Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [75]
The last day of my working there, Sylvia’s last day of teaching, was a massage day. Sylvia had to leave early for the college, because of some ceremony, so I walked across town, arriving when Roxanne was already there. Old Mrs. Crozier was also in the kitchen, and they both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was coming, as if I had interrupted them.
“I ordered them specially,” said Old Mrs. Crozier.
She must have meant the macaroons sitting in the baker’s box on the table.
“Yeah, but I told you,” said Roxanne. “I can’t eat that stuff. Not no way no how.”
“I sent Hervey down to the bakeshop to get them.”
Hervey was the name of our neighbor, her garden man.
“Okay let Hervey eat them. I’m not kidding, I break out something awful.”
“I thought we’d have a treat, like something special,” said Old Mrs. Crozier. “Seeing it’s the last day we’ve got before—”
“Last day before she parks her butt here permanently, yeah, I know. Doesn’t help me breaking out like a spotted hyena.”
Who was it whose butt was parked permanently?
Sylvia’s. Sylvia.
Old Mrs. Crozier was wearing a beautiful black silk wrapper, with water lilies and geese on it. She said, “No chance of having anything special with her around. You’ll see.”
“So let’s get going and get some time today. Don’t bother about this stuff, it’s not your fault. I know you got it to be nice.”
“I know you got it to be nice,” imitated Old Mrs. Crozier in a mean mincing voice, and then they both looked at me, and Roxanne said, “Pitcher’s where it always is.”
I took Mr. Crozier’s pitcher of water out of the fridge. It occurred to me that they could offer me a golden macaroon out of those sitting in the box, but apparently it did not occur to them.
I expected him to be lying back on the pillows with his eyes closed, but Mr. Crozier was wide awake.
“I’ve been waiting,” he said, and took a breath. “For you to get here,” he said. “I want to ask you—do something for me. Will you?”
I said sure.
“Keep it a secret?”
I had been worried that he might ask me to help him to the commode that had recently appeared in his room, but surely that would not have to be a secret.
Yes.
He told me to go to the bureau across from his bed and open the left-hand little drawer, and see if I could find a key there.
I did so. I found a large heavy old-fashioned key.
He wanted me to go out of this room and shut the door and lock it. Then hide the key in a safe place, perhaps in the pocket of my shorts.
I was not to tell anybody what I had done.
I was not to let anybody know I had the key until his wife came home, and then I was to give it to her. Did I understand?
Okay.
He thanked me.
Okay.
All the time he was talking to me there was a film of sweat on his face and his eyes were bright as if he had a fever.
“Nobody is to get in.”
“Nobody to get in,” I repeated.
“Not my stepmother or—Roxanne. Just my wife.”
I locked the door from the outside and put the key in the pocket of my shorts. But then I was afraid it could be seen through the light cotton material, so I went downstairs and into the back parlor and hid it between the pages of I Promessi Sposi. I knew that Roxanne and Old Mrs. Crozier would not hear me because the massage was going on, and Roxanne was using her professional voice.
“I got my work cut out for me getting these knots out of you today.”
And I heard Old Mrs. Crozier’s voice, full of her new displeasure.
“… punching harder than you normally do.”
“Well I gotta.”
I was headed upstairs when some further thoughts came to me.
If he and not I had locked the door—which was evidently what he wanted the others to think—and I had been sitting on the top step as usual, I would certainly have heard him and called out and roused the others in the house. So I went back down and sat on the bottom step of the front stairs, a place from which it could have been possible for me not to hear a thing.
The massage seemed to be brisk and businesslike today; they were evidently not teasing and making jokes. Pretty soon I could hear Roxanne running up the back stairs.