Alice Munros Best

southern India. For a while when she was in her teens Sophie had taken an interest in Kerala. She brought home books from the library and took to going to parties in a sari. She talked about looking her father up, when she got older. The fact that she knew his first name and his special study – diseases of the blood – seemed to her possibly enough. Eve stressed to her the size of the population of India and the chance that he had not even stayed there. What she could not bring herself to explain was how incidental, how nearly unimaginable, the existence of Sophie would be, necessarily, in her father’s life. Fortunately the idea faded, and Sophie gave up wearing the sari when all those dramatic, ethnic costumes became too commonplace. The only time she mentioned her father, later on, was when she was carrying Philip, and making jokes about keeping up the family tradition of flyby fathers.
    NO JOKES LIKE that now. Sophie had grown stately, womanly, graceful, and reserved. There had been a moment – they were getting through the woods to the beach, and Sophie had bent to scoop up Daisy, so that they might move more quickly out of range of the mosquitoes – when Eve had been amazed at the new, late manifestation of her daughter’s beauty. A full-bodied, tranquil, classic beauty, achieved not by care and vanity but by self-forgetfulness and duty. She looked more Indian now, her creamed-coffee skin had darkened in the California sun, and she bore under her eyes the lilac crescents of a permanent mild fatigue.
    But she was still a strong swimmer. Swimming was the only sport she had ever cared for, and she swam as well as ever, heading it seemed for the middle of the lake. The first day she had done it she said, “That was wonderful. I felt so free.” She didn’t say that it was because Eve was watching the children that she had felt that way, but Eve understoodthat it didn’t need to be said. “I’m glad,” she said – though in fact she had been frightened. Several times she had thought, Turn around now, and Sophie had swum right on, disregarding this urgent telepathic message. Her dark head became a spot, then a speck, then an illusion tossed among the steady waves. What Eve feared, and could not think about, was not a failure of strength but of the desire to return. As if this new Sophie, this grown woman so tethered to life, could be actually more indifferent to it than the girl Eve used to know, the young Sophie with her plentiful risks and loves and dramas.
    “ WE HAVE TO GET that movie back to the store,” Eve said to Philip.
    “Maybe we should do it before we go to the beach.”
    Philip said, “I’m sick of the beach.”
    Eve didn’t feel like arguing. With Sophie gone, with all plans altered, so that they were leaving, all of them leaving later in the day, she was sick of the beach, too. And sick of the house – all she could see now was the way this room would look tomorrow. The crayons, the toy cars, the large pieces of Daisy’s simple jigsaw puzzle, all swept up and taken away. The storybooks gone that she knew by heart. No sheets drying outside the window. Eighteen more days to last, by herself, in this place.
    “How about we go somewhere else today?” she said.
    Philip said, “Where is there?”
    “Let it be a surprise.”
    EVE HAD COME home from the village the day before, laden with provisions. Fresh shrimp for Sophie – the village store was actually a classy supermarket these days, you could find almost anything – coffee, wine, rye bread without caraway seeds because Philip hated caraway, a ripe melon, the dark cherries they all loved, though Daisy had to be watched with the stones, a tub of mocha-fudge ice cream, and all the regular things to keep them going for another week.
    Sophie was clearing up the children’s lunch. “Oh,” she cried. “Oh, what’ll we do with all that stuff?”
    Ian had phoned, she said. Ian had phoned and said he was flying into Toronto tomorrow. Work on his book had progressed more quickly than he had expected; he had changed his plans. Instead of waiting for the three weeks to be up, he was coming tomorrow to collect Sophie and the children and take them on a little trip. He wanted to go to Quebec City. He had never been there, and he thought the children should see the part of Canada where people spoke French.
    “He got lonesome,” Philip said.
    Sophie laughed. She said, “Yes. He got lonesome for us.”
    Twelve days, Eve thought. Twelve