Away from Her

miles, surely it wouldn’t prove too difficult. Or if she’d like to take the time off—Grant hadn’t thought of this before and was rather dismayed to hear himself suggest it—then he himself could take Aubrey out there, he wouldn’t mind at all. He was sure he could manage it. And she could use a break.
    While he talked she moved her closed lips and her hidden tongue as if she was trying to identify some dubious flavor. She brought milk for his coffee, and a plate of ginger cookies.
    “Homemade,” she said as she set the plate down. There was challenge rather than hospitality in her tone. She said nothing more until she had sat down, poured milk into her coffee and stirred it.
    Then she said no.
    “No. I can’t do that. And the reason is, I’m not going to upset him.”
    “Would it upset him?” Grant said earnestly.
    “Yes, it would. It would. That’s no way to do. Bringing him home and taking him back. Bringing him home and taking him back, that’s just confusing him.”
    “But wouldn’t he understand that it was just a visit? Wouldn’t he get into the pattern of it?”
    “He understands everything all right.” She said this as if he had offered an insult to Aubrey. “But it’s still an interruption. And then I’ve got to get him all ready and get him into the car, and he’s a big man, he’s not so easy to manage as you might think. I’ve got to maneuver him into the car and pack his chair along and all that and what for? If I go to all that trouble I’d prefer to take him someplace that was more fun.”
    “But even if I agreed to do it?” Grant said, keeping his tone hopeful and reasonable. “It’s true, you shouldn’t have the trouble.”
    “You couldn’t,” she said flatly. “You don’t knowhim. You couldn’t handle him. He wouldn’t stand for you doing for him. All that bother and what would he get out of it?”
    Grant didn’t think he should mention Fiona again.
    “It’d make more sense to take him to the mall,” she said. “Where he could see kids and whatnot. If it didn’t make him sore about his own two grandsons he never gets to see. Or now the lake boats are starting to run again, he might get a charge out of going and watching that.”
    She got up and fetched her cigarettes and lighter from the window above the sink.
    “You smoke?” she said.
    He said no thanks, though he didn’t know if a cigarette was being offered.
    “Did you never? Or did you quit?”
    “Quit,” he said.
    “How long ago was that?”
    He thought about it.
    “Thirty years. No—more.”
    He had decided to quit around the time he started up with Jacqui. But he couldn’t remember whether he quit first, and thought a big reward was coming to him for quitting, or thought that the time had come to quit, now that he had such a powerful diversion.
    “I’ve quit quitting,” she said, lighting up. “Just made a resolution to quit quitting, that’s all.”
    Maybe that was the reason for the wrinkles. Somebody—a woman—had told him that women who smoked developed a special set of fine facial wrinkles. But it could have been from the sun, or just the nature of her skin—her neck was noticeably wrinkled as well. Wrinkled neck, youthfully full and up-tilted breasts. Women of her age usually had these contradictions. The bad and good points, the genetic luck or lack of it, all mixed up together. Very few kept their beauty whole, though shadowy, as Fiona had done.
    And perhaps that wasn’t even true. Perhaps he only thought that because he’d known Fiona when she was young. Perhaps to get that impression you had to have known a woman when she was young.
    So when Aubrey looked at his wife did he see a high-school girl full of scorn and sass, with an intriguing tilt to her robin’s-egg blue eyes, pursing her fruity lips around a forbidden cigarette?
    “So your wife’s depressed?” Aubrey’s wife said. “What’s your wife’s name? I forget.”
    “It’s Fiona.”
    “Fiona. And what’s yours? I don’t think I ever was told that.”
    Grant said, “It’s Grant.”
    She stuck her hand out unexpectedly across the table.
    “Hello, Grant. I’m Marian.”
    “So now we know each other’s name,” she said, “there’s no point in not telling you straight out what I think. I don’t know if he’s still so stuck on seeing your—on seeing Fiona. Or not. I don’t ask him and he’s not telling me. Maybe just a passing fancy. But I don’t feel like taking him back there in case