Alice Munros Best

Laura. Or to blot out what he had said to her last time. To humiliate her because he was frightened. Perhaps. Or perhaps all this seemed to him simply a further, and genuinely interesting, development in lovemaking.
    She would have liked to talk it over with Maya. But the possibility of talking anything over with Maya had disappeared. Their friendship had come suddenly to an end.
    THE NIGHT AFTER the incident at Clover Point, Georgia was sitting on the living-room floor playing a bedtime card game with her sons. The phone rang, and she was sure that it was Miles. She had been thinking all day that he would call, he would have to call to explain himself, to beg her pardon, to say that he had been testing her, in a way, or had been temporarily deranged by circumstances that she knewnothing about. She would not forgive him immediately. But she would not hang up.
    It was Maya.
    “Guess what weird thing happened,” Maya said. “Miles phoned me. Your Miles. It’s okay, Raymond isn’t here. How did he even know my name?”
    “I don’t know,” said Georgia.
    She had told him it, of course. She had offered wild Maya up for his entertainment, or to point out what a novice at this game she herself was – a relatively chaste prize.
    “He says he wants to come and talk to me,” Maya said. “What do you think? What’s the matter with him? Did you have a fight? … Yes? Oh, well, he probably wants me to persuade you to make up. I must say he picked the right night. Raymond’s at the hospital. He’s got this balky woman in labor; he may have to stay and do a section on her. I’ll phone and tell you how it goes. Shall I?”
    After a couple of hours, with the children long asleep, Georgia began to expect Maya’s call. She watched the television news, to take her mind off expecting it. She picked up the phone to make sure there was a dial tone. She turned off the television after the news, then turned it on again. She started to watch a movie; she watched it through three commercial breaks without going to the kitchen to look at the clock.
    At half past midnight she went out and got into her car and drove to Maya’s house. She had no idea what she would do there. And she did not do much of anything. She drove around the circular drive with the lights off. The house was dark. She could see that the garage was open and Raymond’s car was not there. The motorcycle was nowhere in sight.
    She had left her children alone, the doors unlocked. Nothing happened to them. They didn’t wake up and discover her defection. No burglar, or prowler, or murderer surprised her on her return. That was a piece of luck that she did not even appreciate. She had gone out leaving the door open and the lights on, and when she came back she hardly recognized her folly, though she closed the door and turned out some lights and lay down on the living-room sofa. She didn’t sleep. She laystill, as if the smallest movement would sharpen her suffering, until she saw the day getting light and heard the birds waking. Her limbs were stiff. She got up and went to the phone and listened again for the dial tone. She walked stiffly to the kitchen and put on the kettle and said to herself the words
a paralysis of grief.
    A paralysis of grief.
What was she thinking of? That was what she would feel, how she might describe the way she would feel, if one of her children had died. Grief is for serious matters, important losses. She knew that. She would not have bartered away an hour of her children’s lives to have had the phone ring at ten o’clock last night, to have heard Maya say, “Georgia, he’s desperate. He’s sorry; he loves you very much.”
    No. But it seemed that such a phone call would have given her a happiness that no look or word from her children could give her. Than anything could give her, ever again.
    She phoned Maya before nine o’clock. As she was dialling, she thought that there were still some possibilities to pray for. Maya’s phone had been temporarily out of order. Maya had been ill last night. Raymond had been in a car accident on his way home from the hospital.
    All these possibilities vanished at the first sound of Maya’s voice, which was sleepy (pretending to be sleepy?) and silky with deceit. “Georgia? Is that Georgia? Oh, I thought it was going to be Raymond. He had to stay over at the hospital in case this poor wretched woman needed a C-section. He was going to call me–”
    “You told me that last night,” said