[04] When the Light Goes by Larry McMurtry

Author:Larry McMurtry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ephemeral, mblsm, Fiction
ISBN: 9781439126509
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

23

THREE DAYS after retreating to the grocery-filled cabin, Duane saw a dust cloud of unusual magnitude filling the air above the road. It was Bobby Lee, he imagined, but the old Toyota pickup Bobby Lee nursed along wouldn’t make a dust cloud of that magnitude. It must mean that Bobby had bought a new pickup with oversized wheels—which proved to be the case.

“New wheels,” Duane remarked, when Bobby Lee braked his new red pickup to a stop.

“Have you taken Miss Cameron for a ride in it yet?” he added.

“No—that snooty bitch is the bane of my existence,” Bobby Lee said. “You ought not to have inflicted her on me at this stage of my life.”

“I didn’t inflict her, Dickie did,” Duane reminded him. “Anyway she’ll be gone to Indonesia in a few months—you’ll just have to tough it out till then.”

“You got a FedEx from your doctor,” Bobby Lee told him. “I rescued it from Annie. I think she was about to trash it.”

Duane took the envelope, supposing it was from Dr. Peppard—there was still the matter of the clogged arteries to think about. Duane was doing nothing, other than a lot of staring into space, the matter of the arteries didn’t feel urgent—not to him, anyway. Of course it felt urgent to his daughters, who called him frequently—so often that he finally turned his cell phone off.

The FedEx, though, was from Honor, and it didn’t just contain a letter. It contained plane tickets from DFW to Boston, a hotel reservation at the Ritz-Carlton, and a sheet of information from Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was set to see a cardiologist named Thomas Higginson, who would do another angiogram and other tests as needed. There was a short letter from Honor, written in her firm hand:

Duane:

Mass General is the best diagnostic hospital in America, and Tommy Higginson and I are old friends. Please submit to whatever tests he says you need. My niece Cherry will meet your plane, take you to the hotel, then the hospital, and back to the airport. I’ll be in Europe a few weeks—don’t balk on me. We need to know what’s what about your heart.

Your physical heart, that is.

I’ll be in Texas the week you get home. You’ll hear from me.

Honor

P.S. I enjoyed our day of sex perhaps more than you realized. You’ve got a lot of loosening up to do. Maybe I can help.

“Good news?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Well, news,” Duane said. “I guess I’m going to Boston to get tested.”

Bobby Lee looked uncomfortable—he took off his dozer cap and put it back on. He was looking into the distance—the same distance Duane often stared into.

“What’s the matter?”

“Bad arteries ain’t the only kind of problem a person can have,” Bobby Lee reminded him. “For example, an old friend and family employee could find himself in the middle of a family dispute that’s no business of his to even know about.”

“What in hell does that mean?”

“It means your daughters are both dead set against your going to Boston—they want you to have the tests done in Dallas.

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