Alice Munros Best

“This is Tom Shepherd speaking. I will be out of town for the month of September. Please record your message, name, and phone number.”
    Tom’s voice sounded so pleasant and familiar that I opened my mouth to ask him the meaning of this foolishness. Then I hung up. I felt as if he had deliberately let me down, as if we had planned to meet in a public place and then he hadn’t shown up. Once, he had done that, I remembered.
    I got myself a glass of vermouth, though it was not yet noon, and I phoned my father.
    “Well, of all things,” he said. “Fifteen more minutes and you would have missed me.”
    “Were you going downtown?”
    “Downtown Toronto.”
    He explained that he was going to the hospital. His doctor in Dalgleish wanted the doctors in Toronto to take a look at him, and had given him a letter to show them in the emergency room.
    “Emergency room?” I said.
    “It’s not an emergency. He just seems to think this is the best way to handle it. He knows the name of a fellow there. If he was to make me an appointment, it might take weeks.”
    “Does your doctor know you’re driving to Toronto?” I said.
    “Well, he didn’t say I couldn’t.”
    The upshot of this was that I rented a car, drove to Dalgleish, brought my father back to Toronto, and had him in the emergency room by seven o’clock that evening.
    Before Judith left I said to her, “You’re sure Nichola knows I’m staying here?”
    “Well, I told her,” she said.
    Sometimes the phone rang, but it was always a friend of Judith’s.
    “ WELL, IT LOOKS like I’m going to have it,” my father said. This was on the fourth day. He had done a complete turnaround overnight. “It looks like I might as well.”
    I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I thought perhaps he looked to me for a protest, an attempt to dissuade him.
    “When will they do it?” I said.
    “Day after tomorrow.”
    I said I was going to the washroom. I went to the nurses’ station and found a woman there who I thought was the head nurse. At any rate, she was gray-haired, kind, and serious-looking.
    “My father’s having an operation the day after tomorrow?” I said.
    “Oh, yes.”
    “I just wanted to talk to somebody about it. I thought there’d been a sort of decision reached that he’d be better not to. I thought because of his age.”
    “Well, it’s his decision and the doctor’s.” She smiled at me without condescension. “It’s hard to make these decisions.”
    “How were his tests?”
    “Well, I haven’t seen them all.”
    I was sure she had. After a moment she said, “We have to be realistic. But the doctors here are very good.”
    When I went back into the room my father said, in a surprised voice,
“Shore-le
ss seas.”
    “What?” I said. I wondered if he had found out how much, or how little, time he could hope for. I wondered if the pills had brought on anuntrustworthy euphoria. Or if he had wanted to gamble. Once, when he was talking to me about his life, he said, “The trouble was I was always afraid to take chances.”
    I used to tell people that he never spoke regretfully about his life, but that was not true. It was just that I didn’t listen to it. He said that he should have gone into the Army as a tradesman – he would have been better off. He said he should have gone on his own, as a carpenter, after the war. He should have got out of Dalgleish. Once, he said, “A wasted life, eh?” But he was making fun of himself, saying that, because it was such a dramatic thing to say. When he quoted poetry too, he always had a scoffing note in his voice, to excuse the showing-off and the pleasure.
    “Shoreless seas,” he said again. “‘Behind him lay the gray Azores, / Behind the Gates of Hercules; / Before him not the ghost of shores, / Before him only shoreless seas.’ That’s what was going through my head last night. But do you think I could remember what kind of seas? I could not. Lonely seas? Empty seas? I was on the right track but I couldn’t get it. But there now when you came into the room and I wasn’t thinking about it at all, the word popped into my head. That’s always the way, isn’t it? It’s not all that surprising. I ask my mind a question. The answer’s there, but I can’t see all the connections my mind’s making to get it. Like a computer. Nothing out of the way. You know, in my situation the thing is, if there’s anything you can’t explain right away, there’s a great temptation to