The Progress of Love

cigarettes, to test her. She laid down the book, and he looked at the title. My Love Where the High Winds Blow , by Veronica Gray. She gave him his change and settled her sweater around her shoulders and picked up her book, all without looking at him. Her sweater was covered with little jiggly balls of pink and white wool, like popcorn. She waited till the last minute to speak to him.
    “You taken up smoking in your old age, Sam?”
    “I thought you didn’t know me.”
    “I’d know your hide in a tannery,” said Callie, pleased with herself. “I knew you the minute you walked in that door.”
    Sam is sixty-nine years old, a widower. He is staying at the Three Little Pigs Motel, out on the highway, for a few days while on hisway to visit his married daughter in Pennsylvania. For all he used to tell his wife about Gallagher, he would never bring her back to see it. Instead, they went to Hawaii, to Europe, even to Japan.
    Now he goes for walks in Gallagher. Often he is the only person walking. The traffic is heavy, and not as varied as it used to be. Manufacturing has given way to service industries. Things look to Sam a bit scruffy. But that could be because he lives now in Victoria—in Oak Bay, an expensive and pretty neighborhood full of well-off retired people like himself.
    Kernaghan’s boarding house used to be the last house—last building—on the edge of town. It’s still there, still close to the sidewalk. But the town has spread a little at all its edges. A Petro-Car gas station. A Canadian Tire Store with a big parking lot. Some new, low houses. Kernaghan’s has been painted a pale, wintry blue, but otherwise looks neglected. Instead of the front veranda, where the boarders each had a chair, Sam sees a glassed-in porch entirely filled up with batts of insulating material, an upended mattress, screens, and heavy old storm windows. The house used to be light tan, and the trim was brown. Everything was terribly clean. Dust was a problem, the road being so close and not paved at that time. There were always horses going by, and people on foot, as well as cars and farm trucks. “You simply have to keep after it,” said Miss Kernaghan, in an ominous way, referring to the dust. As a matter of fact, it was Callie who kept after it. Callie Kernaghan was nineteen when Sam and Edgar Grazier first saw her, and she could have passed for twelve. A demon worker. Some people called her a drudge, Miss Kernaghan’s little drudge, or they called her slavey—Slavey Kernaghan. The mistake they made was in thinking that she minded.
    Sometimes a woman coming in from the country, lugging her butter and eggs, would take a rest on the front steps. Or a girl would sit there to take off her rubber boots and put on her town shoes—hiding the boots in the ditch until she put them on again on her way home. Then Miss Kernaghan would call out, from the darkness behind the dining-room window, “This is not a park bench!” Miss Kernaghan was a big, square-shouldered, awkward woman, flat in front and back, with hennaed hair and a looming white-powdered face and a thickly painted, sullenly drooping mouth.Stories of lasciviousness hung around her, dimmer, harder to substantiate than the stories of her amazing avarice and stinginess. Callie, supposedly a foundling, was said by some to be Miss Ker-naghan’s own daughter. But her boarders had to toe the line. No drinking, no smoking, no bad language or bad morals, she told the Grazier boys on their first day. No eating in the bedrooms, she told them later, after Thanksgiving, when they brought a large, greasy box of sweet buns from home. “It attracts mice,” she said.
    Miss Kernaghan said fairly often that she had never had boys before. She sounded as if she was doing them a favor. She had four other boarders. A widow lady, Mrs. Cruze, very old but able to look after herself; a business lady, Miss Verne, who was a bookkeeper in the glove factory; a bachelor, Adam Delahunt, who worked in the bank and taught Sunday school; and a stylish, contemptuous young woman, Alice Peel, who was engaged to a policeman and worked as a telephone operator. These four took up the upstairs bedrooms. Miss Kernaghan herself slept on the couch in the dining room, and Callie slept on the couch in the kitchen. Sam and Edgar got the attic. Two narrow metal-frame beds had been set up on either side of a chest of drawers and a rag rug.
    After they had taken a look around, Sam pushed Edgar into going