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?