The Late Child by Larry McMurtry Page A

He was in love with a Chicano boy who was a janitor there. Gary was happy to loan Harmony his car; his new love was on his mind, not his old Mercury.
    On her way to the airport, Harmony remembered Ross, Pepper’s father. She knew it was up to her to start looking for Ross; Gary had said he would ask around, and maybe he would, but Gary had never thought much of Ross. He had even sort of opposed the effort Harmony made to get back with Ross, seven years earlier, when Ross was working as a light man in Reno.
    Gary had been right about that one, her effort to hitch up with Ross again had been El Floppo, as Myrtle would say. Harmony knew before she went to Reno that Ross was involved with a young woman named Linda, who happened to be pregnant by him at the time, but she had allowed herself to be convinced thatRoss’s relationship with Linda was just kind of a roommate thing. Then Harmony got to Reno and found out that the relationship with Linda
wasn’t
just a roommate thing—it was closer to being a mad passion; why Ross had even urged her to come to Reno she never knew. On the whole, that venture had been pretty discouraging—so discouraging that she hadn’t talked to Ross a single time since she got herself back on the bus and limped back to Las Vegas. For the next year or two her self-esteem was at a low ebb, which is probably why she ended up getting pregnant by Webb.
    Still, getting pregnant by Webb had produced Eddie, just as getting pregnant by Ross had produced Pepper: Harmony was not willing to think of either guy as just a total mistake.
    â€œHarmony, never go out with a guy with sideburns like that,” Gary had said, in disgust, the first time he met Webb. “Those sideburns are from another age.”
    It was true that Webb had biker sideburns—he had mainly been a biker until he got in the tow-truck business.
    â€œGary, I guess my standards are just different,” Harmony said. She couldn’t imagine rejecting a guy with a shy grin like Webb’s just because his sideburns were a little long—that was before she knew about the impatience, of course, or any of Webb’s other bad habits, such as having five or six girlfriends strung out up and down I-15, from Las Vegas to San Bernardino.
    Speaking of impatience, Gary himself didn’t have much room to talk; he was becoming more and more intolerant of her boyfriends, although quite a few of
his
boyfriends were really nothing to write home about.
    â€œYour standards are the standards a doormat would have if a doormat wanted to claim it had standards,” Gary said. He was on his way down from taking too much speed and was unusually bitchy—later he apologized for that remark. It
had
hurt Harmony’s feelings; she didn’t feel she was exactly a doormat because she tried to be accepting of things about her menfolk that maybe she wasn’t too fond of, such as Jimmy’s digestive condition or Webb’s impatience; after all, nobody was perfect and if youweren’t willing to put up with a little imperfection in a guy, here and there, then the alternative was to have no relationship, and be alone.
    Harmony had gone to see Pepper’s rich husband, Mel, in the hospital in Tulsa, a few days before he died of pancreatic cancer. Mel was very weak at the time, he was on his way out and he knew it, but being weak didn’t make Mel less smart. Even if Pepper and Mel hadn’t actually lived together very long, before Pepper went to New York, Harmony considered that her daughter was lucky to have been married to a man who was so smart. Mel’s eyes were tired when Harmony visited him the last time; she could tell that he had had about enough of the pain and the struggle. Harmony was feeling apologetic about Pepper. After all, Pepper and Mel were still married and Mel was dying, but Pepper didn’t come to visit him—it seemed to her that Pepper ought to make a little more effort to be a