The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [103]
It was true. Wilfred had a big head as well as a big stomach, and an anxious, eager, changeable face. He looked like a man who put a high value on joking and chatting, and so he did.
“It’s lucky there’s none of you too fleshy,” Wilfred said. “You can all fit into the one bed. Naturally Albert gets the middle.”
“Don’t pay attention to him,” said Mildred. “There’s a good daybed if you don’t mind sleeping on the porch,” she said to Vera. “It’s got blinds on the windows and it gets the best breeze of anywhere.”
God knows if the women even caught on to what Wilfred was joking about.
“That’ll be fine,” said Albert.
With Albert and Grace sleeping in the spare room, which was where Mildred usually slept, Mildred and Wilfred had to share a double bed. They weren’t used to it. In the night, Wilfred had one of his wild dreams, which were the reason Mildred had moved to the spare room in the first place.
“Grab ahold!” yelled Wilfred, in terror. Was he on a lake boat, trying to pull somebody out of the water?
“Wilfred, wake up! Stop hollering and scaring everybody to death.” “I am awake,” said Wilfred. “I wasn’t hollering.”
“Then I’m Her Majesty the Queen.”
They were lying on their backs. They both heaved, and turned to face the outside. Each kept a courteous but firm hold on the top sheet.
“Is it whales that can’t turn over when they get up on the beach?” Mildred said.
“I can still turn over,” said Wilfred. They aligned backsides. “Maybe you think that’s the only thing I can do.”
“Keep still, now, you’ve got them all listening.”
In the morning she said, “Did Wilfred wake you up? He’s a terrible hollerer in his sleep.”
“I hadn’t got to sleep anyway,” Albert said.
SHE WENT OUT and got the two ladies into the car. “We’ll take a little drive and raise a breeze to cool us off,” she said. They sat in the back, because there wasn’t really room left over in the front, even for two such skinnies.
“I’m the chauffeur!” said Mildred merrily. “Where to, your ladyships?”
“Just anyplace you’d like,” said one of them. When she wasn’t looking at them Mildred couldn’t be sure which was talking.
She drove them around Winter Court and Chelsea Drive to look at the new houses with their landscaping and swimming pools. Then she took them to the Fish and Game Club, where they saw the ornamental fowl, the family of deer, the raccoons, and the caged bobcat. She felt as tired as if she had driven to Toronto, and in need of refreshment, so she headed out to the place on the highway to buy ice-cream cones. They both asked for a small vanilla. Mildred had a mixed double: rum-raisin and praline cream. They sat at a picnic table licking their ice-cream cones and looking at a field of corn.
“They grow a lot of corn around here,” Mildred said. Albert had been the manager of a grain elevator before he retired, so she supposed they might be interested in crops. “Do they grow a lot of corn out west?”
They thought about it. Grace said, “Well. Some.”
Vera said, “I was wondering.”
“Wondering what?” said Mildred cheerfully.
“You wouldn’t have a Pentecostal Church here in Logan?”
They set out in the car again, and after some blundering, Mildred found the Pentecostal Church. It was not one of the handsomer churches in town. It was a plain building, of cement blocks, with the doors and the window-trim painted orange. A sign told the minister’s name and the times of service. There was no shade tree near it and no bushes or flowers, just a dry yard. Maybe that would remind them of Saskatchewan.
“Pentecostal Church,” said Mildred, reading the sign. “Is that the church you people go to?”
“Yes.”
“Wilfred and I are not regular churchgoers. If we went, I guess we would