Alice Munros Best

days had passed of the three weeks. She had had to take the house for a month. She was letting her friend Dev use the apartment. He was another out-of-work actor, and was in such real or imagined financial peril that he answered the phone in various stage voices. She was fond of Dev, but she couldn’t go back and share the apartment with him.
    Sophie said that they would drive to Quebec in the rented car, then drive straight back to the Toronto airport, where the car was to be turned in. No mention of Eve’s going along. There wasn’t room in the rented car. But couldn’t she have taken her own car? Philip riding with her, perhaps, for company. Or Sophie. Ian could take the children, if he was so lonesome for them, and give Sophie a rest. Eve and Sophie could ride together as they used to in the summer, travelling to some town they had never seen before, where Eve had got a job.
    That was ridiculous. Eve’s car was nine years old and in no condition to make a long trip. And it was Sophie Ian had got lonesome for – you could tell that by her warm averted face. Also, Eve hadn’t been asked.
    “Well that’s wonderful,” said Eve. “That he’s got along so well with his book.”
    “It is,” said Sophie. She always had an air of careful detachment when she spoke of Ian’s book, and when Eve had asked what it was about she had said merely, “Urban geography.” Perhaps this was the correct behavior for academic wives – Eve had never known any.
    “Anyway you’ll get some time by yourself,” Sophie said. “After all this circus. You’ll find out if you really would like to have a place in the country. A retreat.”
    Eve had to start talking about something else, anything else, so that she wouldn’t bleat out a question about whether Sophie still thought of coming next summer.
    “I had a friend who went on one of those real retreats,” she said. “He’s a Buddhist. No, maybe a Hindu. Not a real Indian.” (At this mention of Indians Sophie smiled in a way that said this was another subject that need not be gone into.) “Anyway, you could not speak on this retreat for three months. There were other people around all the time, but you could not speak to them. And he said that one of the things that often happened and that they were warned about was that you fell in love with one of these people you’d never spoken to. You felt you were communicating in a special way with them when you couldn’t talk. Of course it was a kind of spiritual love, and you couldn’t do anything about it. They were strict about that kind of thing. Or so he said.”
    Sophie said, “So? When you were finally allowed to speak what happened?”
    “It was a big letdown. Usually the person you thought you’d been communicating with hadn’t been communicating with you at all. Maybe they thought they’d been communicating that way with somebody else, and they thought –”
    Sophie laughed with relief. She said, “So it goes.” Glad that there was to be no show of disappointment, no hurt feelings.
    Maybe they had a tiff, thought Eve. This whole visit might have been tactical. Sophie might have taken the children off to show him something. Spent time with her mother, just to show him something. Planning future holidays without him, to prove to herself that she could do it. A diversion.
    And the burning question was, Who did the phoning?
    “Why don’t you leave the children here?” she said. “Just while you drive to the airport? Then just drive back and pick them up and take off. You’d have a little time to yourself and a little time alone with Ian. It’ll be hell with them in the airport.”
    Sophie said, “I’m tempted.”
    So in the end that was what she did.
    Now Eve had to wonder if she herself had engineered that little change just so she could get to talk to Philip.
    (Wasn’t it a big surprise when your dad phoned from California?
He didn’t phone. My mom phoned him.
Did she? Oh I didn’t know. What did she say?
She said, “I can’t stand it here, I’m sick of it, let’s figure out some plan to get me away.”)
    EVE DROPPED HER voice to a matter-of-fact level, to indicate an interruption of the game. She said, “Philip. Philip, listen. I think we’ve got to stop this. That truck just belongs to some farmer and it’s going to turn in someplace and we can’t go on following.”
    “Yes we can,” Philip said.
    “No we can’t. They’d want to know what we were doing. They might be very