The Late Child by Larry McMurtry Page B

wife in Mel’s last days as a living person.
    But when Harmony tried to apologize for her daughter, Mel smiled his sad little smile—it had been a sad little smile even before he got cancer of the pancreas—and shook his head.
    â€œWe choose our lovers for their flaws, you know,” Mel said. “People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.”
    The comment took Harmony by surprise; it was not something you would expect a dying man to say—or any man to say, for that matter.
    â€œPepper’s very very selfish,” Mel said. “You know that and I know that. Yet you and I are mature people, Harmony, and we both love her deeply even though we both know she’s totally selfish. She’s not going to walk around the block for either of us, but I’ll be thinking of her when I die, and I’ll be lucky that I had someone in my life who was flawed in such a way that I could love her that much.”
    â€œI wish you wouldn’t die, Mel,” Harmony said. He was such a kind man, and so wise, and he had been so good to Pepper.
    But, less than a week later, Mel did die—maybe it was better.At the end it was clear that he had been in too much pain, despite all the drugs they gave him. The pain still showed in his eyes.
    As Harmony was trying to ease Gary’s car into a parking space at the airport, she thought of Mel’s remark, about loving people for their flaws; she decided it was probably true. Most of the guys in her life had flaws you could drive a truck through; even so, she loved them. The one man who hadn’t seemed too flawed was Didier, her first lover, a Frenchman who produced the floor show at the Tropicana—Didier had died in a suite, upstairs at the Trop, one morning while waiting for his breakfast.
    Of course, Harmony had only been sixteen then; had she been older, she might have detected a few flaws in Didier; but she hadn’t been older, and she remembered her time with Didier as the one perfect love of her life. It was still all she could do not to cry when she thought of him, he had been so kind.
    There had been something in Didier’s kindness that reminded Harmony of Mel; she wished she could remember Didier better, so she could compare the kindnesses.
    In Mel’s kindness, it seemed to her, there was a kind of defeat—though it wasn’t that Mel wasn’t cheerful. Lots of times, after Pepper left for New York, Mel would ask Harmony over for dinner; maybe they’d just have soup or a salad or something and then play rummy or some simple card game. They would tell jokes, and reminisce about Las Vegas in the old days. Mel had even known Didier, for example.
    Still, Harmony thought she had at least a little intuition—there was some defeat lurking in Mel’s kindness; maybe there had been defeat in Didier’s kindness too; but, at sixteen, she had known nothing of the defeats that haunted men—what could she know? It was only remembering Mel’s remark about loving flaws that got her thinking about it; that, and the fact that Pepper and Mel were both dead.
    Harmony didn’t have a confident feeling about there being a heaven; somehow the descriptions she had heard didn’t ring true; but she did like to think that
something
of a person survived. She wanted to hope that Pepper and Mel would make some kind ofcontact in the afterlife, if there was one. Mainly she hoped it for Mel’s sake. He truly loved Pepper and really, in Harmony’s opinion, deserved more contact with her than he had got to have in life.
    When she and Gary walked out to his car that morning, the letter about Pepper was still there in the yard. One page was over in a corner of the yard, one page had sort of curled up, and the third page was under the little cactus. Harmony was for keeping on walking at that point, but Gary noticed the letter right away.
    â€œIs that the letter?” he