The Love of a Good Woman

croissant, the bad coffee that Rosemary was sipping almost surreptitiously, and the man at the counter, and even about Rosemary’s youthful hippielike dress and the messy heap of hair. Also she’d like to get rid of her own missing of Derek, the sense that there was space to fill, and a thinning out of possibility. She said out loud, “I’m glad, I’m glad he’s gone.”
    Rosemary said, “Are you really?”
    “You’ll be happier,” Karin said.
    “Yes,” said Rosemary. “I’m getting my self-respect back. You know you don’t realize how much you’ve lost of your self-respect and how much you miss it till you start getting it back. I want you and me to have a really good summer. We could go on little trips, even. I don’t mind driving where it isn’t hairy. We could go hiking back in the bush where Derek took you. I’d like to do that.”
    Karin said, “Yeah,” though she wasn’t at all sure that withoutDerek they wouldn’t get lost. Her thoughts were not really on hiking but on a scene last summer. Rosemary on the bed, rolled up in a quilt, weeping, stuffing handfuls of the quilt and the pillow into her mouth, biting on them in a rage of grief, and Derek sitting at the table where they worked, reading a page of the manuscript. “Can you do anything to quiet your mother?” he said.
    Karin said, “She wants you.”
    “I can’t cope with her when she’s like this,” said Derek. He laid down the page he’d finished and picked up another. Between pages he looked up at Karin, with a long-suffering grimace. He looked worn out, old and haggard. He said, “I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.”
    So Karin went into the bedroom and stroked Rosemary’s back, and Rosemary too said that she was sorry. “What’s Derek doing?” she said.
    “Sitting in the kitchen,” said Karin. She didn’t like to say “reading.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said I should go in and talk to you.”
    “Oh, Karin. I’m so ashamed.”
    What had happened to start such a row? Calmed down and cleaned up, Rosemary always said it was the work, disagreements they had about the work. “Then why don’t you quit working on his book?” Karin said. “You’ve got all your other stuff to do.” Rosemary edited manuscripts—that was how she had met Derek. Not because he had submitted his book to the publisher she worked for—he hadn’t done so yet—but because she knew a friend of his and the friend had said, “I know a woman who could be a help to you.” And in a little while Rosemary had moved to the country and into the trailer that was not far from his house, so that she could be closer to him to do this work. At first she kept her apartment in Toronto, but then she let it go, because she wasspending more and more time in the trailer. She still did other work but not so much of it, and she managed her one workday a week in Toronto by leaving at six o’clock in the morning and getting home after eleven at night.
    “What’s this book about?” Ted had said to Karin.
    Karin said, “It’s sort of about the explorer La Salle and the Indians.”
    “Is this guy a historian? Does he teach at a university?”
    Karin didn’t know. Derek had done a lot of things—he had worked as a photographer; he had worked in a mine and as a surveyor; but as far as his teaching went she thought it had been in a high school. Ann spoke of his work as being “outside the system.”
    Ted himself taught at a university. He was an economist.
    She didn’t, of course, tell Ted or Grace about the grief brought on, apparently, by disagreements about the book. Rosemary blamed herself. It’s the tension, she said. Sometimes she said it was the menopause. Karin had heard her say to Derek, “Forgive me,” and Derek had said, “Nothing to forgive,” in a voice of cool satisfaction.
    At this Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes—he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.
    So what did I do this time?
    “She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her—Karin—in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.
    Sometimes she just got out. She went up the road to see Ann, and Ann always seemed glad that she had come. She never asked Karin why,