The Love of a Good Woman

they should shave their heads.
    A curly-headed beanpole was what he called you. Coming from him that was almost complimentary.
    When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said, “Oh-oh. Do you think you’ll ever manage to get another one?” If I’d objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.
    M RS . B ARRIE is back. She’s back in less than three weeks though it was supposed to be a month. But she has to work shorter days than she did before. It takes her so long to get dressed and to do her own housework that she seldom gets here (delivered by her nephew or her nephew’s wife) until around ten o’clock in the morning.
    “Your father looks poorly” was the first thing she said to me. I think she’s right.
    “Maybe he should take a rest,” I said.
    “Too many people bothering him,” she said.
    The Mini is out of the garage and the money is in my bank account. What I should do is take off. But I think stupid things. I think, What if we get another special? How can Mrs. B. help him? She can’t use her left hand yet to hold any weight, and she could never hold on to the basin with just her right hand.
    • • •
    R. This day. This day was after the first big snowfall. It all happened overnight and in the morning the sky was clear, blue; there was no wind and the brightness was preposterous. I went for an early walk, under the pine trees. Snow was sifting through them, straight down, bright as the stuff on Christmas trees, or diamonds. The highway had already been plowed and so had our lane, so that my father could drive out to the hospital. Or I could drive out whenever I wanted to.
    Some cars went by, in and out of town, as on any other morning.
    Before I went back into the house I just wanted to see if the Mini would start, and it did. On the passenger seat I saw a package. It was a two-pound box of chocolates, the kind you buy at the drugstore. I couldn’t think how it had got there—I wondered if it could possibly be a present from the young man at the Historical Society. That was a stupid thought. But who else?
    I stomped my boots free of snow outside the back door and reminded myself that I must put a broom out. The kitchen had filled up with the day’s blast of light.
    I thought I knew what my father would say.
    “Out contemplating nature?”
    He was sitting at the table with his hat and coat on. Usually by this time he had left to see his patients in the hospital.
    He said, “Have they got the road plowed yet? What about the lane?”
    I said that both were plowed and clear. He could have seen that the lane was plowed by looking out the window. I put the kettle on and asked if he would like another cup of coffee before he went out.
    “All right,” he said. “Just so long as it’s plowed so I can get out.”
    “What a day,” I said.
    “All right if you don’t have to shovel yourself out of it.”
    I made the two cups of instant coffee and set them on the table. I sat down, facing the window and the incoming light. He sat at the end of the table, and had shifted his chair so that the light was at his back. I couldn’t see what the expression on his face was, but his breathing kept me company as usual.
    I started to tell my father about myself. I hadn’t intended to do this at all. I had meant to say something about my going away. I opened my mouth and things began to come out of it that I heard with equal amounts of dismay and satisfaction, the way you hear the things you say when you are drunk.
    “You never knew I had a baby,” I said. “I had it on the seventeenth of July. In Ottawa. I’ve been thinking how ironic that was.”
    I told him that the baby had been adopted right away and that I didn’t know whether it had been a boy or a girl. That I had asked not to be told. And I had asked not to have to see it.
    “I stayed with Josie,” I said. “You remember me speaking about my friend Josie. She’s in England now but she was all alone then in her parents’ house. Her parents had been posted to South Africa. That was a godsend.”
    I told him who the father of the baby was. I said it was you, in case he wondered. And that since you and I were already engaged, even officially engaged, I had thought that all we had to do was get married.
    But you thought differently. You said that we had to