Alice Munros Best

undertake a long trip, and he was spending all he had just to live. Then the hotel had fallen into his lap.
    “Like a ton of bricks,” she said. “Tires and fixing the car would be a better investment than sinking anything into this place. It would be a good idea to get out there before the snow comes. And ship the furniture by rail again, to make use of it when we get there. We have got all we need to furnish a home.”
    “It’s maybe not all that firm of an offer.”
    She said, “I know. But it’ll be all right.”
    He understood that she did know, and that it was, it would be, all right. You could say that a case like his was right up her alley.
    Not that he wouldn’t be grateful. He’d got to a point where gratitude wasn’t a burden, where it was natural – especially when it wasn’t demanded.
    Thoughts of regeneration were starting.
This is the change I need.
He had said that before, but surely there was one time when it would be true. The mild winters, the smell of the evergreen forests and the ripe apples.
All we need to make a home.
    HE HAS HIS PRIDE , she thought. That would have to be taken account of. It might be better never to mention the letters in which he had laid himself open to her. Before she came away, she had destroyed them. In fact she had destroyed each one as soon as she’d read it over well enough to know it by heart, and that didn’t take long. One thing she surely didn’t want was for them ever to fall into the hands of young Sabitha and her shifty friend. Especially the part in the last letter, about her nightgown, and being in bed. It wasn’t that such things wouldn’t go on, but it might be thought vulgar or sappy or asking for ridicule, to put them on paper.
    She doubted they’d see much of Sabitha. But she would never thwart him, if that was what he wanted.
    This wasn’t really a new experience, this brisk sense of expansion and responsibility. She’d felt something the same for Mrs. Willets – another fine-looking, flighty person in need of care and management. Ken Boudreau had turned out to be a bit more that way than she was prepared for, and there were the differences you had to expect with a man, but surely there was nothing in him that she couldn’t handle.
    After Mrs. Willets her heart had been dry, and she had considered it might always be so. And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
    MR. MCCAULEY DIED about two years after Johanna’s departure. His funeral was the last one held in the Anglican church. There was a good turnout for it. Sabitha – who came with her mother’s cousin, the Toronto woman – was now self-contained and pretty and remarkably, unexpectedly slim. She wore a sophisticated black hat and did not speak to anybody unless they spoke to her first. Even then, she did not seem to remember them.
    The death notice in the paper said that Mr. McCauley was survived by his granddaughter Sabitha Boudreau and his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, and Mr. Boudreau’s wife Johanna, and their infant son Omar, of Salmon Arm, B.C.
    Edith’s mother read this out – Edith herself never looked at the local paper. Of course, the marriage was not news to either of them – or to Edith’s father, who was around the corner in the front room, watching television. Word had got back. The only news was Omar.
    “Her with a
baby
,” Edith’s mother said.
    Edith was doing her Latin translation at the kitchen table.
Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi –
    In the church she had taken the precaution of not speaking to Sabitha first, before Sabitha could not speak to her.
    She was not really afraid, anymore, of being found out – though she still could not understand why they hadn’t been. And in a way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self – let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her. It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her – it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?
    Ignoring her mother, she wrote, “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know –”
    She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a