Away from Her

they had been alone he would have let her do it. But with Grant there Aubrey would not permit it. He got hold of the Kleenex as well as he could and made a few awkward but lucky swipes at his face.
    While he was occupied, Fiona turned to Grant.
    “Do you by any chance have any influence around here?” she said in a whisper. “I’ve seen you talking to them–”
    Aubrey made a noise of protest or weariness or disgust. Then his upper body pitched forward as if he wanted to throw himself against her. She scrambled half out of bed and caught him and held on tohim. It seemed improper for Grant to help her, though of course he would have done so if he’d thought Aubrey was about to tumble to the floor.
    “Hush,” Fiona was saying. “Oh, honey. Hush. We’ll get to see each other. We’ll have to. I’ll go and see you. You’ll come and see me.”
    Aubrey made the same sound again with his face in her chest, and there was nothing Grant could decently do but get out of the room.
    “I just wish his wife would hurry up and get here,” Kristy said. “I wish she’d get him out of here and cut the agony short. We’ve got to start serving supper before long and how are we supposed to get her to swallow anything with him still hanging around?”
    Grant said, “Should I stay?”
    “What for? She’s not sick, you know.”
    “To keep her company,” he said.
    Kristy shook her head.
    “They have to get over these things on their own. They’ve got short memories usually. That’s not always so bad.”
    Kristy was not hard-hearted. During the time he had known her Grant had found out some things about her life. She had four children. She did not know where her husband was but thought he might be in Alberta. Her younger boy’s asthma was so badthat he would have died one night in January if she had not got him to the emergency ward in time. He was not on any illegal drugs, but she was not so sure about his brother.
    To her, Grant and Fiona and Aubrey too must seem lucky. They had got through life without too much going wrong. What they had to suffer now that they were old hardly counted.
    Grant left without going back to Fiona’s room. He noticed that the wind was actually warm that day and the crows were making an uproar. In the parking lot a woman wearing a tartan pants suit was getting a folded-up wheelchair out of the trunk of her car.
    The street he was driving down was called Black Hawks Lane. All the streets around were named for teams in the old National Hockey League. This was in an outlying section of the town near Meadowlake. He and Fiona had shopped in the town regularly but had not become familiar with any part of it except the main street.
    The houses looked to have been built all around the same time, perhaps thirty or forty years ago. The streets were wide and curving and there were no sidewalks—recalling the time when it was thought unlikely that anybody would do much walking everagain. Friends of Grant’s and Fiona’s had moved to places something like this when they began to have their children. They were apologetic about the move at first. They called it “going out to Barbecue Acres.”
    Young families still lived here. There were basketball hoops over garage doors and tricycles in the driveways. But some of the houses had gone downhill from the sort of family homes they were surely meant to be. The yards were marked by car tracks, the windows were plastered with tinfoil or hung with faded flags.
    Rental housing. Young male tenants—single still, or single again.
    A few properties seemed to have been kept up as well as possible by the people who had moved into them when they were new—people who hadn’t had the money or perhaps hadn’t felt the need to move on to someplace better. Shrubs had grown to maturity, pastel vinyl siding had done away with the problem of repainting. Neat fences or hedges gave the sign that the children in the houses had all grown up and gone away, and that their parents no longer saw the point of letting the yard be a common run-through for whatever new children were loose in the neighborhood.
    The house that was listed in the phone book asbelonging to Aubrey and his wife was one of these. The front walk was paved with flagstones and bordered by hyacinths that stood as stiff as china flowers, alternately pink and blue.
    Fiona had not got over her sorrow. She did not eat at mealtimes, though she pretended to, hiding food in her napkin. She was being given a