The Progress of Love

right.”
    This conversation was taking place at the back of the store in the afternoon, when Peg had gone out to get a sandwich.
    “She had not said one word to me. Nothing. I said, ‘How come you never said a word about this, Peg,’ and she said, ‘I knew you’d find out pretty soon.’ I said yes, but she could’ve told me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Just like she’s apologizing for some little thing like using my coffee mug. Only, Peg would never do that.”
    Robert had finished what he was doing at the Keneally store around noon, and decided to drive back to Gilmore before getting anything to eat. There was a highway diner just outside of town, on the way in from Keneally, and he thought that he would stop there. A few truckers and travellers were usually eating in the diner, but most of the trade was local—farmers on the way home, business and working men who had driven out from town. Robert liked thisplace, and he had entered it today with a feeling of buoyant expectation. He was hungry from his work in the cold air, and aware of the brilliance of the day, with the snow on the fields looking sculpted, dazzling, as permanent as marble. He had the sense he had fairly often in Gilmore, the sense of walking onto an informal stage, where a rambling, agreeable play was in progress. And he knew his lines—or knew, at least, that his improvisations would not fail. His whole life in Gilmore sometimes seemed to have this quality, but if he ever tried to describe it that way, it would sound as if it was an artificial life, something contrived, not entirely serious. And the very opposite was true. So when he met somebody from his old life, as he sometimes did when he went to Toronto, and was asked how he liked living in Gilmore, he would say, “I can’t tell you how much I like it!” which was exactly the truth.
    “Why didn’t you get in touch with me?”
    “You were up on the roof.”
    “You could have called the store and told Ellie. She would have told me.”
    “What good would that have done?”
    “I could at least have come home.”
    He had come straight from the diner to the store, without eating what he had ordered. He did not think he would find Peg in any state of collapse—he knew her well enough for that—but he did think she would want to go home, let him fix her a drink, spend some time telling him about it.
    She didn’t want that. She wanted to go up the street to the bakery to get her usual lunch—a roll with ham and cheese.
    “I let Karen go out to eat, but I haven’t had time. Should I bring one back for you? If you didn’t eat at the diner, I might as well.”
    When she brought him the sandwich, he sat and ate it at the desk where she had been doing invoices. She put fresh coffee and water into the coffee maker.
    “I can’t imagine how we got along without this thing.”
    He looked at Peg’s lilac-colored coat hanging beside Karen’sred coat on the washroom door. On the lilac coat there was a long crusty smear of reddish-brown paint, down to the hemline.
    Of course that wasn’t paint. But on her coat? How did she get blood on her coat? She must have brushed up against them in that room. She must have got close.
    Then he remembered the talk in the diner, and realized she wouldn’t have needed to get that close. She could have got blood from the door frame. The constable had been in the diner, and he said there was blood everywhere, and not just blood.
    “He shouldn’t ever have used a shotgun for that kind of business,” one of the men at the diner said.
    Somebody else said, “Maybe a shotgun was all he had.”
    It was busy in the store most of the afternoon. People on the street, in the bakery and the cafe and the bank and the post office, talking. People wanted to talk face to face. They had to get out and do it, in spite of the cold. Talking on the phone was not enough.
    What had gone on at first, Robert gathered, was that people had got on the phone, just phoned anybody they could think of who might not have heard. Karen had phoned her friend Shirley, who was at home in bed with the flu, and her mother, who was in the hospital with a broken hip. It turned out her mother knew already—the whole hospital knew. And Shirley said, “My sister beat you to it.”
    It was true that people valued and looked forward to the moment of breaking the news—Karen was annoyed at Shirley’s sister, who didn’t work and could get to the phone whenever she