Read Online Moving On by Larry McMurtry - Free Book Online Page A

His pickup was parked between the chicken house and the barn, an ancient Chevrolet twice as old as the Ford, with sideboards that had not been painted in so long that they were gray.
    He called to the milk cow and let her and the red calf into the barn. The sun was burning the mist away. When he emerged from the barn he had a full bucket of milk and set it carefully on a wheelbarrow near the lot. He filled a hayrack with yellow hay and got his milk bucket and carried it slowly to the house.
    Patsy felt talkative. She laid her book and comb on the window-sill, belted her blue robe about her, and skipped quickly down the stairs to meet him.
    “Hi,” she said. “So this is what morning’s like. Want me to help you with breakfast?”
    Roger was a tall old man, with hair thin and quite white and so molded to his temples by years of being beneath the same hat that it stayed molded even when he took the hat off.
    “Sure, start helping,” he said. He set the heavy milk bucket on the smooth blanched wood of the drain-board. Patsy had watched him strain it through some cheesecloth into a strainer only the evening before, and she determined that straining the milk would be her first rural task. She began to open drawers at random, looking for the cheesecloth.
    Roger became nervous as she rapidly progressed through the drawers. He got the cheesecloth, which hung on a towel rack over the sink. “You’re an energetic creature, Patsy,” he said. “Don’t you have no shoes? You been here two days now and I ain’t seen you with shoes on yet.”
    Patsy was busy reopening the drawers he had just closed, as she had in mind cooking bacon and wanted a fork to turn it with. She noticed that he was watching her as if he expected to have the entire contents of his cabinets dumped on the kitchen floor, and actually a good number of implements were scattered on the drain-board, but she intended to put them back as soon as she had a chance. The blue milk strainer, an antique almost, stood on the back porch. She held the cheesecloth between her teeth and used both hands to carry the milk bucket out there. How she was going to affix the cheesecloth and pour too she didn’t know, and Roger Wagonner didn’t know either. Whatever he envisioned her doing made him so nervous that he undiplomatically took the bucket and strained the milk himself while she went back and started the bacon frying.
    “You don’t trust me,” she said. “You’re perfectly right not to. I don’t know why I think I’m a milkmaid, but it seems a lovely thing to be on a morning like this. I guess I must have read about milkmaids. Thomas Hardy has them in numerous books and they’re always at their best on mornings like this. If we’re going to have biscuits you’ll have to make them and I’ll do the oven part. I’ve never made biscuits from scratch.”
    Watching her wandering about the kitchen in her blue robe, standing on one foot now and then to scratch her bare calf with a toe, Roger Wagonner shook his head and resigned himself with a smile to the chaos females bring to an orderly house. Patsy fried the bacon but then sat down at the table to peel an orange and eat it, dropping the peel and in time each seed on a white napkin spread on the checkered oilcloth. She talked all the while of the mist and the milk cow and this and that, and Roger fixed the biscuits and fried four eggs hard as stones and got the breakfast around her. It was not until he bent over stiffly and slowly to peer into the oven at the browning biscuits, and the hip pocket of his faded Levi’s came into her vision, that Patsy remembered she had been going to cook.
    “Oh, dear,” she said, blushing and jumping up. She ran to the cabinet and looked desperately for something to do, but he had even put the plates on the table while she was chattering.
    “I’m terrible,” she said. “You have every right to be suspicious of me. I’m completely impractical.”
    “Now quit apologizin’ and