Away from Her

it turns out to be more than that. I can’t afford to risk it. I don’t want him getting hard to handle. I don’t want him upset and carrying on. I’ve got my hands full with him as it is. I don’t have any help. It’s just me here. I’m it.”
    “Did you ever consider—it
is
very hard for you—” Grant said—“did you ever consider his going in there for good?”
    He had lowered his voice almost to a whisper, but she did not seem to feel a need to lower hers.
    “No,” she said. “I’m keeping him right here.”
    Grant said, “Well. That’s very good and noble of you.”
    He hoped the word “noble” had not sounded sarcastic. He had not meant it to be.
    “You think so?” she said. “Noble is not what I’m thinking about.”
    “Still. It’s not easy.”
    “No, it isn’t. But the way I am, I don’t have much choice. If I put him in there I don’t have the money to pay for him unless I sell the house. The house is what we own outright. Otherwise I don’t have anything in the way of resources. I get the pension next year, and I’ll have his pension and my pension, but even so I could not afford to keep him there and hang on to the house. And it means a lot to me, my house does.”
    “It’s very nice,” said Grant.
    “Well, it’s all right. I put a lot into it. Fixing it up and keeping it up.”
    “I’m sure you did. You do.”
    “I don’t want to lose it.”
    “No.”
    “I’m not
going
to lose it.”
    “I see your point.”
    “The company left us high and dry,” she said. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but basically he got shoved out. It ended up with them saying he owed them money and when I tried to find out what was what he just went on saying it’s none of my business. What I think is he did something pretty stupid. But I’m not supposed to ask, so I shut up. You’ve been married. You are married. You know how it is. And in the middle of me finding out about this we’re supposed to go on this trip with thesepeople and can’t get out of it. And on the trip he takes sick from this virus you never heard of and goes into a coma. So that pretty well gets
him
off the hook.”
    Grant said, “Bad luck.”
    “I don’t mean exactly that he got sick on purpose. It just happened. He’s not mad at me anymore and I’m not mad at him. It’s just life.”
    “That’s true.”
    “You can’t beat life.”
    She flicked her tongue in a cat’s businesslike way across her top lip, getting the cookie crumbs. “I sound like I’m quite the philosopher, don’t I? They told me out there you used to be a university professor.”
    “Quite a while ago,” Grant said.
    “I’m not much of an intellectual,” she said.
    “I don’t know how much I am, either.”
    “But I know when my mind’s made up. And it’s made up. I’m not going to let go of the house. Which means I’m keeping him here and I don’t want him getting it in his head he wants to move anyplace else. It was probably a mistake putting him in there so I could get away, but I wasn’t going to get another chance, so I took it. So. Now I know better.”
    She shook out another cigarette.
    “I bet I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
    “You’re thinking there’s a mercenary type of a person.”
    “I’m not making judgments of that sort. It’s your life.”
    “You bet it is.”
    He thought they should end on a more neutral note. So he asked her if her husband had worked in a hardware store in the summers, when he was going to school.
    “I never heard about it,” she said. “I wasn’t raised here.”
    Driving home, he noticed that the swamp hollow that had been filled with snow and the formal shadows of tree trunks was now lighted up with skunk lilies. Their fresh, edible-looking leaves were the size of platters. The flowers sprang straight up like candle flames, and there were so many of them, so pure a yellow, that they set a light shooting up from the earth on this cloudy day. Fiona had told him that they generated a heat of their own as well. Rummaging around in one of her concealed pockets of information, she said that you were supposed to be able to put your hand inside the curled petal and feel the heat. She said that she had tried it, but she couldn’t be sure if what she felt was heat or her imagination. The heat attracted bugs.
    “Nature doesn’t fool around just being decorative.”
    He had failed with Aubrey’s wife. Marian. He had foreseen that he might fail, but he