Eventide - Kent Haruf [66]
Strawberry, Richie said.
Betty brought the drinks and they sat down at the kitchen table. Luther took a package of lasagna from the freezer and put it in the microwave, and it came out steaming and he set it on the table, and Betty got down paper plates left over from a birthday party and they began to eat.
When they were finished, Luther and Betty walked the children back to their bedrooms and left the door open at Richie’s room so he could see the light in the hall. Then Luther went into his and Betty’s room, and he undressed and got into bed in his underwear and stretched out. The bed sagged and complained under his weight. Dear, he called, ain’t you coming to bed?
In a minute, Betty said. But she had stayed in the front room and was sitting on the couch now, watching the snow falling in the front yard and out in Detroit Street. After a while she took up the phone, set it in her lap, and made a call to a house in Phillips. A woman answered.
I’d like to speak to Donna, please, Betty said. I want to talk to Donna Jean.
Who’s calling? the woman said.
This is her mother.
Who?
Her mother. This is Betty Wallace.
You, the woman said. You’re not supposed to call here. Don’t you know that?
I want to talk to her. I ain’t going to do nothing.
It’s against the regulations.
I won’t hurt her. I wouldn’t hurt her for nothing in the world.
Listen to me. You want me to put her on the phone and have her tell you herself you’re not her mother anymore? Is that what you want me to do?
I am too her mother, Betty said. You ain’t suppose to say something like that to me. I’m always going to be her mother. I give birth to her, out of my own self.
Oh no, the woman said. That’s not what the court order says. I’m her mother now. And don’t you ever call here again. I’ll call the police. I got enough trouble on account of her without you making it worse.
What kind of trouble? Is something the matter with Donna?
That’s none of your business. The Lord will guide me. I don’t need any help from you. The woman hung up.
Betty put the receiver down and sat motionless on the couch, and presently she began to cry.
Outside the trailer house the snow continued to fall. It fell thickly in the yard and in the street in front and it kept falling until midnight, then it began to diminish and by one o’clock it had stopped altogether. The sky cleared and the cold brilliant stars came out.
Betty woke then, lying on the couch. It was cold in the room and she rose and walked back to their bedroom and pulled off her thin dress and stepped out of her underwear and unfastened her bra. She put on a tattered yellow nightgown and lay down beside Luther in the sagging bed. Shivering and cold, she pulled the blankets up and moved closer to him. Then she began to remember what the woman had said to her. How her voice had been. You want me to put her on the phone and have her tell you herself you’re not her mother anymore. Betty lay in bed beside Luther, remembering. Soon she began to cry again. She cried quietly for a long time and at last fell asleep against his great warm wide bare back.
26
CHRISTMAS EVE OBSERVANCE WAS GENERAL IN HOLT. There were candlelight services at the local churches and family gatherings in the front rooms of the houses overlooking the quiet streets, and out on the east side of town on US Highway 34 the bartender Monroe kept the Chute Bar and Grill open until two o’clock in the morning.
Hoyt Raines was sitting in a back booth with a middle-aged divorcée named Laverne Griffith, a fleshy maroon-haired woman twenty years his senior. She was buying and they were sitting close together on the same side of the booth, their drinks before them next to the ashtray on the scarred wooden table.
The Chute had been decorated for the season. Loops of red and green lights were festooned above the bar and silver tassels hung from the mirror. A half-dozen men were sitting at the bar, drinking and talking, and an old woman was asleep with her head in her arms at a far table. From the jukebox Elvis Presley was singing I