Friend of My Youth

she’s sixty-five, she’ll be O.K.”
    Morris digs up the earth in front of the headstone; Joan and Ruth Ann plant the bulbs. The earth is cold, but there hasn’t been a frost. Long bars of sunlight fall between the clipped cedar trees and the rustling poplars, which still hold many gold leaves, on the rich green grass.
    “Listen to that,” says Joan, looking up at the leaves. “It’s like water.”
    “People like it,” says Morris. “Very pop’lar sound.”
    Joan and Ruth Ann groan together, and Joan says, “I didn’t know you still did that, Morris.”
    Ruth Ann says, “He never stops.”
    They wash their hands at an outdoor tap and read a few names on the stones.
    “Rose Matilda,” Morris says.
    For a moment Joan thinks that’s another name he’s read; then she realizes he’s still thinking of Matilda Buttler.
    “That poem Mother used to say about her,” he says. “Rose Matilda.”
    “Rapunzel,” Joan says. “That was what Mother used to call her. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy gold hair.’ ”
    “I know she used to say that. She said ‘Rose Matilda,’ too. It was the start of a poem.”
    “It sounds like a lotion,” Ruth Ann says. “Isn’t that a skin lotion? Rose Emulsion?”
    “ ‘Oh, what avails,’ ” says Morris firmly. “That was the start of it. ‘Oh, what avails.’ ”
    “Of course, I don’t know hardly any poems,” says RuthAnn, versatile and unabashed. She says to Joan, “Does it ring a bell with you?”
    She has really pretty eyes, Joan thinks—brown eyes that can look soft and shrewd at once.
    “It does,” says Joan. “But I can’t think what comes next.”
    Morris has cheated them all a little bit, these three women. Joan, Ruth Ann, Matilda. Morris isn’t habitually dishonest—he’s not foolish that way—but he will cut a corner now and then. He cheated Joan a long time ago, when the house was sold. She got about a thousand dollars less out of that than she should have. He thought she would make it up in the things she chose to take back to her house in Ottawa. Then she didn’t choose anything. Later on, when she and her husband had parted, and she was on her own, Morris considered sending her a check, with an explanation that there had been a mistake. But she got a job, she didn’t seem short of money. She has very little idea of what to do with money anyway—how to make it work. He let the idea drop.
    The way he cheated Ruth Ann was more complicated, and had to do with persuading her to declare herself a part-time employee of his when she wasn’t. This got him out of paying certain benefits to her. He wouldn’t be surprised if she had figured all that out, and had made a few little adjustments of her own. That was what she would do—never say anything, never argue, but quietly get her own back. And as long as she just got her own back—he’d soon notice if it was any more—he wouldn’t say anything, either. She and he both believe that if people don’t look out for themselves what they lose is their own fault. He means to take care of Ruth Ann eventually anyway.
    If Joan found out what he had done, she probably wouldn’t say anything, either. The interesting part, to her, would not be the money. She has some instinct lacking in that regard. The interesting part would be: why? She’d worry that around and get her curious pleasure out of it. This fact about her brother wouldlodge in her mind like a hard crystal—a strange, small, light-refracting object, a bit of alien treasure.
    He didn’t cheat Matilda when he sold her the house. She got that at a very good price. But he told her that the hot-water heater he had put in a year or so before was new, and of course it wasn’t. He never bought new appliances or new materials when he was fixing up the places he owned. And three years ago last June, at a dinner dance in the Valhalla Inn, Matilda said to him, “My hot-water heater gave out. I had to replace it.”
    They were not dancing at the time. They were sitting at a round table, with some other people, under a canopy of floating balloons. They were drinking whiskey.
    “It shouldn’t have done that,” Morris said.
    “Not after you’d put it in new,” said Matilda, smiling. “You know what I think?”
    He kept looking at her, waiting.
    “I think we should have another dance before we have anything more to drink!”
    They danced. They had always danced easily together, and often with some special flourish. But this time