Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

went near the cemetery) and one for their parents’.
    “I thought you might like to take a drive out to Last Lookout,” she said to Jeanette at breakfast. That was her husband’s name for it, his joke. Naturally Jeanette did not know what she was talking about. Viola had spoken confidentially, coquettishly. She could not help it. To the cashier at the grocery store, the mechanic at the garage, the teenager who mowed the lawn, she bent her silver, smoothly waved head in this mystifying way, she murmured deprecatingly some words that half the time they did not bother to pick up. Dorothy was embarrassed. To offset Viola’s silliness she had to be more brusque and to the point than she might have been otherwise.
    “She means the cemetery,” Dorothy said.
    “Oh, I love the cemetery,” said Jeanette, with her tender, charming smile.
    “What is there to love?” said Dorothy, looking down into her cup of black coffee as if it were a well.
    “Well I love the view,” said Jeanette gamely. “And the old tombstones. I love reading the inscriptions on the old tombstones.”
    “Dorothy thinks I’m morbid,” said Viola slyly.
    “I don’t think anything,” said Dorothy, and brightened up, remembering something. “Glass jars are prohibited in the cemetery.” She looked at the bouquets which Viola had put in preserving jars. “You’ll have to take them out and put them in those plastic ice-cream things.”
    “Prohibited?” Viola said. “Whyever is that?”
    “Vandalism,” replied Dorothy with satisfaction. “I heard it on the radio.”
    Jeanette was Dorothy’s granddaughter. People here in town, seeing her with the two old ladies—and seeing her with Viola, who still drove her car, more frequently than with Dorothy—were not usually aware of this. They thought her some distant young relative. Though Dorothy had lived in and around this town all her life it was not well remembered that she had been left a widow with a young boy to raise, that his name had been Bobby, that he had gone to high school four years here, before he left to look for work out west in the final years before the War. From the time she was widowed until the time of her retirement Dorothy had taught Grade Seven in the public school, and because of this people were apt to forget that she had had any life that might be called private. She had become a fixed star in many, many, shifting, changing, ongoing lives. Seeing her on the street, truck drivers, storekeepers, mothers pushing baby carriages—now, as a matter of fact, even grandmothers pushing baby carriages—would be reminded of maps, percentages, spelling bees, the serious but not oppressive, well-run, sensible, atmosphere of her class. She herself seldom thought of the classroom where she had spent most of her life, and could not have gone back to visit it if she had wanted to, because they had torn down the building five years ago and put up a new, low, unimpressive, pastel school; but as far as those people were concerned, she carried it around with her, forever, and they never looked at her for anything beyond that. The Mrs. in front of her name was as empty as a courtesy title.
    Bobby, her son, had died before the War, killed in a car accident in the interior of British Columbia. He had found time to get married first and father a baby girl. That was Jeanette. Jeanette’s mother, whom Dorothy had never met to this day, had moved to Vancouver and in a couple of years had married again and started in on what was to be a large family. When Jeanette was fourteen years old she had come east for the first time, on the train, to spend a month of the summer with her grandmother. For a few years after that she came every summer, Dorothy and the stepfather splitting the cost. Dorothy’s correspondence was with the stepfather who explained that there was some natural friction between the girl and her mother and her mother’s many children; it was a good thing to give them a holiday from each other. He seemed a sensible man. Now he was dead too. Jeanette seemed to see hardly anything nowadays of her mother and her step-family.
    But she continued to visit Dorothy and, after Viola had moved in, Dorothy and Viola. She had won scholarships which had taken her to college. She remained to get her M.A. Then her Ph.D. She stayed at college for good, teaching. She traveled. Her visits never lasted longer than a week, and sometimes only three or four days. She had friends to see, she had