Dear Life

highway, driving west, she finds that the sun is just low enoughto shine into her face. If she sits up quite straight, however, and lifts her chin, she can get her eyes into shadow. Also, she has good sunglasses. She can read the sign, which tells her that she has eight miles to go to the village of Highman.
    Highman. So that’s what it was, no joke. Population 1,553.
    Why do they bother to put the 3 on?
    Every soul counts.
    She has a habit of checking out small places just for fun, to see if she could live there. This one seems to fill the bill. A decent-sized market, where you could get fairly fresh vegetables, though they would probably not be from the fields round about, okay coffee. Then a Laundromat, and a pharmacy, which could fill your prescriptions even if they didn’t stock the better class of magazines.
    There are signs of course that the place has seen better days. A clock that no longer tells the time presides over a window which promises Fine Jewellery but now appears to be full of any old china, crocks and pails and wreaths twisted out of wires.
    She gets to look at some of this trash because she has chosen to park in front of the shop where it is displayed. She thinks that she may as well search out this doctor’s office on foot. And almost too soon to give her satisfaction she does see a dark brick one-story building in the utilitarian style of the last century and she is ready to bet that is it. Doctors in small towns used to have their working quarters as part of their houses, but then they had to have space where cars could park, and they put up something like this. Reddish-brown bricks, and sure enough the sign, Medical/Dental. A parking lot behind the building.
    In her pocket she has the doctor’s name and she gets outthe scrap of paper to check it. The names on the frosted glass door are Dr. H. W. Forsyth, Dentist, and Dr. Donald McMillen, Physician.
    These names are not on Nancy’s piece of paper. And no wonder, because nothing is written there but a number. It is the shoe size of her husband’s sister, who is dead. The number is O 7½. It takes her a while to figure that out, the O standing for Olivia but scribbled in a hasty way. She can only recall faintly something about buying slippers when Olivia was in the hospital.
    That’s no use to her anyway.
    One solution may be that the doctor she will see has newly moved into this building and the name on the door has not been changed yet. She should ask somebody. First she should ring the bell on the off chance that somebody is in there, working late. She does this, and it is a good thing in a way that nobody comes, because the doctor’s name that she is after has for a moment slipped below the surface of her mind.
    Another idea. Isn’t it quite possible that this person—the crazy-doctor, as she has chosen to call him in her head—isn’t it quite possible that he (or she—like most people of her age she does not automatically allow for that possibility) that he or she does operate out of a house? It would make sense and be cheaper. You don’t need a lot of apparatus for the crazy doctoring.
    So she continues her walk away from the main street. The doctor’s name that she is after has come back to her, as such things are apt to do when there is no longer a crisis. The houses she walks by were mostly built in the nineteenth century. Some of wood, some of brick. The brickones often two full stories high, the wooden ones somewhat more modest, a story and a half with slanting ceilings in the upstairs rooms. Some front doors open just a few feet from the sidewalk. Others onto wide verandas, occasionally glassed in. A century ago, on an evening like this one, people would have been sitting on their verandas or perhaps on the front steps. Housewives who had finished washing the dishes and sweeping up the kitchen for the last time that day, men who had coiled up the hose after giving the grass a soaking. No garden furniture such as now sat here empty, showing off. Just the wooden steps or dragged-out kitchen chairs. Conversation about the weather or a runaway horse or some person who has taken to bed and was not expected to recover. Speculation about herself, once she was out of earshot.
    But wouldn’t she have put their minds at ease by this time, stopping and asking them, Please, can you tell me, where is the doctor’s house?
    New item of conversation. What does she want the doctor for?
    (This once she has put herself out of