Alice Munros Best

they’re not so worn out, I guess.”
    Then she stopped smiling, as if she was afraid she had said too much, or spoken callously.
    “Don’t take me wrong,” she said. “I don’t mean Fiona. Fiona is a lady.”
    Well, what about Aubrey? Grant felt like saying. But he remembered that Aubrey was in a wheelchair.
    “She’s a real lady,” Kristy said, in a tone so decisive and reassuring that Grant was not reassured. He had in his mind a picture of Fiona, in one of her long eyelet-trimmed blue-ribboned night-gowns, teasingly lifting the covers of an old man’s bed.
    “Well, I sometimes wonder –” he said.
    Kristy said sharply, “You wonder what?”
    “I wonder whether she isn’t putting on some kind of a charade.”
    “A what?” said Kristy.
    MOST AFTERNOONS THE pair could be found at the card table. Aubrey had large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult for him to manage his cards. Fiona shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes moved quickly to straighten a card that seemed to be slipping from his grasp. Grant would watch from across the room her darting move and quick, laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s husbandly frown as a wisp of her hair touched his cheek. Aubrey preferred to ignore her as long as she stayed close.
    But let her smile her greeting at Grant, let her push back her chair and get up to offer him tea – showing that she had accepted his right to be there and possibly felt a slight responsibility for him – and Aubrey’s face took on its look of sombre consternation. He would let the cards slide from his fingers and fall on the floor, to spoil the game.
    So that Fiona had to get busy and put things right.
    If they weren’t at the bridge table they might be walking along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to the railing with one hand and clutching Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other. The nurses thought that it was a marvel, the way she had got him out of his wheelchair. Though for longer trips – to the conservatory at one end of the building or the television room at the other – the wheelchair was called for.
    The television seemed to be always turned to the sports channel and Aubrey would watch any sport, but his favorite appeared to be golf. Grant didn’t mind watching that with them. He sat down a few chairs away. On the large screen a small group of spectators and commentators followedthe players around the peaceful green, and at appropriate moments broke into a formal sort of applause. But there was silence everywhere as the player made his swing and the ball took its lonely, appointed journey across the sky. Aubrey and Fiona and Grant and possibly others sat and held their breaths, and then Aubrey’s breath broke out first, expressing satisfaction or disappointment. Fiona’s chimed in on the same note a moment later.
    In the conservatory there was no such silence. The pair found themselves a seat among the most lush and thick and tropical-looking plants – a bower, if you like – which Grant had just enough self-control to keep from penetrating. Mixed in with the rustle of the leaves and the sound of splashing water was Fiona’s soft talk and her laughter.
    Then some sort of chortle. Which of them could it be?
    Perhaps neither – perhaps it came from one of the impudent flashy-looking birds who inhabited the corner cages.
    Aubrey could talk, though his voice probably didn’t sound the way it used to. He seemed to say something now – a couple of thick syllables.
Take care. He’s here. My love.
    On the blue bottom of the fountain’s pool lay some wishing coins. Grant had never seen anybody actually throwing money in. He stared at these nickels and dimes and quarters, wondering if they had been glued to the tiles – another feature of the building’s encouraging decoration.
    TEENAGERS AT THE baseball game, sitting at the top of the bleachers out of the way of the boy’s friends. A couple of inches of bare wood between them, darkness falling, quick chill of the evening late in the summer. The skittering of their hands, the shift of haunches, eyes never lifted from the field. He’ll take off his jacket, if he’s wearing one, to lay it around her narrow shoulders. Underneath it he can pull her closer to him, press his spread fingers into her soft arm.
    Not like today when any kid would probably be into her pants on the first date.
    Fiona’s skinny soft arm. Teenage lust astonishing her and flashing along all the nerves of her tender new body, as the night