The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [105]
Mr. Toll died in the middle of the night. Wilfred phoned Mildred at seven in the morning.
“I didn’t want to wake you up,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure you knew before you heard it out in public.”
Then he asked her to have supper with him in a restaurant. Being used to Mr. Toll, she was surprised at Wilfred’s table manners. He was nervous, she decided. He got upset because the waitress hadn’t brought their glasses of water. Mildred told him she was going to quit her job, she wanted to get clear of McGaw, she might end up out west.
“Why not end up in Logan?” Wilfred said. “I’ve got a house there. It’s not so big a house, but it’ll take two.”
So it dawned on her. His nervousness, his bad temper with the waitress, his sloppiness, must all relate to her. She asked if he had ever been married before, and if not, why not?
He said he had always been on the go, and besides, it wasn’t often you met a good-hearted woman. She was about to make sure he had things straight, by pointing out that she expected nothing from Mr. Toll’s will (nothing was what she got), but she saw in the nick of time that Wilfred was the kind of man who would be insulted.
Instead, she said, “You know I’m secondhand goods?”
“None of that,” he said. “We won’t have any of that kind of talk around the house. Is it settled?”
Mildred said yes. She was glad to see an immediate improvement in his behavior to the waitress. In fact, he went overboard, apologizing for his impatience earlier, telling her he had worked in a restaurant himself. He told her where the restaurant was, up on the Alaska Highway. The girl had trouble getting away to serve coffee at the other tables.
No such improvement took place in Wilfred’s table manners. She guessed that this was one of his bachelor ways she would just have to learn to live with.
“You better tell me a bit about where you were born, and so on,” Mildred said.
He told her he had been born on a farm in Hullett Township, but left there when he was three days old.
“Itchy feet,” he said, and laughed. Then he sobered, and told her that his mother had died within a few hours of his birth, and his aunt had taken him. His aunt was married to a man who worked on the railway. They moved around, and when he was twelve his aunt died.
Then the man she was married to looked at Wilfred and said, “You’re a big boy. What size shoe do you wear?”
“Number nine,” said Wilfred.
“Then you’re big enough to earn your own living.”
“Him and my aunt had eight kids of their own,” said Wilfred. “So I don’t blame him.”
“Did you have any brothers and sisters in your real family?” Mildred thought cozily of her own life long ago: her mother fixing her curls in the morning, the kitten, named Pansy, that she used to dress up in doll’s clothes and wheel round the block in the doll buggy.
“I had two older sisters, married. Both dead now. And one brother. He went out to Saskatchewan. He has a job managing a grain elevator. I don’t know what he gets paid but I imagine it’s pretty good. He went to business college, like yourself. He’s a different person than me, way different.”
THE DAY that Albert had stayed in bed, he wanted the curtains shut. He didn’t want a doctor. Wilfred couldn’t get out of him what was wrong. Albert said he was just tired.
“Then maybe he is tired,” said Mildred. “Let him rest.”
But Wilfred was in and out of the spare room all day. He was talking, smoking, asking Albert how he felt. He told Albert he had cured himself of migraine headaches by eating fresh leeks from the bush in the spring. Albert said he didn’t have a migraine headache, even if he did want the curtains closed. He said he had never had a bad headache in his life. Wilfred explained that you could have migraine headaches without knowing it—that is, without having the actual ache—so that could be what Albert had. Albert said he didn’t see how that was possible.
Early that afternoon Mildred heard Wilfred crashing around in the clothes closet. He emerged calling her name.
“Mildred! Mildred! Where is the Texas mickey?”
“In the buffet,” said Mildred,