The Love of a Good Woman

slamming. Enid could hear the children shouting their greetings to General and General barking excitedly in return.
    T WO days later Enid was back, driving her mother’s car herself. She came late in the afternoon, when the funeral would have been well over. There were no extra cars parked outside, which meant that the women who had helped in the kitchen had all gone home, taking with them the extra chairs and teacups and the large coffeepot that belonged to their church. The grass was marked with car tracks and some dropped crushed flowers.
    She had to knock on the door now. She had to wait to be asked in.
    She heard Rupert’s heavy, steady footsteps. She spoke some greeting to him when he stood in front of her on the other side of the screen door, but she didn’t look into his face. He was in his shirtsleeves, but was wearing his suit trousers. He undid the hook of the door.
    “I wasn’t sure anybody would be here,” Enid said. “I thought you might still be at the barn.”
    Rupert said, “They all pitched in with the chores.”
    She could smell whiskey when he spoke, but he didn’t sound drunk.
    “I thought you were one of the women come back to collect something you forgot,” he said.
    Enid said, “I didn’t forget anything. I was just wondering, how are the children?”
    “They’re fine. They’re at Olive’s.”
    It seemed uncertain whether he was going to ask her in. It was bewilderment that stopped him, not hostility. She had not prepared herself for this first awkward part of the conversation. So that she wouldn’t have to look at him, she looked around at the sky.
    “You can feel the evenings getting shorter,” she said. “Even if it isn’t a month since the longest day.”
    “That’s true,” said Rupert. Now he opened the door and stood aside and she went in. On the table was a cup without a saucer. She sat down at the opposite side of the table from where he had been sitting. She was wearing a dark-green silk-crepe dress and suede shoes to match. When she put these things on she had thought how this might be the last time that she would dress herself and the last clothes she would ever wear. She had done her hair up in a French braid and powdered her face. Her care, her vanity, seemed foolish but were necessary to her. She had been awake now three nights in a row, awake every minute, and she had not been able to eat, even to fool her mother.
    “Was it specially difficult this time?” her mother had said. She hated discussion of illness or deathbeds, and the fact that she had brought herself to ask this meant that Enid’s upset was obvious.
    “Was it the children you’d got fond of?” she said. “The poor little monkeys.”
    Enid said it was just the problem of settling down after a long case, and a hopeless case of course had its own strain. She did not go out of her mother’s house in the daytime, but she did go for walks at night, when she could be sure of not meeting anybody and having to talk. She had found herself walking past the walls of the county jail. She knew there was a prison yard behind those walls where hangings had once taken place. But not for years and years. They must do it in some large central prison now, when they had to do it. And it was a long time since anybody from this community had committed a sufficiently serious crime.
    S ITTING across the table from Rupert, facing the door of Mrs. Quinn’s room, she had almost forgotten her excuse, lost track of the way things were to go. She felt her purse in her lap, the weight of her camera in it—that reminded her.
    “There is one thing I’d like to ask you,” she said. “I thought I might as well now, because I wouldn’t get another chance.”
    Rupert said, “What’s that?”
    “I know you’ve got a rowboat. So I wanted to ask you to row me out to the middle of the river. And I could get a picture. I’d like to get a picture of the riverbank. It’s beautiful there, the willow trees along the bank.”
    “All right,” said Rupert, with the careful lack of surprise that country people will show, regarding the frivolity—the rudeness, even—of visitors.
    That was what she was now—a visitor.
    Her plan was to wait until they got out to the middle of the river, then to tell him that she could not swim. First ask him how deep he thought the water would be there—and he would surely say, after all the rain they had been having, that it might be seven or eight, or even ten, feet. Then tell him