The Love of a Good Woman

tell him I’m not terribly concerned about the money.
    What a thing to say. He can hardly look me in the eye.
    “Perhaps you could go home and take a very good look,” he says. “Don’t neglect the obvious places. It could be in a cookie tin. Or in a box under the bed. Surprising the places people can pick. Even the most sensible and intelligent people.
    “Or in a pillow slip,” he’s saying as I go out the door.
    • • •
    A WOMAN on the phone wants to speak to the doctor.
    “I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
    “Dr. Strachan. Have I got the right doctor?”
    “Yes but I’m sorry, he’s dead.”
    “Is there anyone—does he by any chance have a partner I could talk to? Is there anybody else there?”
    “No. No partner.”
    “Could you give me any other number I could call? Isn’t there some other doctor that can—”
    “No. I haven’t any number. There isn’t anybody that I know of.”
    “You must know what this is about. It’s very crucial. There are very special circumstances—”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “There isn’t any problem about money.”
    “No.”
    “Please try to think of somebody. If you do think of somebody later on, could you give me a call? I’ll leave you my number.”
    “You shouldn’t do that.”
    “I don’t care. I trust you. Anyway it’s not for myself. I know everybody must say that but really it’s not. It’s for my daughter who’s in a very bad condition. Mentally she’s in a very bad condition.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “If you knew what I went through to get this number you would try to help me.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Please.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    • • •
    M ADELEINE was the last one of his specials. I saw her at the funeral. She hadn’t got to Kenora. Or else she’d come back. I didn’t recognize her at first because she was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with a horizontal feather. She must have borrowed it—she wasn’t used to the feather which came drooping down over her eye. She spoke to me in the lineup at the reception in the church hall. I said to her just the same thing I said to everybody.
    “So good of you to come.”
    Then I realized what an odd thing she’d said to me.
    “I was just counting on you to have a sweet tooth.”
    “P ERHAPS he didn’t always charge,” I say to the lawyer. “Perhaps he worked for nothing sometimes. Some people do things out of charity.”
    The lawyer is getting used to me now. He says, “Perhaps.”
    “Or possibly an actual charity,” I say. “A charity he supported without keeping any record of it.”
    The lawyer holds my eyes for a moment.
    “A charity,” he says.
    “Well I haven’t dug up the cellar floor yet,” I say, and he smiles wincingly at this levity.
    M RS . B ARRIE hasn’t given her notice. She just hasn’t shown up. There was nothing in particular for her to do, since the funeral was in the church and the reception was in the church hall. She didn’t come to the funeral. None of her family came. So many people were there that I would not have noticed that if someone hadn’t said to me, “I didn’t see any of the Barrie connection, did you?”
    I phoned her several days afterwards and she said, “I never went to the church because I had too bad a cold.”
    I said that that wasn’t why I’d called. I said I could manage quite well but wondered what she planned to do.
    “Oh I don’t see no need for me to come back there now.”
    I said that she should come and get something from the house, a keepsake. By this time I knew about the money and I wanted to tell her I felt bad about it. But I didn’t know how to say that.
    She said, “I got some stuff I left there. I’ll be out when I can.”
    She came out the next morning. The things she had to collect were mops and pails and scrub brushes and a clothes basket. It was hard to believe she would care about retrieving articles like these. And hard to believe she wanted them for sentimental reasons, but maybe she did. They were things she had used for years—during all her years in this house, where she had spent more waking hours than she had spent at home.
    “Isn’t there anything else?” I said. “For a keepsake?”
    She looked around the kitchen, chewing on her bottom lip. She might have been chewing back a smile.
    “I don’t think there’s nothing here I’d have much use for,” she said.
    I had a check ready for her. I just needed to write in the amount. I hadn’t been able to decide how much of the five