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

let’s eat,” he said, sitting down. He wore a clean brown khaki work shirt with the cuffs turned up. The hair on his wrists was as white as the hair on his head, but his wrists were strong-looking, old as he was. He cut through his eggs diagonally. They had been fried in bacon grease and the outsides were brown.
    “I guess I’m a shade nervous,” he said. “Haven’t had to cope with a female in this kitchen in the morning for eleven years. That’s how long it’s been since Mary got killed.”
    He said the last merely as one states a fact, with no self-pity or nostalgia. Patsy could not understand how he could eat eggs fried so hard.
    “How come you fry them that way?” she asked.
    “Because it don’t take no talent. You just leave ’em in the frying pan till they’re hard enough to bounce.”
    The coffee stopped perking at just that time and Patsy noticed and jumped up before Roger could even scoot back his chair. She poured them cups. The cups were white and thick and had little thin cracks running down their sides. Roger immediately poured half of his coffee into a saucer. His food was already gone. He tilted his chair back, the saucer in one hand, and began to blow on the coffee gently and sip it as it steamed.
    “Mary never went barefooted that I can remember,” he said, still more thoughtful than nostalgic.
    “Apparently ladies didn’t in earlier days,” Patsy said, contemplating the two brown eggs that seemed to be her responsibility. The peanut butter, the orange, and a sliver of bacon had filled her completely and she was nervous about the eggs. She had heard that in the country food was never wasted.
    “Where you and Jim going next?”
    “Phoenix.”
    “Going in that car?”
    “Sure.” She felt suddenly loyal to the Ford. She cut a little corner off one egg to see what the yolk of an egg looked like when it was fried that hard. “It’s our only car. Your pickup is older than it is and you still drive it, don’t you?”
    “Well, naturally,” Roger said. “No use buying nothin’ new at my age. I don’t go out tourin’ the world in it, though. Besides, I’m pore. If old Jim’s gonna haul you all over the country he oughta buy you a better automobile than that. He can afford it. You could probably even get a pair of shoes out of him if you sweet-talked him a little.”
    Patsy sighed and started to eat the bite of egg and then decided not to eat any egg. She felt too good to stuff herself with things she didn’t want, duty or no duty. Perhaps there were pigs that the eggs could be fed to, though she had not noticed any.
    “He doesn’t like being able to afford so much, you see,” she said gravely. Jim’s wealth was one of their big problems. Her people were new rich, his not so new, and far richer. She did not think it would be polite to talk about the problem of having too much money to a person who had the problem of having too little.
    “Just leave them eggs, honey,” Roger said kindly. “I’ve seen strong men who couldn’t choke down my cooking. Why would anyone not like being able to afford things? I’ve wished I was able to afford things all my life.”
    “You’re a nice man,” she said smiling, but she felt almost tearful. Small gracious things, like about the eggs, sometimes flooded her with feelings of gratitude. A shadow came under her eyes and the old man saw it. “He doesn’t really know how to do any one thing,” she said. “But he can afford not to, of course. He just hates it. It’s such a silly problem to have when there are so many people, you know, like the poor, who have real problems.”
    Uncle Roger looked at her and she saw in his lined, firm face and the twist of his smile that she had touched him, that even though they had only known each other three days he was fond of her, perhaps had just become fond of her as they sat at the breakfast table. Her throat closed and she was choked with feeling and began to scrape with her toenail at the white