The Love of a Good Woman

thousand dollars to share with her. A thousand? I had been thinking. Now that seemed shameful. I thought I’d better double it.
    I got out the checks that I had hidden in a drawer. I found a pen. I made it out for four thousand dollars.
    “This is for you,” I said. “And thank you for everything.”
    She took the check in her hand and glanced at it and stuffed it in her pocket. I thought maybe she hadn’t been able to read how much it was for. Then I saw the darkening flush, the tide of embarrassment, the difficulty of being grateful.
    She managed to pick up all the things she was taking, using her one good arm. I opened the door for her. I was so anxious for her to say something more that I almost said, Sorry that’s all.
    Instead I said, “Your elbow’s not better yet?”
    “It’ll never be better,” she said. She ducked her head as if she was afraid of another of my kisses. She said, “Well-thanks-very-much-goodbye.”
    I watched her making her way to the car. I had assumed her nephew’s wife had driven her out here.
    But it was not the usual car that the nephew’s wife drove. The thought crossed my mind that she might have a new employer. Bad arm or not. A new and rich employer. That would account for her haste, her cranky embarrassment.
    It was the nephew’s wife, after all, who got out to help with the load. I waved, but she was too busy stowing the mops and pails.
    “Gorgeous car,” I called out, because I thought that was a compliment both women would appreciate. I didn’t know what make the car was, but it was shining new and large and glamorous. A silvery lilac color.
    The nephew’s wife called out, “Oh yeah,” and Mrs. Barrie ducked her head in acknowledgment.
    Shivering in my indoor clothes, but compelled by my feelings of apology and bewilderment, I stood there and waved the car out of sight.
    I couldn’t settle down to do anything after that. I made myself coffee and sat in the kitchen. I got Madeleine’s chocolates out of the drawer and ate a couple, though I really did not have enough of a sweet tooth for their chemically colored orange and yellow centers. I wished I had thanked her. I didn’t see how I could now—I didn’t even know her last name.
    I decided to go out skiing. There are gravel pits that I believe I told you about at the back of our property. I put on the oldwooden skis that my father used to wear in the days when the back roads were not plowed out in winter, and he might have to go across the fields to deliver a baby or take out an appendix. There were only cross straps to hold your feet in place.
    I skied back to the gravel pits whose slopes have been padded with grass over the years and are now additionally covered with snow. There were dog tracks, bird tracks, the faint circles that the skittering voles make, but no sign of humans. I went up and down, up and down, first choosing a cautious diagonal and then going on to steeper descents. I fell now and then, but easily on the fresh plentiful snow, and between one moment of falling and the next of getting to my feet I found out that I knew something.
    I knew where the money had gone.
    Perhaps a charity
.
    Gorgeous car.
    And four thousand dollars out of five.
    S INCE that moment I have been happy.
    I’ve been given the feeling of seeing money thrown over a bridge or high up into the air. Money, hopes, love letters—all such things can be tossed off into the air and come down changed, come down all light and free of context.
    The thing I can’t imagine is my father caving in to blackmail. Particularly not to people who wouldn’t be very credible or clever. Not when the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence.
    What I can imagine, though, is a grand perverse gesture. To forestall demand, maybe, or just to show he didn’t care. Looking forward to the lawyer’s shock, and to my trying even harder to figure him out, now that he’s dead.
    No. I don’t think he’d be thinking of that. I don’t think I’d havecome into his thoughts so much. Never so much as I’d like to believe.
    What I’ve been shying away from is that it could have been done for love.
    For love, then. Never rule that out.
    I CLIMBED out of the gravel pit and as soon as I came out on the fields the wind hit me. Wind was blowing snow over the dog tracks and the fine chain traces of the vole and the trail that will likely be the last ever to be broken by my father’s skis.
    Dear R., Robin—what should be