The Love of a Good Woman

against Pauline’s side, anxious to get down. Caitlin came along the hall and went into the store, leaving wet sandy footprints. Pauline said, “Just a minute, just a minute.” She let Mara slide down and hurried to close the door that led to the steps. She did not remember telling Jeffrey the name of this place, though she had told him roughly where it was. She heard the woman in the store speaking to Caitlin in a sharper voice than she would use to children whose parents were beside them.
    “Did you forget to put your feet under the tap?”
    “I’m here,” said Jeffrey. “I didn’t get along well without you. I didn’t get along at all.”
    Mara made for the dining room, as if the male voice calling out “Under the
N-
—” was a direct invitation to her.
    “Here. Where?” said Pauline.
    She read the signs that were tacked up on the bulletin board beside the phone.
    N O P ERSON UNDER F OURTEEN Y EARS OF A GE N OT A CCOMPANIED BY A DULT A LLOWED IN B OATS OR C ANOES .
    F ISHING D ERBY .
    B AKE AND C RAFT S ALE , S T . B ARTHOLOMEW’S C HURCH .
    Y OUR L IFE I S IN Y OUR H ANDS . P ALMS AND C ARDS R EAD . R EASONABLE AND A CCURATE . C ALL C LAIRE .
    “In a motel. In Campbell River.”
    P AULINE knew where she was before she opened her eyes. Nothing surprised her. She had slept but not deeply enough to let go of anything.
    She had waited for Brian in the parking area of the lodge, with the children, and had asked him for the keys. She had told him in front of his parents that there was something else she needed, from Campbell River. He asked, What was it? And did she have any money?
    “Just something,” she said, so he would think that it was tampons or birth control supplies, that she didn’t want to mention. “Sure.”
    “Okay but you’ll have to put some gas in,” he said. Later she had to speak to him on the phone. Jeffrey said she had to do it.
    “Because he won’t take it from me. He’ll think I kidnapped you or something. He won’t believe it.”
    But the strangest thing of all the things that day was that Brian did seem, immediately, to believe it. Standing where she had stood not so long before, in the public hallway of the lodge—the bingo game over now but people going past, she could hear them, people on their way out of the dining room after dinner—he said, “Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay” in a voice that would have to be quickly controlled, but that seemed to draw on a supply of fatalism or foreknowledge that went far beyond that necessity.
    As if he had known all along, all along, what could happen with her.
    “Okay,” he said. “What about the car?”
    He said something else, something impossible, and hung up, and she came out of the phone booth beside some gas pumps in Campbell River.
    “That was quick,” Jeffrey said. “Easier than you expected.”
    Pauline said, “I don’t know.”
    “He may have known it subconsciously. People do know.”
    She shook her head, to tell him not to say any more, and he said, “Sorry.” They walked along the street not touching or talking.
    T HEY’D had to go out to find a phone booth because there was no phone in the motel room. Now in the early morning looking around at leisure—the first real leisure or freedom she’d had since she came into that room—Pauline saw that there wasn’t much of anything in it. Just a junk dresser, the bed without a headboard, an armless upholstered chair, on the window a Venetian blind with a broken slat and curtain of orange plastic that was supposed to look like net and that didn’t have to be hemmed, just sliced off at the bottom. There was a noisy air conditioner—Jeffrey had turned it off in the night and left the door open on the chain, since the window was sealed. The door was shut now. He must have got up in the night and shut it.
    This was all she had. Her connection with the cottage where Brian lay asleep or not asleep was broken, also her connection with the house that had been an expression of her life with Brian, of the way they wanted to live. She had no furniture anymore. She had cut herself off from all the large solid acquisitions like the washer and dryer and the oak table and the refinished wardrobe and the chandelier that was a copy of the one in a painting by Vermeer. And just as much from those things that were particularly hers—the pressed-glass tumblers that she had been collecting and the prayer rug which was of course not authentic, butbeautiful. Especially from those