Free The Journey Prize Stories 24 by Various Page B

her room when she is alone there for hours. Sometimes they’ll find her with one of those thick women’s fashion magazines spread out in front of her; Earl understands the magazine is probably a cover, but a cover for what? Nothing, it seems. She sometimes gets a little angry when they disturb her, and if Earl asks her whether she’ll have supper with the others she might impatiently tell him that she’ll eat later. But following that, she also might take his hand, smile, apologize, and thus give him temporary relief.
    It is the end of July, and two months since the four of them have returned from a vacation in Barcelona. Millie pleaded and persuaded the reluctant Amanda into the vacation, because she wanted, in part at least, to commemorate the togetherness of the four of them, to affirm how pleasantly Grace, Millie, Amanda, and Earl have lived together. Millie’s sister Grace is getting remarried in three weeks and they won’t be under the same roof, most likely, ever again. Grace has lived here for nearly a year; she moved in when Dan, Millie’s husband, left for the States on business. Grace and Larry’s ceremony and reception will be right here at the house. The house is large, as is the yard, and the yard slopes onto a ravine; you can stand at the far end of the yard on the edge of the ravine and see the shimmering surface of the river. There is lots of room for a small outdoor wedding of forty or so guests.
    One part of Millie hopes Dan will come back for Grace’s wedding as he has told her he would. He has also promised he’d be flying back regularly, and has not been back once in more than a year of being away. But another part of her would prefer not to have the interruption of him at the wedding. Lethim come when there are no guests, when the house is empty, formidable, silent except for the rustle of the poplar leaves outside, and Millie is ready and waiting with two glasses of Scotch on the coffee table under the sixteen-foot ceiling. Or let him not come at all. Before Dan went away this last time, he had spent nineteen months at Pennybrooke, a minimum-security prison an hour out of town. He was guilty of defrauding shareholders. Either Amanda or she visited him every week and brought him books to read. Sometimes she feels as if he has never lived here, has never slumped his slim frame onto the sofa and put his feet up after work, has never greeted the neighbours with friendly obscenities, as if it was always she and Amanda, or she and Amanda and Earl here in the house. Many times already she has bartered Dan away for the return of Amanda as she once knew her.
    Today they are having dinner together, but Amanda has not shown up yet. Everyone worries about Amanda since she has changed the location of her pyjamas, and especially since she has told them that she wants to go back to Barcelona in the fall, for an eight-week course in Spanish language and culture. Millie has acquired the habit of writing her worries in letters to Grace; these letters often contain things she most wants to say, and she slips them to Grace in passing, on her way out to work, or even while they’re sitting in the living room. In the last letter she wrote about a dream she had in which Amanda, looking not quite like herself, tells her that there is no heart left in it, and Millie, panicked and heavy with foreboding, tries to understand what it means, what is the
it
. She wants to ask but for some reason can only touch Amanda’s hair, which in the dream is inexplicably blond. She gave the letter to Grace whileGrace was having her one nightly cigarette out in the yard; so far, Grace has not brought it up.
    “We have to fix up the yard,” says Grace as she spoons mashed potatoes onto Millie’s plate. She is just the kind of person to fill your plate when you’d like it to be filled, thinks Millie. She watches with admiration her sister’s tall figure, with a straight posture, thick around the waist and hips.
    “Is Amanda