Free Before He Wakes by Jerry Bledsoe Page A

helping with youth activities. She didn’t want to come back to Randolph County and more strife. Strangely, though, she offered a compromise. They would remain apart. But Larry could take Bryan. She would keep Jason.
    Larry said no. He wanted his family whole. He came home convinced that it was mainly Barbara’s mother who stood in his way. “These things happen, Larry,” he said she had told him, as if everything had been settled. There was a smugness about her, he thought, a sense of victory that Barbara was now back under her control and could be set again upon the right path.
    Although he had entered his marriage reluctantly, Larry turned around to become its proponent. He was willing to forgive Barbara’s infidelities and overlook their mistakes. If both were willing to change their attitudes and work at it, he was certain that they could make a go of the marriage and provide a stable and happy family life for Bryan and Jason, and he didn’t intend to give up until his family was reunited. He kept trying, and in March Barbara gave in and agreed to try a reconciliation.
    It was quickly clear to Larry’s family that Larry had not been the only one to suffer from the troubles in his family.
    “The biggest change was in Bryan,” Jane later recalled. “He was so sad. The look in his eyes was just a haunted look. I’d never seen that in a child before.”
    If Larry thought that reuniting his family would bring them happiness, he was mistaken. Barbara’s compulsions would continue to grow and would make their next break permanent.
    6
    The pattern that had emerged in Barbara’s life would be evident later. She had to push the boundaries, one way or the other. When she was not having affairs, she was spending money. When she was not spending, she was having affairs. Soon after she moved back to Randolph County to try to salvage her marriage, she resumed spending.
    Larry’s family marveled at the things Barbara bought and wondered how she could keep doing it. She made only $175 a week at the job she took as a customer service representative at a newly formed company in High Point that supplied upholstery fabric to furniture manufacturers. And Larry wasn’t making all that much more. How were they going to pay for everything when their budget was already stretched to the breaking point?
    “If they’d been millionaires, it wouldn’t have been enough,” Larry’s brother Ronnie said years later.
    Barbara’s new boss could have told them how she was able to get away with it to some extent. She had made it clear to him that she was the boss at home and controlled the finances.
    If Larry was distressed by Barbara’s spending at this time, he didn’t show it. He seemed relieved just to have his family back together, and he was trying hard to keep the peace and make the marriage work. Although his parents no longer trusted Barbara because of the pain she had caused Larry, they suppressed their feelings for his sake. They still went for visits to their son’s house. Larry, Barbara and the children still came for Doris’s Sunday dinners. But Larry’s siblings started to avoid them. They not only resented Barbara for the way she had treated their brother, they didn’t like the way she looked down on them and their parents. And they didn’t want to hear Barbara bragging about the new things she had bought.
    Barbara became friends with Shirley Gilbert* at work, and Shirley visited at her house on several occasions, once going for a cookout. She got the impression that Barbara and Larry had a good relationship, and they both were clearly devoted to the children. Later, though, Barbara began telling her about a woman with whom Larry worked, implying that he had had an affair with her. Shirley was surprised. Larry just didn’t seem the type to do that.
    Although she couldn’t have known, Barbara’s implication of an affair by Larry was justification for further sexual adventures of her own. Barbara restrained herself