They stood looking at her impassively. Their aunt was still holding their wrists.
Yes, they have.
Well, I’m sure they won’t do it anymore. There’s too little for them to do up here.
They can’t do that anymore. I won’t have it.
So that was the end of that. They were forbidden to go out onto the balcony.
At the end of the week they woke one night in the dark and discovered that their mother wasn’t in the room. They opened the door and went out into the living room. No lights were on, but the curtain was drawn back from the glass balcony door and the lights of the city came in through the glass. Their mother was sitting on the davenport with a blanket wrapped around her. Though she was awake, so far as they could see, she wasn’t doing anything.
Mother?
What is it? she said. What woke you?
We wondered where you were.
I’m just out here, she said. It’s all right. Go back to bed.
Can’t we sit here with you?
If you want. It’s cool out here though.
I’ll get a blanket, Ike said.
But you won’t like it, their mother said. I’m not very good company.
Mother, can’t you come home again? Bobby said. What good is it here?
No. Not yet, she said.
When?
I don’t know, she said. I’m not sure. Here. Slide closer. You’re getting cold. I should make you go back to bed. They sat for a long time watching out the window.
The boys were glad the next day when their father returned to pick them up. They wanted to go home again, but they felt confused and uneasy about leaving their mother in Denver in the apartment with her sister. Guthrie tried to make them talk on the way back. They wouldn’t say very much of anything, though. They didn’t want to be disloyal to their mother. The trip seemed to take a long time. Once they were in the house upstairs in their own bedroom it was better. They could look out and see the corral and windmill and horse barn.
McPherons
There was no school between Christmas and New Year’s. Victoria Roubideaux stayed out in the country in the old house back off the county road with the McPheron brothers, and the days seemed slow. The ground was covered in thin dirty patches of ice and the weather stayed cold, the temperature never rising above freezing, and in the night it was bitterly cold. She stayed inside the house and read popular magazines and baked in the kitchen, while the brothers came and went from the house, haying cattle and chopping ice in the stock tanks, paying close attention all the time to the steady advance of pregnancy in the two-year-old heifers, since they would be the most trouble during calving, and returned to the kitchen from the farm lots and pastures, ice-bound and half frozen, with their blue eyes watery and their cheeks as red as if they had been burnt. In the house Christmas had been quiet and there were no particular plans for New Year’s.
By the middle of the week the girl had begun to spend long hours in her room, sleeping late in the morning and staying up at night listening to the radio and fixing her hair, reading about babies, thinking, fiddling in a notebook.
The McPheron brothers didn’t know what to make of this behavior. They had grown accustomed to her school-week routine, when she had gotten up and eaten breakfast with them every morning and then gone to school on the bus and afterward had come home from her classes and was often out in the parlor reading another magazine or watching television when they came in for the evening. They had begun to talk more easily with her and to rehearse together the happenings of the passing days, finding the threads of things that interested them all. So it bothered them now that she’d begun to spend so many hours by herself. They didn’t know what she was doing in her room, but they didn’t want to ask her either. They didn’t think it was their right to ask or query her. So instead they began to worry.
Late in the week, driving back to the house in the pickup in the evening, Harold said, Don’t Victoria seem kind of sorry and miserable to you lately?
Yes. I’ve noted it.
Because she stays in bed too late. That’s one thing.
Maybe they do, Raymond said. Young girls might all do like that, by their natures.
Till nine-thirty in the morning? I went back into the house for something the other day and she was just getting up.
I don’t know, Raymond said. He looked out over the rattling hood of the pickup. I reckon she’s just getting bored and lonesome.
Maybe, Harold said. But if she is, I don’t know if that’s good for the baby.
What isn’t good for the baby?
Feeling lonesome and sorry like that. That can’t be good for him. On top of staying up all manner of hours and sleeping all morning.
Well, Raymond said. She needs her sleep.
She needs her regular sleep. That’s what she needs. She needs regular hours.
How do you know that?
I don’t know that, Harold said, not for a certified fact. But you take a two-year-old heifer that’s carrying a calf. She’s not up all night long, restless, moving around, is she.
What are you talking about? Raymond said. How in hell does that apply to anything?
I started thinking about it the other day. The similarities amongst em. Both of them is young. Both of them’s out in the country with only us here to watch out for em. Both is carrying a baby for the first time. Just think about it.
Raymond looked at his brother in amazement. They had arrived at the house and stopped on the frozen rutted drive in front of the wire gate. Goddamn it, he said, that’s a cow. You’re talking about cows.
I’m just saying, is all, Harold said. Give it some thought.
You’re saying she’s a cow is what you’re saying.
I’m not either saying that.
She’s a girl, for christsakes. She’s not a cow. You can’t rate girls and cows together.
I was only just saying, Harold said. What are you getting so riled up about it for?
I don’t appreciate you saying she’s a heifer.
I never said she was one. I wouldn’t say that for money.
It sounded like it to me. Like you was.
I just thought of it, is all, Harold said. Don’t you ever think of something?
Yeah. I think of something sometimes.
Well then.
But I don’t have to say it. Just because I think of it.
All right. I talked out before I thought. You want to shoot me now or wait till full dark?
I’ll have to let you know, Raymond said. He looked out the side window toward the house where the lights had been switched on in the darkening evening. I just reckon she’s getting bored. There’s nothing to do out here. No school nor nothing else now.
She don’t appear to have many friends to speak of, Harold said. That’s one thing for sure.
No. And she don’t call nobody and nobody calls her, Raymond said.
Maybe we ought to take her in to town to a picture show sometime. Do something like that.
Raymond stared at his brother. Why, you just flat amaze me.
What’s wrong now?
Well, do you want to attend a movie show? Can you see us doing that? Sit there while some Hollywood movie actor pokes his business into some naked girl on the screen while we’re sitting there eating salted popcorn watching him do it — with her sitting there next to us.
Well.
Well.
Okay, Harold said. All right then.
No sir, Raymond said. I didn’t think you’d want to do that.
But by God, we got to do something, Harold said.
I ain’t arguing that.
Well, we do, goddamn it.
I said I know, Raymond said. He rubbed his hands together between his knees, warming them; his hands were chafed and red, cracked. It does appear to me like we just did this, he said. Or something next to it. That night when we was talking to her about the market. I tell you, it seems like you get one thing fixed and something else pops up. Like with a young girl like her, you can’t fix nothing permanent.