Eventide - Kent Haruf [68]
Where’s your bedroom at? Hoyt said.
Back there.
She went through the kitchen, and he walked a few steps across the room and entered the bedroom. There was a red comforter over the bed and a mirrored dresser against the bare wall. The mirror reflected the room at an odd angle, including a little closet with a naked lightbulb hanging from a cord. He switched on the lamp beside the bed and got out of his clothes, then dropped them on the floor and got in bed and pulled the cover up. He stretched out comfortably looking at the ceiling and put his hands under his head.
Laverne stepped into the room. Well, why don’t you make yourself at home?
I’m just waiting on you.
You didn’t wait long.
Come on to bed.
Don’t look at me, she said.
What?
Don’t watch me. She turned her back and removed her blouse and her slacks and hung them in the little closet and stood in the doorway facing away from him, and took off her black bra and black silky underwear. Are you looking?
No.
Yes you are.
I’m just doing what you want me to.
Like hell. Shut your eyes.
He looked at her and shut his eyes and she turned toward the bed. She was very pale and soft-looking, with a thick stomach and large fallen breasts and heavy legs, and she seemed saddened in the dim light. She crossed to the bed and crawled in under the covers. She switched off the bedside lamp.
You have to be nice to me, she said. I don’t like to be hurt.
I’m not going to hurt you.
Kiss me first.
He raised up on his side and put one hand to her face and kissed her, then he kissed her again and she lay back quietly and closed her eyes, and beneath the sheet he began to move his hand over her flattened breasts and across her soft stomach, and she said nothing more to him but seemed content just to breathe, and he went on kissing and after a while he lay on her and began to move.
When he was finished he saw that she had gone to sleep beneath him. Laverne, he said. Darlin. Hey. He looked into her sleeping face and rolled off and lay back beside her under the warm covers, and soon was asleep himself.
THE NEXT DAY HE GOT UP LATE AND MADE A BREAKFAST of eggs and coffee and buttered toast, and he sprinkled paprika on the eggs and arranged everything on a large white plate and brought all of it to her in the bedroom. She sat up with the blankets drawn around her shoulders, her maroon hair all matted and disheveled, but she seemed to be cheered now in the morning. What have you got here? she said.
Didn’t I say I’d make you breakfast?
At noon they rose from bed and spent the afternoon and the evening watching the holiday parades on television and viewing the old sweet movies that were shown at Christmastime. And in the succeeding days and weeks in the heart of winter she allowed him to stay with her in the upstairs apartment on Chicago Street while she went off to work as an aide at the Holt County Twilight Nursing Home and he took a job riding cattle pens at the feedlot east of town. He reported to the probation officer at the courthouse as the judge had ordered, and he and Laverne Griffith were still together at the middle of February, and during all that time things stayed satisfactory for Hoyt in the little apartment upstairs.
27
IN THE WEEK BETWEEN CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S they passed the long afternoons in the shed beside the alley. It was very cold in the shed and the sunlight came in only thinly from the single window. They lit candles on the table and the back shelf, and they had the blankets. For greater warmth they took to lying beside each other on the carpet in the patch of sunlight that fell in through the window.
They lay under the blankets on their backs and talked. Frequently now she talked about her mother. He recalled a memory of his own mother, how she once wore a sleeveless red blouse in the summertime, sitting in the shade on the back porch of a little house in Brush Colorado, and how she was wearing shorts and would stretch her toes in the dirt below the