Alice Munros Best

but he didn’t.
    She had many jobs to learn which had to do with the upkeep of this place and also with the art and skill of taxidermy. She would learn, for instance, how to color lips and eyelids and the ends of noses with a clever mixture of oil paint and linseed and turpentine. Other things she had to learn concerned what he would say and wouldn’t say. It seemed that she had to be cured of all her froth and vanity and all her old notions of love.
    One night I got into his bed and he did not take his eyes from his book or move or speak a word to me even when I crawled out and returned to my own bed, where I fell asleep almost at once because I think I could not bear the shame of being awake.
    In the morning he got into my bed and all went as usual.
    I come up against blocks of solid darkness.
    She learned, she changed. Age was a help to her. Drink also.
    And when he got used to her, or felt safe from her, his feelings took a turn for the better. He talked to her readily about what he was interested in and took a kinder comfort from her body.
    On the night before the operation they lay side by side on the strange bed, with all available bare skin touching – legs, arms, haunches.
II
    LIZA TOLD WARREN that a woman named Bea Doud had phoned from Toronto and asked if they – that is, Warren and Liza – could go out and check on the house in the country, where Bea and her husband lived. They wanted to make sure that the water had been turned off. Bea and Ladner (not actually her husband, said Liza) were in Toronto waiting for Ladner to have an operation. A heart bypass. “Because the pipes might burst,” said Liza. This was on a Sunday night in February during the worst of that winter’s storms.
    “You know who they are,” said Liza. “Yes, you do. Remember that couple I introduced you to? One day last fall on the square outside of Radio Shack? He had a scar on his cheek and she had long hair, half black and half gray. I told you he was a taxidermist, and you said, ‘What’s that?’”
    Now Warren remembered. An old – but not too old – couple in flannel shirts and baggy pants. His scar and English accent, her weird hair and rush of friendliness. A taxidermist stuffs dead animals. That is, animal skins. Also dead birds and fish.
    He had asked Liza, “What happened to the guy’s face?” and she had said, “W.W. Two.”
    “I know where the key is – that’s why she called me,” Liza said. “This is up in Stratton Township. Where I used to live.”
    “Did they go to your same church or something?” Warren said.
    “Bea and
Ladner
? Let’s not be funny. They just lived across the road.
    “It was her gave me some money,” Liza continued, as if it was something he ought to know, “to go to college. I never asked her. She just phones up out of the blue and says she wants to. So I think, Okay, she’s got lots.”
    WHEN SHE WAS little, Liza had lived in Stratton Township with her father and her brother Kenny, on a farm. Her father wasn’t a farmer. He just rented the house. He worked as a roofer. Her mother was already dead. By the time Liza was ready for high school – Kenny was a year younger and two grades behind her – her father had moved them to Carstairs. He met a woman there who owned a trailer home, and later on he married her. Later still, he moved with her to Chatham. Liza wasn’t sure where they were now – Chatham or Wallaceburg or Sarnia. By the time they moved, Kenny was dead – he had been killed when he was fifteen, in one of the big teenage car crashes that seemed to happen every spring, involving drunk, often unlicensed drivers, temporarily stolen cars, fresh gravel on the country roads, crazy speeds. Liza finished high school and went to college in Guelph for one year. She didn’t like college, didn’t like the people there. By that time she had become a Christian.
    That was how Warren met her. His family belonged to the Fellowship of the Saviour Bible Chapel, in Walley. He had been going to the Bible Chapel all his life. Liza started going there after she moved to Walley and got a job in the government liquor store. She still worked there, though she worried about it and sometimes thought that she should quit. She never drank alcohol now, she never even ate sugar. She didn’t want Warren eating a Danish on his break, so she packed him oat muffins that she made at home. She did the laundry every Wednesday night and counted the strokes when she brushed her teeth and