Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [44]
Savanna had never known her brother very well—what was all the fuss about? Did her father’s death make her feel the need of family? She should marry, soon; she should have children. But she had such a stubborn streak when she set her mind on something—was it possible she would find Kent? Her father had told her when she was about ten years old that she could gnaw an idea to the bone, she ought to be a lawyer. And from then on, that was what she said she would be.
Sally was overcome by a trembling, a longing, a weariness.
It was Kent, and within a week Savanna had found out all about him. No. Change that to found out all he meant to tell her. He had been living in Toronto for years. He had often passed the building Savanna worked in and had spotted her a couple of times on the street. Once they were nearly face-to-face at an intersection. Of course she wouldn’t have recognized him because he was wearing a kind of robe.
“A Hare Krishna?” said Sally.
“Oh, Mom, if you’re a monk it doesn’t mean you’re a Hare Krishna. Anyway he’s not that now.”
“So what is he?”
“He says he lives in the present. So I said well don’t we all, nowadays, and he said no, he meant in the real present.”
Where they were now, he had said, and Savanna had said, “You mean in this dump?” Because it was, the coffee shop he had asked her to meet him in was a dump.
“I see it differently,” he said, but then he said he had no objection to her way of seeing it, or anybody’s.
“Well, that’s big of you,” said Savanna, but she made a joke of it and he sort of laughed.
He said that he had seen Alex’s obituary in the paper and thought it was well done. He thought Alex would have liked the geological references. He had wondered if his own name would appear, included in the family, and he was rather surprised that it was there. He wondered, had his father told them what names he wanted listed, before he died?
Savanna said no, he wasn’t planning on dying anything like so soon. It was the rest of the family who had a conference and decided Kent’s name should be there.
“Not Dad,” Kent said. “Well no.”
Then he asked about Sally.
Sally felt a kind of inflated balloon in her chest.
“What did you say?”
“I said you were okay, maybe at loose ends a little, you and Dad being so close and not much time yet to get used to being alone. Then he said tell her she can come to see me if she wants to and I said I would ask you.”
Sally didn’t reply.
“You there, Mom?”
“Did he say when or where?”
“No. I’m supposed to meet him in a week in the same place and tell him. I think he sort of enjoys calling the shots. I thought you’d agree right away.”
“Of course I agree.”
“You aren’t alarmed at coming in by yourself?”
“Don’t be silly. Was he really the man you saw in the fire?”
“He wouldn’t say yes or no. But my information is yes. He’s quite well known as it turns out in certain parts of town and by certain people.”
Sally receives a note. This in itself was special, since most people she knew used e-mail or the phone. She was glad it wasn’t the phone. She did not trust herself to hear his voice yet. The note instructed her to leave her car in the subway parking lot at the end of the line and take the subway to a specified station where she should get off and he would meet her.
She expected to see him on the other side of the turnstile, but he was not there. Probably he meant that he would meet her outside. She climbed the steps and emerged into the sunlight and paused, with all sorts of people hurrying and pushing past her. She had a feeling of dismay and embarrassment. Dismay because of Kent’s apparent absence, and embarrassment because she was feeling just what people from her part of the country often seemed to feel, though she would never say what they said. You’d think you were in the Congo or India or Vietnam, they would say. Anyplace but Ontario. Turbans and saris and dashikis were much in evidence, and Sally was all in favor of their swish and bright colors. But they weren’t being worn