Away from Her

was here. If it was you and if you are even home. Because I don’t have a machine obviously, so you couldn’t leave a message. So I just wanted. To let you know.
    “Bye.”
    The time was now twenty-five after ten.
    Bye.
    He would say that he’d just got home. There was no point in bringing to her mind the picture of his sitting here, weighing the pros and cons.
    Drapes. That would be her word for the blue curtains—drapes. And why not? He thought of the ginger cookies so perfectly round that she’d had to announce they were homemade, the ceramic coffee mugs on their ceramic tree. A plastic runner, he was sure, protecting the hall carpet. A high-gloss exactness and practicality that his mother had never achieved but would have admired—was that why he could feel this twinge of bizarre and unreliable affection? Or was it because he’d had two more drinks after the first?
    The walnut-stain tan—he believed now that it was a tan—of her face and neck would most likely continue into her cleavage, which would be deep, crepey-skinned, odorous and hot. He had that to think of, as he dialed the number that he had alreadywritten down. That and the practical sensuality of her cat’s tongue. Her gemstone eyes.
    Fiona was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady, warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.
    She had a book open in her lap.
    She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found, it’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms. The people staying here are not necessarily honest. And I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up. I never wear yellow.”
    “Fiona …,” he said.
    “You’ve been gone a long time. Are we all checked out now?”
    “Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
    She stared at him for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags.
    “Names elude me,” she said harshly.
    Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms toput them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to him like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water.
    “I’m happy to see you,” she said, and pulled his earlobes.
    “You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”
    He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance.

A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL,
MAY 2007
    “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” copyright © 1999
    by Alice Munro
    Preface copyright © 2007 by Sarah Polley

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    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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    eISBN: 978-0-307-48181-8
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