Mary Jo hesitated. "Ma, don't go gettin' dewey-eyed over him. He ain't gonna be no replacement for Jim Bob."
Ma crammed her hands into the pockets of her apron and stared absently out the window into the growing darkness. "No," she finally said. "Ain't no one can replace my little boy, and this young man looks like he’ll get better. Of course, he wasn’t full of…." She let the sentence hang.
"Jim Bob weren’t no little boy, Ma. He was nearly twenty-four years old. Anyways, if he hadn't been doin' drugs he coulda made that turn. He kilt himself, same as if he'd shot his own self."
Ma’s brows drew down as she glared at Mary Jo. "Ain't no way to talk about your lost brother."
Mary Jo sighed. "He was a stranger for a long time before he died, Ma. You know that. Jim Bob died when he started doing drugs. His body just stayed with us for a while."
Ma's face looked even more drawn and wrinkled with despair. "He'da been all right if he hadn'ta got mixed up with them Hudson boys. It was our fault, though - yer Pa and me. We couldn't give him the things he needed, and it's so lonely up here." Her gaze sharpened and she cut Mary Jo off before she could speak. "Yer like yer Pa. You like the wilderness. It was different for Jim Bob.”
There was no point in arguing with her. It was true that she liked the wilderness, and that she enjoyed solitude. Jim Bob had a different personality. Still, she got lonely sometimes too.
“I’ll go feed the mules,” she said.
Ol' Ned was waiting patiently for her, standing hipshot in the front yard. She rubbed his nose and patted him on the neck. Ol' Ned accepted her for who she was. It didn’t matter to him that she was leggy and thin. It was a cinch he wouldn’t tease her about the unruly mop of loose blond curls that framed her thin face – or the gap between her two front teeth. No, to Ned she was simply the one who fed and lavished attention on him.
She turned Ol' Ned into the corral with Sweet Sally and gave them each a scoop of oats in the individual wooden troughs she had built for them. The edges had been chewed until they were scalloped, but they still served their purpose.