Free Luck by Joan Barfoot Page A

Nora’s indulgences, and those rewards and costs may include the bodies, if not necessarily the lost hearts, of husbands. Now who will ever know what happened to Philip’s heart, besides that it’s very likely what blew up on him overnight. Over and over, again and again, moment after moment and hour after hour as Nora lies in Beth’s bed, there’s his first face, here’s his last one. What comes between?
    On the day they’d planned, they would have been driving home by now from their lovely long lunch in the city with Max. Sophie would be considering dinner, Beth would be lounging about doing whatever it is she does when her limbs and expressions aren’t being turned in various useful directions. Once together around the table they would talk about each other’s days, Nora’s and Philip’s in particular, since theirs would have been more interesting than the others’. Later they might watch TV or read, chatting now and then about what they were watching or reading, or about other subjects altogether. Maybe they’d have a bottle or two of wine, or a couple of beers, or a glass or two of Scotch, except for Beth, who doesn’t drink. The evening would pass pleasantly anyway. Finally they would go to bed, just like last night, taking for granted they would all be waking up in the morning.
    Instead, Nora is finally rising out of Beth’s bed and putting on her black pants and black blouse again, decking herself in the colour of mourning. She is middle-aged, she sees in Beth’s mirror, and she is pale.
    Downstairs, where the other two are in the kitchen, Beth at the table, Sophie standing at the counter nearby, Nora resumes her own place in her own chair. There’s the fourth place. “I keep,” she says, “expecting him to walk through the door.” Kicking his boots off. Stretching, calling hello.
    Sophie nods. “Yes. It’s very odd.”
    If he did come through the door, wouldn’t Nora leap to embrace him! Everything could change back and be forgotten if he would just come through that door.
    First, though, she would give him raging, blistering hell for giving her such a scare. She might even take a swing at his jaw, or at one of his big impervious arms. “I could kill him for this,” she says aloud, “I could just kill him.”
    How startled Sophie and Beth look when Nora starts laughing. Then finds she can’t stop. Philip would have got it, he’d have laughed, but now Nora, forced by his absence into laughing, and for that matter crying, for two, has to do it all now, all by herself. She can imagine no end to the bleakness of this sudden division of two into one, but here she is, with Sophie and Beth and a big empty place at the table, and apparently it really doesn’t matter what she can imagine, or not.

Six
    A nd so winds to a close the first day of Philip Lawrence’s permanent absence from earth. Whatever full-throttle rumbustiousness and confusions his life may have contained, and whatever enviable peacefulness accompanied his overnight passing, he has certainly disrupted the day, he has captured everybody’s attention.
    A precarious kind of attention, however. Nora is fixated on two particular visions of him, and one of those is from just this morning. Sophie has kept herself busy, busy, busy, and otherwise seems mainly concerned with the loss of his skin, not much of substance. While Beth’s gaze is stuck on the sudden main chance. Is it normal to veer like this from furious at one extreme to dazzled at the other? And surely it can scarcely be typical, the absence of sad, lively, sentimental or vivid exchanges of tales and anecdotes about things Philip did, words he said, revealing bits of who he may have been—everything that ought to enter effortlessly and even insistently into conversations among the bereaved.
    There are stages in these matters. Other people may not be quite so quick off the mark with,
What does this mean to
me? What have I lost? What happens now?
but they get there, too. The