The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [47]
Give up Frances.
How stupid and unfair it was, and yet how easy, to set Frances on one side, tainted, and on the other his hurt child, his poor crushed child whose look, the one time he had opened his eyes, had shown a blinded question, the claim of his twelve-year-old life. Innocence and corruption; Bobby; Frances; what simplification; what nonsense. What powerful nonsense.
Bobby died. His ribs were crushed, a lung was punctured. The main puzzle to the doctors was why he had not died sooner. But before midnight, he died.
Much later, Ted told Frances, not only about the idiotic queen but about the meal in the cafeteria, about his thoughts of phoning her, and why he had not done so; his thoughts of bargains; everything. He did not tell her as a confession, but as a matter of interest, an illustration of the way the most rational mind could relapse and grovel. He did not imagine that what he was telling her could be upsetting, when he had, after all, decided so thoroughly in her favor.
FRANCES WAITED a few moments, alone in the supply room, dressed, buttoned, booted, with her coat on. She didn’t think about anything. She looked at the skeletons. The human skeleton looked smaller than a man, while the cat’s skeleton looked larger, longer than a cat.
She got out of the school without meeting anybody. She got into her car. Why had she taken her coat and boots out of the cloakroom, so that it would look as if she had gone home, when anybody could see her car still sitting here?
Frances drove an old car, a 1936 Plymouth. A picture that surfaced in many people’s minds, after she was gone, was of Frances at the wheel of her stalled car, trying one thing after another (she would already be late for somewhere) while it coughed and stuttered and refused her. Or—as now—with the window down, her bare head stuck out in the falling snow, trying to get her spinning wheels out of a drift, with an expression on her face that said she had never expected that car to do anything but balk and confound her, but would fight it just the same to her last breath.
She did get out, at last, and drove down the hill toward the main street. She didn’t know what had happened to Bobby, what sort of accident. She had not heard what was said, after Ted had left her. On the main street the stores were warmly lighted. There were horses as well as cars along the street (at this time the township roads were not plowed out); they clouded the air with their comforting breath. More people than usual, it seemed to her, were standing around talking, or not talking, just unwilling to separate. Some storekeepers had come outside and were standing there, too, in their shirtsleeves, in the snow. The post office corner seemed to be blocked off, and that was the direction people were looking in.
She parked behind the hardware store, and ran up the long outdoor steps, which she had shovelled free of snow and ice that morning, and was going to have to shovel again. She felt as if she was running to a hiding place. But she wasn’t; Adelaide was there.
“Frances, is that you?”
Frances took off her coat in the back hall, checked her blouse buttons. She put her boots on the rubber mat.
“I was just telling Grandma. She never knew anything about it. She never heard the ambulance.”
There was a basket of clean laundry on the kitchen table, an old