Alice Munros Best

things, but suppose this time she didn’t laugh?
    Worse things were coming. She went to town and phoned him from a booth to ask him how to drive home. She went for her walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line – a very long way round. She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere.
    It was hard to figure out. She said that about fences as if it was a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.
    “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing my mind.”
    He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.
    “If I have I don’t remember,” she said. Then she said she was sorry to sound so flippant.
    “I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins.”
    Vitamins didn’t help. She would stand in doorways trying to figure out where she was going. She forgot to turn on the burner under the vegetables or put water in the coffeemaker.
    She asked Grant when they’d moved to this house.
    “Was it last year or the year before?”
    He said that it was twelve years ago.
    She said, “That’s shocking.”
    “She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor. “Once she left her fur coat in storage and just forgot about it. That was whenwe were always going somewhere warm in the winters. Then she said it was unintentionally on purpose, she said it was like a sin she was leaving behind. The way some people made her feel about fur coats.”
    He tried without success to explain something more – to explain how Fiona’s surprise and apologies about all this seemed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some adventure that she had not been expecting. Or was playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to. They had always had their games – nonsense dialects, characters they invented. Some of Fiona’s made-up voices, chirping or wheedling (he couldn’t tell the doctor this), had mimicked uncannily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about.
    “Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might be selective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say.”
    In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer went shopping alone, disappeared from the supermarket while Grant had his back turned. A policeman picked her up as she walked down the middle of the road, blocks away. He asked her name and she answered readily. Then he asked her the name of the prime minister of the country.
    “If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible job.”
    He laughed. But then she made the mistake of asking if he’d seen Boris and Natasha.
    These were the Russian wolfhounds she had adopted some years ago as a favor to a friend, then devoted herself to for the rest of their lives. Her taking them over might have coincided with the discovery that she was not likely to have children. Something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted – Grant could not remember now. He had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus. Or it might have been after her mother died. The dogs’ long legs and silky hair, their narrow, gentle, intransigent faces made a fine match for her when she took them out for walks. And Grant himself, in those days, landing his first job at the university (his father-in-law’s money welcome in spite of the political taint), might have seemed to some people to have been picked upon another of Fiona’s eccentric whims, and groomed and tended and favored. Though he never understood this, fortunately, until much later.
    SHE SAID TO HIM , at suppertime on the day of the wandering-off at the supermarket, “You know what you’re going to have to do with me, don’t you? You’re going to have to put me in that place. Shallowlake?”
    Grant said, “Meadowlake. We’re not at that stage yet.”
    “Shallowlake, Shillylake,” she said, as if they were engaged in a playful competition. “Sillylake. Sillylake it is.”
    He held his head in his hands, his elbows on the table. He said that if they did think of it, it must be as something that need not be permanent. A kind of experimental treatment. A rest cure.
    THERE WAS A RULE that nobody could be admitted during the month of December. The holiday season had so many emotional pitfalls. So they made the