The Love of a Good Woman

Have yourself a time.”
    She thought his cockiness sounded sad and faked. He must have seen her dancing. Or else he would have said, “What have you done to your face?”
    “I’d sooner wait for you,” she said.
    He frowned at the baby, tipping up the bottle.
    “Nearly finished,” he said. “Okay if you want.”
    “I just have to go to the bathroom,” Kath said. And in the bathroom, as she had expected in Monica’s house, there was a good supply of Kleenex. She ran the water hot, and soaked and scrubbed, soaked and scrubbed, from time to time flushing a wad of black and purple tissues down the toilet.
IV
    I N the middle of the second drink, when Kent was talking about the astounding, really obscene prices of real estate these days in West Vancouver, Sonje said, “You know, I have a theory.”
    “Those places we used to live in,” he said. “They went long ago. For a song, compared to now. Now I don’t know what you’d get for them. Just for the property. Just for a teardown.”
    What was her theory? About the price of real estate?
    No. It was about Cottar. She did not believe that he was dead.
    “Oh, I did at first,” she said. “It never occurred to me to doubtit. And then suddenly I just woke up and saw it didn’t necessarily have to be true. It didn’t have to be true at all.”
    Think of the circumstances, she said. A doctor had written to her. From Jakarta. That is, the person writing to her said that he was a doctor. He said that Cottar had died and he said what he had died of, he used the medical term which she forgot now. Anyway it was an infectious disease. But how did she know that this person really was a doctor? Or even, granted that he might be a doctor, how did she know that he was telling the truth? It would not be difficult for Cottar to have made the acquaintance of a doctor. To have become friends. Cottar had all sorts of friends.
    “Or even to have paid him,” she said. “That isn’t outside the range of possibility either.”
    Kent said, “Why would he do that?”
    “He wouldn’t be the first doctor to do something like that. Maybe he needed the money to keep a clinic going for poor people, how do we know? Maybe he just wanted it for himself. Doctors aren’t saints.”
    “No,” said Kent. “I meant Cottar. Why would Cottar do it? And did he have any money?”
    “No. He didn’t have any himself but—I don’t know. It’s only one hypothesis anyway. The money. And I was here, you know. I was here to take care of his mother. He really cared about his mother. He knew I’d never desert her. So that was all right.
    “It really was all right,” she said. “I was very fond of Delia. I didn’t find it a burden. I might really have been better suited to taking care of her than to being married to Cottar. And you know, something strange. Delia thought the same as I did. About Cottar. She had the same suspicions. And she never mentioned them to me. I never mentioned mine to her. Each of us thought it would break the other’s heart. Then one evening not that long before she—had to go, I was reading her a mystery story that wasset in Hong Kong, and she said, ‘Maybe that’s where Cottar is. Hong Kong.’
    “She said she hoped she hadn’t upset me. Then I told her what I’d been thinking, and she laughed. We both laughed. You would expect an old mother would be grief-stricken talking about how her only child had run off and left her, but no. Maybe old people aren’t like that. Really old people. They don’t get grief-stricken anymore. They must figure it’s not worth it.
    “He knew I’d take care of her, though he probably didn’t know how long that would last,” she said. “I wish I could show you the doctor’s letter, but I threw it out. That was very stupid, but I was distraught at the time. I didn’t see how I was going to get through the rest of my life. I didn’t think how I should follow up and find out what his credentials were or ask about a death certificate or anything. I thought of all that later and by then I didn’t have an address. I couldn’t write to the American embassy because they were the last people Cottar would have had anything to do with. And he wasn’t a Canadian citizen. Maybe he even had another name. False identity he could slip into. False papers. He used to hint about things like that. That was part of the glamour about him, for me.”
    “Some of that could have been along the lines of self-dramatizing,” Kent said.