The Evening Star

Praise for Larry McMurtry’s
The Evening Star

“Mr. McMurtry’s quick, eager sympathy for his characters, his uncanny ability to zip in and out of all their minds, and his effortless narrative inventiveness all combine to create a story that’s as emotionally involving as it is entertaining. . . . Utterly satisfying.”
—
The New York Times

“Larry McMurtry is one of Americas most cinematic writers.”
—
Newsweek

“
The Evening Star
is a bittersweet testament to the precariousness of life. Aurora and Rosie are wonderfully drawn women whose witty exchanges crackle like the dialogue in classic films from the 1930s.”
—
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Aurora Greenway is one of the finest characters McMurtry or anyone else has created lately—wonderfully well-spoken and kaleidoscopic in her emotional range.... For all the humor and snappy dialogue
The Evening Star
offers, there is a lot of sadness too.... A rich, emotional read.”
—
The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star

“Larry McMurtry ‘grabs’ his readers in the first paragraph of narrative and continues his hold on them to even beyond the final one. . . .
The Evening Star
again underscores his talent for weaving the unexpected turns and failures in the lives of his believable characters into an imaginative, highly readable narrative of substance that is, at the same time, hilariously funny and soberly sad. Characteristically, there are no slow passages, no wasted words—only exuberant action.”
—
The Daily Press,
Newport News

“McMurtry is a master narrator. . . .
The Evening Star
closes another satisfying chapter in a growing body of work destined for status among the classics.”
—
The Commercial Appeal,
Memphis

“The latest link in a chain detailing some of the juiciest characters in contemporary fiction . . . Their stories, told in deceptively simple language, are terrific meditations on age, sex, and the wayward heart McMurtry’s ability to get us deep inside these people is uncanny . . . an experience not soon forgotten.”
—
The Seattle Times

“Big, good-natured . . . entertaining.”
—
The Sacramento Bee

By Larry McMurtry

The Wandering Hill
Sin Killer
Paradise
Boone’s Lick
Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:
Reflections at Sixty and Beyond
Duane’s Depressed
Comanche Moon
Dead Man’s Walk
The Late Child
Streets of Laredo
The Evening Star
Buffalo Girls
Some Can Whistle
Anything for Billy
Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
Texasville
Lonesome Dove
The Desert Rose
Cadillac Jack
Somebody’s Darling
Terms of Endearment
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Moving On
The Last Picture Show
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Leaving Cheyenne
Horseman, Pass By

By Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

Pretty Boy Floyd
Zeke and Ned

Larry McMurtry

THE
EVENING
STAR

A NOVEL

Simon & Schuster
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1992 by Larry McMurtry

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2003 S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

Manufactured in the United States of America

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
McMurtry, Larry.
The evening star / by Larry McMurtry.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Terms of endearment.
I. Title.
PS3563.A319E94 1992
813′.54—dc20 92-2596

ISBN 0-671-68519-8
eISBN 978-1-4516-0772-7
0-684-85751-0 (Pbk)

F
OR
G
RACE
D
AVID
,
M
YRTLE
B
OONE,
AND
C
URTIS

I
The Children and the Men

1

On their monthly visits to the prison, Aurora drove going and Rosie drove home. That was the tradition, and there was good reason for it: seeing her grandson behind bars, being reminded yet again that he had killed a woman, realizing that in all likelihood she would be seeing him only in such circumstances for the rest of her life, left Aurora far too shaken to be trusted at the wheel of a car—particularly the sputtery old Cadillac she refused to trade in. Aurora managed the Cadillac erratically under the best of circumstances, and visiting Tommy in prison could not be called the best of circumstances.

Rosie and everyone else who knew Aurora felt sure the Cadillac would be the death of her someday, but it would not have been wise to reiterate this fear on the return trip from Huntsville, when Aurora would have been only too happy to die on the spot.

Aurora, in the midst of a bitter fit of sobbing, nonetheless reached up and twisted the rearview mirror her way, in order to regard her own despair. It was an old habit: when sorrow beset her, as it now did regularly, she often grabbed the
nearest mirror, hoping, through vanity alone, to arrest it in its course before it did her too much damage.

This time it didn’t work, not merely because she was crying so hard she couldn’t see herself at all, but because Rosie—a woman so short she could barely see the traffic in front of her, much less that which she knew to be in pursuit, immediately grabbed the mirror and twisted it back.

“Don’t do that, hon, I got to have my mirror!” Rosie said, panicked because she heard the sound of a huge truck bearing down on them, but lacked a clue as to exactly how close it might be.

“There’s an eighteen-wheeler after us—if that sucker ran over us we’d be squished like soup in a can,” she added, wishing they were in Conroe, so perhaps Aurora would quit crying, shaking, and scattering wet Kleenex around.

