Hatton flew to Texas on a two-week leave.
“My pass is for only three days,” he told his family so that he could spend all of his time with Lisa. “I lied to them so I wouldn’t hurt their feelings,” he told Lisa. She noticed that Chris Hatton often lied in the name of not hurting feelings.
But the day before Halloween, he and Lisa drove to the small town of Copperas Cove to visit his grandparents. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, but Lisa thought it’d be cute if he showed up at the Hattons’ door in his sailor suit, as if he were trick-or-treating.
So while Pace drove her 1980 Ford Pinto, Hatton changed into his Navy uniform. When he rang the doorbell, his grandmother looked at him as if to say, “Who’s this?”
Then Chris smiled. There was no mistaking that gorgeous grin. His grandmother broke into her own huge smile. “Come in, come in.”
Sounding almost like a bird, she ordered, “Eat, eat, eat. You need to eat. You’re too skinny.” The woman who was tiny herself hovered over her grandson’s plate. “You’re not getting enough food.”
They didn’t serve his favorites in the Navy—homemade fried chicken and Nutter Butter cookies.
The following morning, his grandmother, with loving, arthritic hands, cooked Chris and Lisa bacon, eggs, and biscuits. Chris and his grandfather left the room to let the women clean the kitchen. It was as though Chris expected to be waited on hand and foot, as if his grandfather thought a woman’s place was in the kitchen, which was tremendously different from when Chris and Lisa were together. Whoever cooked, the other was expected to clean.
On November 13, 1992, Hatton wrote Pace and told her he’d been Christmas shopping and had found a sapphire-and-diamond necklace that matched her sapphire-and-diamond ring, but with “bigger stones.” He underlined many times “bigger stones.”
“Would this be nice for you?” he said. “Or would you like a ruby or just a diamond ring—like an engagement ring?”
Lisa jumped with excitement as she read. They’d talked for months about getting married, how they wanted to have three kids, all boys. “Their” song was the country-western tune “Two of a Kind, Working on a Full House.”
“I promise, two years, and I’ll be back in Texas with you. We can get our own apartment, you can go on to college, and I’ll have a job to support us. And we can take it from there. How does that sound? I love you. And I just wanted to ask if we could get married this summer, or would you rather wait for me to get out of the Navy shithole. I can wait if you can. And if you can’t, then I’ll marry you tomorrow because you’re wonderful, beautiful, special, one-of-a-kind, and I want to always be your man. . . .”
Lisa’s father died on November 22, 1992. Three weeks later, she flew to California to see Chris Hatton. He had only one day off, which worried him. It was okay with Lisa—at least they’d get to see each other in the evening.
Pace stayed at the Navy lodge. They spent every lunch together in their room’s kitchenette, eating sandwiches and junk food from the commissary. At night they each ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, watched movies, sat and talked and laughed.
Two days before Christmas, Chris walked into their room. Clothes, suitcases, and junk lay on one double bed. The other double bed, they slept in. Lisa jumped up and greeted Chris. “I want my Christmas present now. I don’t wanna wait till Christmas. And I want to give you your present right now.”
After a bit of flirtatious bickering, they sat in bed, clothed, and Chris handed her a long, skinny box.
She gasped with excitement to him. To herself, she thought,
This is not a ring . . . unless he put it in a different box.
Inside the box was a gold watch with two rubies and four diamonds on the dial. “Oh, this is so pretty!” She put on the watch and sat back.
“Okay, now let me give you your present.” In her mind, she said,
Okay, I know I’m getting another present, but I don’t want to ask him.
“Here’s your present,” she said, smiling.
He opened a box and found a $1,000 gold ring with three channel set diamonds in it. “Wow, this is really nice,” said Chris. It could be worn as a simple ring or as a wedding ring. He reached over and hugged her and kissed her. But the ring was a bit big on his finger.
“You’ll have to have it sized,” said Lisa.
“Okay, I have one more present.”
“Oh, you do?” laughed Lisa, attempting to feign surprise.
“Well, only if you’re really good,” said Chris.
“Okay,” she said, kissing him.
He handed her another box, this one much smaller.
Lisa opened it. “Oh, it’s so pretty.” It was a diamond engagement ring. “Will you put it on me?”
Chris slipped the ring on her left hand and whispered, “Lisa, will you marry me?”
“Of course I’ll marry you!”
