Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

beautiful.”
    “She won’t do herself any harm,” said Et, enjoying her food, and glad to see that worry hadn’t put him off his. She always made him good suppers.

    It was the week before the Labor Day weekend. Blaikie had gone to Toronto, for a day or two he said.
    “It’s quiet without him,” said Arthur.
    “I never noticed he was such a conversationalist,” Et said.
    “I only mean in the way that you get used to somebody.”
    “Maybe we ought to get unused to him,” said Et.
    Arthur was unhappy. He was not going back to the school; he had obtained a leave of absence until after Christmas. Nobody believed he would go back then.
    “I suppose he has his own plans for the winter,” he said.
    “He may have his own plans for right now. You know I have my customers from the hotel. I have my friends. Ever since I went on that excursion, I hear things.”
    She never knew where she got the inspiration to say what she said, where it came from. She had not planned it at all, yet it came so easily, believably.
    “I hear he’s taken up with a well-to-do woman down at the hotel.”
    Arthur was the one to take an interest, not Char.
    “A widow?”
    “Twice, I believe. The same as he is. And she has the money from both. It’s been suspected for some time and she was talking about it openly. He never said anything, though. He never said anything to you, did he, Char?”
    “No,” said Char.
    “I heard this afternoon that now he’s gone, and she’s gone. It wouldn’t be the first time he pulled something like this. Char and I remember.”
    Then Arthur wanted to know what she meant and she told him the story of the lady ventriloquist, remembering even the names of the dolls, though of course she left out all about Char. Char sat through this, even contributing a bit.
    “They might come back but my guess is they’d be embarrassed. He’d be embarrassed. He’d be embarrassed to come here, anyway.”
    “Why?” said Arthur, who had cheered up a little through the ventriloquist story. “We never set down any rule against a man getting married.”
    Char got up and went into the house. After a while they heard the sound of the piano.

    The question often crossed Et’s mind in later years—what did she mean to do about this story when Blaikie got back? For she had no reason to believe he would not come back. The answer was that she had not made any plans at all. She had not planned anything. She supposed she might have wanted to make trouble between him and Char—make Char pick a fight with him, her suspicions roused even if rumors had not been borne out, make Char read what he might do again in the light of what he had done before. She did not know what she wanted. Only to throw things into confusion, for she believed then that somebody had to, before it was too late.
    Arthur made as good a recovery as could be expected at his age, he went back to teaching history to the senior classes, working half-days until it was time for him to retire. Et kept up her own place on the Square and tried to get up and do some cooking and cleaning for Arthur, as well. Finally, after he retired, she moved back into the house, keeping the other place only for business purposes. “Let people jaw all they like,” she said. “At our age.”
    Arthur lived on and on, though he was frail and slow. He walked down to the Square once a day, dropped in on Et, went and sat in the park. The hotel closed down and was sold again. There was a story that it was going to be opened up and used as a rehabilitation center for drug addicts, but the town got up a petition and that fell through. Eventually it was torn down.
    Et’s eyesight was not as good as it used to be, she had to slow down. She had to turn people away. Still she worked, every day. In the evenings Arthur watched television or read, but she sat out on the porch, in the warm weather, or in the dining room in winter, rocking and resting her eyes. She came and watched the news with him, and made him his hot drink, cocoa or tea.

    There was no trace of the bottle. Et went and looked in the cupboard as soon as she could—having run to the house in response to Arthur’s early morning call, and found the doctor, old McClain, coming in at the same time. She ran out and looked in the garbage, but she never found it. Could Char have found the time to bury it? She was lying on the bed, fully and nicely dressed, her hair piled up. There was no fuss about the cause of death as there