The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [102]
Visitors
Mildred had just come into the kitchen and was looking at the clock, which said five to two. She had thought it might be at least half past. Wilfred came in from the back, through the utility room, and said, “Hadn’t you ought to be out there keeping them company?”
His brother Albert’s wife, Grace, and her sister, Vera, were sitting out in the shade of the carport making lace tablecloths. Albert was out at the back of the house, sitting beside the patch of garden where Wilfred grew beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Every half-hour Wilfred checked to see which tomatoes were ripe enough to pick. He picked them half-ripe and spread them out on the kitchen windowsill, so the bugs wouldn’t get them.
“I was,” said Mildred. She ran a glass of water. “I maybe might take them for a drive,” she said when she had finished drinking it.
“That’s a good idea.”
“How is Albert?”
Albert had spent most of the day before, the first full day of the visit, lying down.
“I can’t figure out.”
“Well surely if he felt sick he’d say so.”
“That’s just it,” said Wilfred. “That’s just what he wouldn’t.”
This was the first time Wilfred had seen his brother in more than thirty years.
Wilfred and Mildred were retired. Their house was small and they weren’t, but they got along fine in the space. They had a kitchen not much wider than a hallway, a bathroom about the usual size, two bedrooms that were pretty well filled up when you got a double bed and a dresser into them, a living room where a large sofa sat five feet in front of a large television set, with a low table about the size of a coffin in between, and a small glassed-in porch.
Mildred had set up a table on the porch to serve meals on. Ordinarily, she and Wilfred ate at the table under the kitchen window. If one of them was up and moving around, the other always stayed sitting down. There was no way five people could have managed there, even when three of them were as skinny as these visitors were.
Fortunately there was a daybed on the porch, and Vera, the sister-in-law, slept on that. The sister-in-law had been a surprise to Mildred and Wilfred. Wilfred had done the talking on the phone (nobody in his family, he said, had ever written a letter); according to him, no sister-in-law had been mentioned, just Albert and his wife. Mildred thought Wilfred might not have heard, because he was so excited. Talking to Albert on the phone, from Logan, Ontario, to Elder, Saskatchewan, taking in the news that his brother proposed to visit him, Wilfred had been in a dither of hospitality, reassurances, amazement.
“You come right ahead,” he yelled over the phone to Saskatchewan. “We can put you up as long as you want to stay. We got plenty of room. We’ll be glad to. Never mind your return tickets. You get on down here and enjoy the summer.” It might have been while he was going on like this that Albert was explaining about the sister-in-law.
“How do you tell them apart?” said Wilfred on first meeting Grace and Vera. “Or do you always bother?” He meant it for a joke.
“They’re not twins,” said Albert, without a glance at either of them. Albert was a short, thin man in dark clothes, who looked as if he might weigh heavy, like dense wood. He wore a string tie and a westerner’s hat, but these did not give him a jaunty appearance. His pale cheeks hung down on either side of his chin.
“You look like sisters, though,” said Mildred genially to the two dried-out, brown-spotted, gray-haired