Free Moving On by Larry McMurtry

paint on the thin table legs.
    “I’m so emotional,” she said with a quaver.
    He chuckled and reached across the napkin full of orange seeds and patted her hand. “Well, what you and him need to do is buy my ranch,” he said. “Then pretty soon you’d be as broke as me and you wouldn’t have no problems like that.”
    He stood up, neatly arranged his plate, knife, fork, cup, and saucer, and carried them to the sink. “Wish you’d clean up these dishes for me,” he said. “I’ve got about three days’ work to do today and I better get started.”
    He reached into the cabinet, got a toothpick out of a box, and stood looking at her thoughtfully while he picked his teeth.
    “Only drawback to that is that you might not be no better at ranchin’ than I am,” he said. “I been at it fifty years and get worse at it ever year. Least that’s the way it looks in the bankbook.”
    Patsy looked up in disbelief. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I can’t imagine you not being good at things. You just look like you’d be good at things.”
    “Oh, well, that’s just my noble bearing,” he said, smiling and pleased. “You seen yourself how I cooked them eggs. One nice thing about a wife, she keeps a man reminded of how good for nothin’ he is. Mary used to let me know her low opinion of me every morning and I worked like a dog all day hoping I could change it. Never did. She bawled me out the morning she went and had the car wreck.”
    He went out to the back porch and got his straw hat and then came back to the door of the kitchen. Patsy sat at the table, her feet drawn up to the top rung of her chair.
    “I will wash the dishes,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
    “I won’t. Hope you-all can find enough to eat to keep you from starving.”
    She was expecting some advice, some country platitude about life and its problems, but Roger just tipped his faded straw hat to her and turned and left.
    When she heard the pickup start she got up and did the few dishes, leisurely, not liking the heavy soap but unable to find any detergent. She did like standing at the sink by the open window, smelling the cool morning and the trees and weeds of the north yard. It surprised her that such dry country could have so many nice smells when it was dampened a little.
    Once finished, she put the dishes away where she hoped they belonged and, since Roger was not there to be nervous, poked around in the cabinet a bit to see what was there. The knives and forks and most of the utensils were old, so old that most of them had wooden handles, very smooth from many washings and with a faint woody smell of their own. She liked them, they seemed better to the touch than her own stainless and sterling, and it occurred to her that if she and Jim ever did do anthying crazy like buy a ranch she would certainly have all sorts of wood in her kitchen—wooden spoons and wooden bowls and perhaps a huge wooden block for cutting meat on. With a bright woody good-smelling kitchen with a window that looked out on a slope and a deep sky, her cooking might even improve, though probably not. She would stand and look out too long.
    She went slowly back up the stairs and got her hand lotion off the bureau and sat again in the chair by the window, rubbing lotion into her hands. Jim was sleeping on his back. She felt a little lonely and would have liked him awake, but probably he would wake up either sulky or sexy and at the moment she felt as cool and unpassionate as if she had become a virgin again. More likely still, he would wake up professional; there were four days’ worth of pictures to be mailed. The next day they were to go to Phoenix, and as Jim was a fanatic marathon driver it would probably be a very long day. She took off her robe, got Incidents of Travel in Yucatan , and lay on the bed on her stomach reading and occasionally tickling her husband’s chest with the ends of her hair, until the warming day made her drowsy and she flopped the book open