Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry Read Free Book Online Page B

lobbying force that would keep it from being such a him-against-them kind of thing.
    While he sipped his bourbon, rehearsing in his mind a few of the points he meant to cover in his statement, Julie came back, trailed closely by Annette and the three kids she and Dickie had produced in ten years of an off-again, on-again union: Loni, Barbi, and Sami, it being Annette’s desire that all her kids’ names end with i . Loni was nine, Barbi six, and Sami four. Annette was a willowy brunette, the tallest woman in Thalia; she went through life wearing a dreamy smile that reflected her good nature, and also the fact that she smoked a lot of dope. Even the convenience store managers that Annette had robbed reported that she had continued to smile pleasantly and remain perfectly courteous while holding them at gunpoint.
    Of the children, Loni and Sami were as good-natured as their mother, but Barbi, a dark midge of a child, was the opposite in all respects of the doll she had been named after. All the other grandkids thought Barbi was a witch, and the older three had only just been prevented from burning her at the stake. The UPS man, who was at the house virtually every day, delivering things Karla had ordered from various catalogues, noticed that something weird was going on and raced over and stopped it just before Bubbles and Willy could get the kindling to light. Barbi, silent and malevolent, had been tied to a fence post.
    “Hi, Annette,” Duane said, when the group walked in. “Why, there’s my Sami.”
    “And there’s my Loni and my Barbi,” Karla said. Grandparental favoritism, where Dickie’s children were concerned, had divided along the lines of gender.
    “I think it’s stupid that that old rehab center won’t even let Dickie make a phone call,” Annette said. “I just miss him to pieces. What could one little phone call hurt?”
    “Plenty, because he’d make it to the drug dealer, not to hisloving wife,” Karla reminded her. “That’s what he did last time he was in, remember?”
    “Shut up talking about dope—here comes my gourmet cooking,” Rag informed them. Soon the large kitchen table was covered with all the things Rag liked to cook: platters of round steak for the masses, bowls of her signature cream gravy, hominy, black-eyed peas, sauerkraut—a personal passion of Rag’s not shared with much intensity by the people she fed—okra, a mound of baked potatoes, grilled onions, and hot rolls.
    “Sit down and eat with us, Rag,” Duane said. “I hate to eat when somebody’s working.”
    He said it every night; asking Rag to eat with them was a prelude to every meal, as grace had once been, but Rag had no interest in eating her gourmet cooking. Instead, she repaired to the little pantry, where she smoked and watched I Love Lucy reruns on a small TV, occasionally popping back in to pile more food on the table or check on the cobbler she held in readiness for dessert.
    “In my day the help didn’t eat with the family,” she said, when Duane asked her to sit down and eat.
    “What if we adopt you, would you eat with us then?” he once asked, out of curiosity.
    “No, because if I start eating my gourmet cooking I’ll get fat and lose my figure,” Rag replied. The truth was that she preferred to stop by the Dairy Queen and pick up a cheeseburger and a few tacos to munch while watching the midnight reruns, her favorite being The Mary Tyler Moore Show , all one hundred and sixty-eight episodes of which she had seen at least once; she could recite whole episodes almost verbatim, and would, if asked. She could do passable imitations of Mary, Phyllis, Lou Grant, Rhoda, Ted, Georgette, and Murray. All the grandkids listened attentively but the one most won by Rag’s performances was Little Bascom, who would roll on the floor laughing hysterically, although he had never seen The Mary Tyler Moore Show and had no idea what Rag was doing.
    Although both Julie and Annette were professing vegetarianism