Free Moving On by Larry McMurtry Page A

on the floor by the bed and went to sleep.

5
    E LEANOR BREAKFASTED outside in the summertime, on the second-floor patio of her ranch house. She exercised early, on a yellow foam-rubber exercise pad on the patio, and then she showered and put on a slip and a white robe and went back outside, her heavy graying blond hair pulled back and held by an orange headband. The ranch house was a long two-story brown stucco that her mother had built in the twenties, when she was no longer able to abide the creaking three-story frame mansion that had been the Guthrie home for two generations. The patio was on the east side of the house, sunny in the mornings, shady in the afternoons, and was Eleanor’s favorite place on the whole ranch.
    She sat at a tiled table at the edge of the patio looking down on the long green lawn that stretched south almost to the barns and corrals. Lucy brought her a grapefruit and some French toast and coffee, and she leafed through a New Yorker as she ate, mostly looking at the ads and the cartoons. Below her the Mexican gardeners were already at work, spading the flower beds and getting ready to water the hedges. To the south, in front of the barns, ten cowhands were saddling up, fiddling with their girths and rope and listening to the foreman outline the day’s work. To the north were her wheatfields, stretching halfway to Red River, and, beyond the barns, to the south and west, the rolling broken country of the ranch spread in a great circle. The ranch house was almost on its rim.
    She ate the French toast and would have liked more but didn’t call Lucy. The sun was up, the air bright and still cool. Soon the air would be merely a shimmer of heat and she would be driven inside.
    As she ate and turned pages and watched the cowboys mounting she saw a white elongating cloud of dust on the road that led from the highway to the ranch house. The highway was three miles away; the road that led to it ran between the wheatfields and the horse pasture. Long before the hearse swung into the circular driveway below her, Eleanor knew who was coming. Others drove as fast as Sonny, and raised as much dust, but seldom at that hour of the morning; and anyway, she always knew when Sonny was coming. In fifteen years she had learned to tell.
    He parked the hearse just beneath her and got out but didn’t look up. In a few minutes she heard the click of his bootheels as he crossed the bedroom floor. All the floors in the house were dark wood, kept bare except for a few Mexican rugs.
    She looked up at him just as his hand gave her shoulder a quick hard squeeze. “Why, hello,” she said.
    Sonny bent and kissed her lightly and then went around the table. “I’m starved,” he said. His chin was dark with stubble, his black hair tousled and uncombed, and his shirttail out. Though he smiled at her arrogantly, he looked a little bushed.
    “Sit down and have breakfast with me,” she said. “We can chat about old times.”
    “How you fixed for steaks?”
    “I’m sure we have some. Steaks are our reason for existing. Ask Lucy to fix you one.”
    “I don’t think I ate yesterday,” he said. “Maybe I’ll ask her to fix me two.”
    He did, and also fixed himself a drink, and came back and sat down across from her, swirling the ice in his glass.
    “Beautiful as ever,” he said. “You dye them streaks in?”
    “I’ve never dyed my hair,” she said. “As you well know.” Her eyes were still on The New Yorker .
    Sonny stood up, smiled, took the magazine from her, whistled sharply at one of the Mexican gardeners, and cooly sailed The New Yorker over the patio railing. Its pages fluttered as it fell to the ground. The gardener was fat and slow and didn’t catch it, but he picked it up and without waiting for instructions took it into the house to Lucy, who understood all mysteries.
    “You can be a bore,” Eleanor said, a little irritated. “I like to read while I eat.”
    “If there was another woman like you