The following October, around Lisa’s birthday, she boarded another jet bound for San Diego. In the romantic California evening, Chris handed her a gift-wrapped package. Inside was peach-colored lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. She’d told him she’d wanted diamond earrings. She slipped on the lingerie.
“Uh,” breathed Lisa. “This color. I don’t think it really goes with my skin.”
“Here’s the receipt,” he said, handing it to her. “You can take it back.”
She dug deeper into the lingerie box and found another box. Inside was a pair of diamond earrings, a third of a karat each. Lisa Pace thanked Chris Hatton with sex.
Afterward, at dinner, Lisa reluctantly looked at her lover. “Uh, Chris.” For once, her words leaked slowly from her mouth. “I went to this party at this guy’s house. I drank too much. I spent the night, in his bed. But that was it, just slept there.”
“Who?” said Chris. “Who was it?”
“I don’t want to tell you his name or anything because that’s irrelevant. We kissed.” They kissed, hot, hungry, heavy-breathing kisses. “And it happened more than once. But I haven’t seen him in, like, three weeks.”
“I don’t believe you.” Hurt splashed across Chris’s dark brown eyes. “You wouldn’t be telling me this if you’d just kissed him.”
“He had a king-size bed, and I slept on one side, and he slept on the other. Nothing happened. I promise.”
“Well, how do you know if you were drunk?” Chris retorted.
“I wasn’t out-of-my-mind drunk. I’d just had too much to drive. And I know that I didn’t have sex with this person, and that’s what you’re implying. I think I’d know if I had sex with somebody or not.”
“Okay.” What else was there for him to say? He remembered all those times back in Round Rock when Lisa had flirted with him and everybody else in the room, all at the same time. He knew the way she touched him when they talked. He had seen the way she touched everyone when she talked. It intimidated him. And it scared him. Women just weren’t trustworthy.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Lisa replied to his silence.
“That really hurts.”
“Well . . . I felt really bad about it, so I thought I had to tell you. And now I told you, and I probably shouldn’t have told you. Whatever.” But her carefree, disgusted “whatever” belied the fact that Lisa felt like dirt for her indiscretion. She truly loved Chris Hatton.
Hatton had truly trusted Lisa Pace. Suddenly that trust was forever tainted.
Not long after Lisa Pace left San Diego, Chris Hatton got caught for driving his Chevy S-10 truck on post without insurance. “Do not drive this vehicle until you get insurance for it,” the MPs told him. Hatton didn’t get the insurance.
He was promoted to E-4 Seaman and went out with his Navy buddies to celebrate. Sometime between two-thirty and three o’clock in the November morning, the celebration turned dark. Chris Hatton got stopped for drunk driving. He was written up for DUI, no insurance, and speeding. He was sent to jail.
His truck was towed, and when he got out of jail, he couldn’t locate it. Nor could he locate his buddies. He didn’t have any money to get back to the ship, and when he finally made it back, he was in big trouble.
Hatton was given extra duty, lost his promotion, and lost his Christmas leave. He was confined to the ship, allowed to work or eat, then go back to his bunk. If he went to the head, a guard accompanied him.
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,
went through Lisa Pace’s brain. Those were the words Chris Hatton had spoken so many times when her mother had come home drunk. Now he’d gotten a DUI. And lost his Christmas leave.
Chris Hatton couldn’t stand it, either. He put on his black Skivvies and a wet suit, tucked his cash and plane ticket into a plastic Baggie, crammed the Baggie between his body and the wet suit, slipped over the ship’s side, shimmied down the anchor, swam five hundred yards to the pier, climbed up the pier to hail a cab, and raced for the airport. He walked through airport security with nothing but a wet suit and a wad of dollars.
On December 17, 1993, Chris Hatton had gone AWOL to Texas.
“What are you doing here?” said Lisa, surprised.
“I needed to see you.”
“You’re gonna get in really big trouble.”
“I’m already in really big trouble. So what?”
She looked into his handsome face. She reached over to touch him. “You better go back. I love you to death, and I want you to stay. But you’d be much better off if you’d just hurry up and go back.”
Pace felt Hatton knew something he wasn’t telling her. In Texas he had worn Justin roper cowboy boots and Levi’s jeans, listened to country-western and the mellower music of the 1960s and 1970s. With his move to San Diego, he was listening to Jimi Hendrix, the acid rock of the 1960s and 1970s. He began wearing sandals, shorts, a bit of a Ralph Lauren look. He even learned to dance by going to hip-hop clubs.