The Love of a Good Woman

years—decades—had gone by. And how truly ancient the mother would have to be by now. How old Sonje would be, how old he was himself. For it was Sonje, and at first she did not know him either. She bent over to stick the shears into the ground, she wiped her hands on her jeans. He felt the stiffness of her movements in his own joints. Her hair was white and skimpy, blowing in the light ocean breeze that had found its way in here among the dunes. Some firm covering of flesh had gone from her bones. She had always been rather flat chested but not so thin in the waist. A broad-backed, broad-faced, Nordic sort of girl. Though her name didn’t come from that ancestry—he remembered a story of her being named Sonje because her mother loved Sonja Henie’s movies. She changed the spelling herself and scorned her mother’s frivolity. They all scorned their parents then, for something.
    He couldn’t see her face very well in the bright sun. But he saw a couple of shining silver-white spots where skin cancers, probably, had been cut away.
    “Well Kent,” she said. “How ridiculous. I thought you were somebody come to buy my house. And is this Noelle?”
    So she had made her mistake too.
    Deborah was in fact a year younger than Noelle. But there wasnothing of the toy wife about her. Kent had met her after his first operation. She was a physiotherapist, never married, and he a widower. A serene, steady woman who distrusted fashion and irony—she wore her hair in a braid down her back. She had introduced him to yoga, as well as the prescribed exercises, and now she had him taking vitamins and ginseng as well. She was tactful and incurious almost to the point of indifference. Perhaps a woman of her generation took it for granted that everybody had a well-peopled and untranslatable past.
    Sonje invited them into the house. Deborah said that she would leave them to have their visit—she wanted to find a health-food store (Sonje told her where one was) and to take a walk on the beach.
    The first thing Kent noticed about the house was that it was chilly. On a bright summer day. But houses in the Pacific Northwest are seldom as warm as they look—move out of the sun and you feel at once a clammy breath. Fogs and rainy winter cold must have entered this house for a long time almost without opposition. It was a large wooden bungalow, ramshackle though not austere, with its veranda and dormers. There used to be a lot of houses like this in West Vancouver, where Kent still lived. But most of them had been sold as teardowns.
    The two large connected front rooms were bare, except for an upright piano. The floor was scuffed gray in the middle, darkly waxed at the corners. There was a railing along one wall and opposite that a dusty mirror in which he saw two lean white-haired figures pass. Sonje said that she was trying to sell the place—well, he could see that by the sign—and that since this part was set up as a dance studio she thought she might as well leave it that way.
    “Somebody could still make an okay thing out of it,” she said. She said that they had started the school around 1960, soon after they heard that Cottar was dead. Cottar’s mother—Delia—played the piano. She played it until she was nearly ninety years old and lost her marbles. (“Excuse me,” said Sonje, “but you do get rather nonchalant about things.”) Sonje had to put her in a nursing home where she went every day to feed her, though Delia didn’t know her anymore. And she hired new people to play the piano, but things didn’t work out. Also she was getting so that she couldn’t show the pupils anything, just tell them. So she saw that it was time to give up.
    She used to be such a stately girl, not very forthcoming. In fact not very friendly, or so he had thought. And now she was scurrying and chattering in the way of people who were too much alone.
    “It did well when we started, little girls were all excited then about ballet, and then all that sort of thing went out, you know, it was too formal. But never completely, and then in the eighties people came moving in here with young families and it seemed they had lots of money, how did they get so much money? And it could have been successful again but I couldn’t quite manage it.”
    She said that perhaps the spirit went out of it or the need went out of it when her mother-in-law died.
    “We were the best of friends,” she said. “Always.”
    The kitchen was another big room,