The Love of a Good Woman

anywhere.”
    “Did he take his stuff and all?”
    Derek had brought more things to Rosemary’s trailer than were strictly necessary for the work on his bundles of manuscripts. Books, of course—not just the books that had to be referred to but books and magazines to read during breaks in the work, when he might lie down on Rosemary’s bed. Records to listen to. Clothes, boots to wear if he decided to hike back into the bush, pills for stomach troubles or headaches, even the tools and lumber with which he built a gazebo. His shaving things were in the bathroom, also a toothbrush and his special toothpaste for sensitive gums. His coffee grinder was on the kitchen counter. (A newer, fancier one that Ann had bought sat on the counter of the kitchen in what was still his house.)
    “All cleared out,” said Rosemary. She pulled into the lot of a doughnut shop that was still open, on the edge of the first town on this highway.
    “Coffee to keep me alive,” she said.
    Usually when they stopped at this place Karin stayed with Derek in the car. He wouldn’t drink such coffee. “Your mother is addicted to places like this because of her awful childhood,” he said. He didn’t mean that Rosemary had been taken to places like this but that she had been forbidden to go into them, just as she had been forbidden all fried or sugary food, and kept to a diet of vegetables and slimy porridge. Not because her parents were poor—they were rich—but because they were food fanatics before their time. Derek had known Rosemary only a short while—compared,say, to the years that Karin’s father, Ted, had known her—but he spoke more readily than Ted ever would about her early life and divulged details about it, such as the ritual of weekly enemas, that Rosemary’s own stories left out.
    Never, never, in her school-year life, her life with Ted and Grace, would Karin find herself in a place with this horrid smell of scorched sugar and grease and cigarette smoke and rank coffee. But Rosemary’s eyes ranged with pleasure over the selection of doughnuts with cream (spelled “crème”) and jelly filling, with butterscotch and chocolate icing, the crullers and éclairs, and dutchies and filled croissants and monster cookies. She saw no reason for rejecting any of this, except perhaps the fear of getting fat, and she could never believe that such food was not just what everybody was craving.
    At the counter—where you were not supposed to sit for more than twenty minutes, according to the sign—were two very fat women with massive curly hairdos, and between them a thin boyish-looking but wrinkled man, who was talking fast and seemed to be telling them jokes. While the women were shaking their heads and laughing, and Rosemary was picking out her almond croissant, he gave Karin a wink that was lewd and conspiratorial. It made her realize that she was still wearing lipstick. “Can’t resist, eh?” he said to Rosemary, and she laughed, taking this for country friendliness.
    “Never can,” she said. “You’re sure?” she said to Karin. “Not a thing?”
    “Little girl watching her figure?” that wrinkled man said.
    T HERE was hardly any traffic north of this town. The air had turned cooler and smelled swampy. The frogs were making such a loud noise in some places that you could hear them over the noise of the car. This two-lane highway wound past stands of blackevergreens and the softer darkness of small juniper-spotted fields, farms going back to the bush. Then on a curve the headlights lit up the first jumble of rocks, some of them glittery pink and gray and some a dried-blood red. Soon this was happening more and more often, and in places the rocks, instead of being jumbled and jammed together, were laid as if by hand in thick or thin layers, and these were gray or greenish white. Limestone, Karin remembered. Limestone bedrock, alternating here with the rocks of the Precambrian Shield. Derek had taught her about that. Derek said that he wished he had been a geologist because he loved rocks. But he wouldn’t have loved making money for mining companies. And history drew him too—it was an odd combination. History for the indoor man, geology for the outdoor man, he said, with a solemnity that told her he was making a joke of himself.
    What Karin wanted to get rid of now—she wished it would just flow out of the car windows on the rush of midnight air—was her feeling of squeamishness and superiority. About the almond