Away from Her

grandpa used to shop. He and I were always kidding around and he could not get up the nerve to ask me out. Till the very last weekend and he took me to a ball game. But when it was over my grandpa showed up to drive me home. I was up visiting for the summer. Visiting my grandparents—they lived on a farm.”
    “Fiona. I know where your grandparents lived. It’s where we live. Lived.”
    “Really?” she said, not paying full attention because the cardplayer was sending her his look, which was not one of supplication but command. He was a man of about Grant’s age, or a little older. Thick coarse white hair fell over his forehead, and his skin was leathery but pale, yellowish-white like an old wrinkled-up kid glove. His long face was dignified and melancholy, and he had something of the beauty of a powerful, discouraged, elderly horse. But where Fiona was concerned he was not discouraged.
    “I better go back,” Fiona said, a blush spotting her newly fattened face. “He thinks he can’t play without me sitting there. It’s silly, I hardly know the game anymore. I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me.”
    “Will you be through soon?”
    “Oh, we should be. It depends. If you go and ask that grim-looking lady nicely she’ll get you some tea.”
    “I’m fine,” Grant said.
    “So I’ll leave you then, you can entertain yourself? It must all seem strange to you, but you’ll be surprised how soon you get used to it. You’ll get to know who everybody is. Except that some of them are pretty well off in the clouds, you know—you can’t expect them all to get to know who
you
are.”
    She slipped back into her chair and said something into Aubrey’s ear. She tapped her fingers across the back of his hand.
    Grant went in search of Kristy and met her in the hall. She was pushing a cart on which there were pitchers of apple juice and grape juice.
    “Just one sec,” she said to him, as she stuck her head through a doorway. “Apple juice in here? Grape juice? Cookies?”
    He waited while she filled two plastic glasses and took them into the room. Then she came back and put two arrowroot cookies on paper plates.
    “Well?” she said. “Aren’t you glad to see her participating and everything?”
    Grant said, “Does she even know who I am?”
    He could not decide. She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her. She had given herself away by that little pretense at the end, talking to him as if she thought perhaps he was a new resident.
    If that was what she was pretending. If it was a pretense.
    But would she not have run after him and laughed at him then, once the joke was over? She would not have just gone back to the game, surely, andpretended to forget about him. That would have been too cruel.
    Kristy said, “You just caught her at sort of a bad moment. Involved in the game.”
    “She’s not even playing,” he said.
    “Well, but her friend’s playing. Aubrey.”
    “So who is Aubrey?”
    “That’s who he is. Aubrey. Her friend. Would you like a juice?”
    Grant shook his head.
    “Oh, look,” said Kristy. “They get these attachments. That takes over for a while. Best buddy sort of thing. It’s kind of a phase.”
    “You mean she really might not know who I am?”
    “She might not. Not today. Then tomorrow— you never know, do you? Things change back and forth all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll see the way it is once you’ve been coming here for a while. You’ll learn not to take it all so serious. Learn to take it day by day.”
    Day by day. But things really didn’t change back and forth, and he didn’t get used to the way they were. Fiona was the one who seemed to get used to him, but only as some persistent visitor who took a special interest in her. Or perhaps even as a nuisance whomust be prevented, according to her old rules of courtesy, from realizing that he was one. She treated him with a distracted, social sort of kindness that was successful in holding him back from the most obvious, the most necessary question. He could not demand of her whether she did or did not remember him as her husband of nearly fifty years. He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question— embarrassed not for herself but for him. She would have laughed in a fluttery way and mortified him with her politeness and bewilderment, and somehow she would have ended up not saying either yes or no. Or she would have said either one in a