The prison where Tommy was doing fifteen years to life was in Huntsville, Texas. Conroe, Texas, thirty-two miles to the south, down an Interstate rife with eighteen-wheelers, was the nearest point at which Aurora could reasonably be expected to regain control of her emotions. Until then, all Rosie could do was stay out of the fast lane and drive for dear life.

“I just wish you’d do something I ask you for once in your life and buy us a Datsun pickup,” Rosie said. “We’d stand a lot better chance on this racetrack if we had a vehicle I could see out of.”

To her relief she noticed the eighteen-wheeler sliding smoothly past them on her left.

Aurora didn’t respond. Her mind was back with Tommy, the pale, calm boy in the prison. He had always been the brightest of her dead daughter’s three children. His grades had never been less than excellent, unlike those of her other grandchildren, Teddy and Melanie, both such erratic scholars that it was hardly even fair to use the word “scholar” when referring to their academic careers.

“We’re almost to Conroe,” Rosie said unwisely, hoping it might cause Aurora to stop crying a little sooner than usual.

“Who gives a fuck where we are!” Aurora yelled, flaring up for a moment before crying a fresh flood.

Rosie was so shocked she almost rear-ended a white Toyota suburban. Only three or four times in their long acquaintance had she heard her employer use that particular word.

Shortly after they sped past the first Conroe exit, Aurora calmed a little.

“Rosie, I’m not a robot,” she said. “I do not have to stop crying just because we happen to be passing Conroe.”

“I wish I hadn’t brought it up,” Rosie said. “I wish I hadn’t never been born. But most of all I wish we had a Datsun pickup—the seat of this car is so old it’s sinking in, and if it sinks in much farther I won’t be able to see anything but the speedometer. Then an eighteen-wheeler will probably run over us and squish us like soup in a can.”

“This car is not a can and we will not be squished like soup,” Aurora declared, sniffing. “You’ve chosen a bad figure.

“Yeah, I was always flat-chested, but I didn’t choose it, God did it to me,” Rosie said, thinking it odd that Aurora would mention her lifelong flat-chestedness at such a time.

“Oh, figure of speech, I meant,” Aurora said. “Of course you didn’t choose your bosom. What I meant to point out is that there’s nothing souplike about either one of us. If you get squished, it’ll be like a French fry, which is what you resemble.”

Aurora felt no better, but she did feel cried out, and she began to mop her cheeks with a wad of Kleenex. She had already scattered several wet wads on the seat. She gathered these up, compressed them into one sopping mess, and threw the mess out the window.

“Hon, you oughtn’t to litter,” Rosie admonished. “There’s signs all up and down this highway saying don’t mess with Texas.”

“I’ll mess with it all I want to,” Aurora said. “It’s certainly messed enough with me.”

When her vision cleared a bit more, she noticed that a stream of cars and trucks was flowing past them. Looking
back, she saw with alarm that a very large truck seemed to be practically pushing them.

“Rosie, are you going the correct speed?” she asked. “We’re not exactly leading the pack.”

“I’m going fifty-five,” Rosie said.

“Then no wonder that truck just behind us has such an impatient aspect,” Aurora said. “I tell you every time we come here that the legal speed is now sixty-five, not fifty-five. You had better put the pedal to the metal, if that is the correct expression.”

“The pedal’s to the metal, otherwise we wouldn’t be moving at all,” Rosie said. “Why do you think I been bugging you about a Datsun pickup? I could push the pedal through the radiator and this old whale wouldn’t go more than fifty-five. Besides, the speed limit’s only fifty-five when you’re going through a town, and we’re going through Conroe.”

“Don’t be pedantic when I’m sad,” Aurora said. “Just try to go a little faster.”

Rosie, in a daring maneuver, attempted to pass the sluggish white Toyota just as a truck behind them pulled out to pass them. The driver honked, and Rosie instantly whipped her arm out the window and gave him the finger. Then, not appeased, she actually stuck her head out the window, turned it, and glared at the truck driver.

Unimpressed, the truck driver honked again, while Rosie, pedal to the metal, inched grimly past the white suburban.

“Well, you don’t lack spunk—you never have or I’d have squished you myself,” Aurora said.

The trucker, perhaps annoyed, perhaps amused, began to tap his horn every few seconds, and Rosie—definitely not amused—stuck her arm out the window and left it there, with her middle finger extended for his benefit.

The sight of her maid sustaining a rude gesture while virtually beneath the wheels of a giant truck made Aurora laugh. A vagrant bubble of mirth rose unexpectedly from inside her, but she had no more than started a little peal when sorrow came back in a flood and overran amusement, just as her Cadillac seemed about to be overrun by the eighteen-wheeler.