Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [99]
Part of the reason the story has made such an impact is that he has a dislike for the River Inn, which is a resort hotel on the Peregrine River. It is built on the remains of an old mill not far from the crossroads where Percy Marshall lives. In fact the inn owns the land Percy lives on and the house he lives in. There was a plan to tear the house down, but it turned out that the inn’s guests, having nothing much to do, like to walk down the road and take pictures of this derelict building and the old harrow and upturned wagon beside it, and the useless pump, and Percy, when he allows himself to be photographed. Some guests do sketches. They come from as far away as Ottawa and Montreal and no doubt think of themselves as being in the backwoods.
Local people go to the inn for a special lunch or dinner. Lea went once, with the dentist and his wife and the hygienist and her husband. Roy would not go. He said that he didn’t want to eat a meal that cost an arm and a leg, even when somebody else was paying. But he is not altogether sure what it is that he has against the inn. He is not exactly opposed to the idea of people spending money in the hope of enjoying themselves, or against the idea of other people making money out of the people who want to spend it. It is true that the antiques at the inn have been restored and reupholstered by craftsmen other than himself—people not from around here at all—but if he had been asked to do them he would probably have refused, saying he had more than enough work to do already. When Lea asked him what he thought was the matter with the inn, the only thing he could think of to say was that when Diane had applied for a job there, as a waitress, they had turned her down, saying that she was overweight.
“Well, she was,” said Lea. “She is. She says so herself.”
True. But Roy still thinks of those people as snobs. Grabbers and snobs. They are putting up new buildings supposed to be like an old-time store and an old-time opera house, just for show. They burn wood for show. A cord a day. So now some operator with a bulldozer will be levelling the bush as if it was a cornfield. This is just the sort of high-handed scheme you would expect, the kind of pillage you might know they would get up to.
He tells Lea the story he has heard. He still tells her things—it’s a habit—but he is so used to her now not paying any real attention that he hardly notices whether there is an answer or not. This time she echoes what he himself has said.
“Never mind. You’ve got enough to do anyway.”
That’s what he would have expected, whether she was well or not. Missing the point. But isn’t that what wives do—and husbands probably the same—around fifty percent of the time?
The next morning he works on a drop-leaf table for a while. He means to stay in the she’d all day and get a couple of past-due jobs finished. Near noon he hears Diane’s noisy muffler and looks out the window. She’ll be here to take Lea to the reflexologist—she thinks it does Lea good and Lea doesn’t object.
But she is heading for the shed, not the house.
“Howdy,” she says.
“Howdy.”
“Hard at work?”
“Hard as ever,” Roy says. “Offer you a job?”
This is their routine.
“I got one. Listen, what I came in here for, I want to ask you a favor. What I want is to borrow the truck. Tomorrow, to take Tiger to the vet. I can’t handle him in the car. He’s got too big for the car. I hate to have to ask you.”
Roy says not to worry about it.
Tiger to the vet, he thinks, that’s going to cost them.
“You weren’t going to need the truck?” she says. “I mean, you can use the car?”
He has of course been meaning to go out to the bush tomorrow, providing he got his jobs done today. What he’ll have to do, he decides now, is get out there this afternoon.
“I’ll fill it up with gas for you,” Diane says.
So another thing he’ll have to do is remember