I had known this man before I left my marriage and he was the immediate reason I had left it, though I pretended to him-and to everyone else-that this was not so. When I met him I tried to be carefree and to show an independent spirit. We exchanged news-I made sure I had news-and we laughed, and went for walks in the ravine, but all I really wanted was to entice him to have sex with me, because I thought the high enthusiasm of sex fused people’s best selves. I was stupid about these matters, in a way that was very risky, particularly for a woman of my age. There were times when I would be so happy, after our encounters-dazzled and secure-and there were other times when I would lie stone-heavy with misgiving. After he had taken himself off, I would feel tears running out of my eyes before I knew that I was weeping. And this was because of some shadow I had glimpsed in him or some offhandedness, or an oblique warning he’d given me. Outside the windows, as it got dark, the back-yard parties would begin, with music and shouting and provocations that later might develop into fights, and I would be frightened, not of any hostility but of a kind of nonexistence.

In one of these moods I phoned Sunny, and got the invitation to spend the weekend in the country.

“It’s beautiful here,” I said.

But the country we were driving through meant nothing to me. The hills were a series of green bumps, some with cows. There were low concrete bridges over weed-choked streams. Hay was harvested in a new way, rolled up and left in the fields.

“Wait till you see the house,” Sunny said. “It’s squalid. There was a mouse in the plumbing. Dead. We kept getting these little hairs in the bathwater. That’s all dealt with now, but you never know what will be next.”

She did not ask me-was it delicacy or disapproval?-about my new life. Maybe she just did not know how to begin, could not imagine it. I would have told her lies, anyway, or half-lies. It was hard to make the break but it had to be done. I miss the children terribly but there is always a price to be paid. I am learning to leave a man free and to be free myself. I am learning to take sex lightly, which is hard for me because that’s not the way I started out and I’m not young but I am learning.

A weekend, I thought. It seemed a very long time.

The bricks of the house showed a scar where a verandah had been torn away. Sunny’s boys were tromping around in the yard.

“Mark lost the ball,” the older one-Gregory-shouted.

Sunny told him to say hello to me.

“Hello. Mark threw the ball over the shed and now we can’t find it.”

The three-year-old girl, born since I’d last seen Sunny, came running out of the kitchen door and then halted, surprised at the sight of a stranger. But she recovered herself and told me, “There was a bug thing flew in my head.”

Sunny picked her up and I took up my overnight bag and we walked into the kitchen, where Mike McCallum was spreading ketchup on a piece of bread.

“It’s you,” we said, almost on the same breath. We laughed, I rushed towards him and he moved towards me. We shook hands.

“I thought it was your father,” I said.

I don’t know if I’d got as far as thinking of the well driller. I had thought, Who is that familiar-looking man? A man who carried his body lightly, as if he would think nothing of climbing in and out of wells. Short-cropped hair, going gray, deep-set light-colored eyes. A lean face, good-humored yet austere. A customary, not disagreeable, reserve.

“Couldn’t be,” he said. “Dad’s dead.”

Johnston came into the kitchen with the golf bags, and greeted me, and told Mike to hurry up, and Sunny said, “They know each other, honey. They knew each other. Of all things.”

“When we were kids,” Mike said.

Johnston said, “Really? That’s remarkable.” And we all said together what we saw he was about to say.

“Small world.”

Mike and I were still looking at each other and laughing-we seemed to be making it clear to each other that this discovery which Sunny and Johnston might think remarkable was to us a comically dazzling flare-up of good fortune.

All afternoon while the men were gone I was full of happy energy. I made a peach pie for our supper and read to Claire so that she would settle for her nap, while Sunny took the boys fishing, unsuccessfully, in the scummy creek. Then she and I sat on the floor of the front room with a bottle of wine and became friends again, talking about books instead of life.

The things Mike remembered were different from the things I remembered. He remembered walking around on the narrow top of some old cement foundation and pretending it was as high as the tallest building and that if we stumbled we would fall to our deaths. I said that must have been somewhere else, then I remembered the foundations for a garage that had been poured, and the garage never built, where our lane met the road. Did we walk on that?

We did.

I remembered wanting to holler loudly under the bridge but being afraid of the town kids. He did not remember any bridge.

We both remembered the clay cannonballs, and the war.

We were washing the dishes together, so that we could talk all we wanted without being rude.

He told me how his father had died. He had been killed in a road accident, coming back from a job near Bancroft.

“Are your folks still alive?”

I said that my mother was dead and that my father had married again.

At some point I told him that I had separated from my husband, I was living in Toronto. I said that my children had been with me for a while but were now on a holiday with their father.

He told me that he lived in Kingston, but had not been there very long. He had met Johnston recently, through his work. He was, like Johnston, a civil engineer. His wife was an Irish girl, born in Ireland but working in Canada when he met her. She was a nurse. Right now she was back in Ireland, in County Clare, visiting her family. She had the kids with her.

“How many kids?”

“Three.”

When the dishes were finished we went into the front room and offered to play Scrabble with the boys, so that Sunny and Johnston could go for a walk. One game-then it was supposed to be bedtime. But they persuaded us to start another round, and we were still playing when their parents came back.

“What did I tell you?” said Johnston.

“It’s the same game,” Gregory said. “You said we could finish the game and it’s the same game.”

“I bet,” said Sunny.

She said it was a lovely night, and she and Johnston were getting spoiled, having live-in baby-sitters.

“Last night we actually went to the movie and Mike stayed with the kids. An old movie. Bridge over the River Kwai.”

“On, “Johnston said. “On the River Kwai.”

Mike said, “I’d seen it anyway. Years ago.”

“It was pretty good,” said Sunny. “Except I didn’t agree with the ending. I thought the ending was wrong. You know when Alec Guinness sees the wire in the water, in the morning, and he realizes somebody’s going to blow up the bridge? And he goes berserk and then it gets so complicated and everybody has to get killed and everything? Well, I think he just should have seen the wire and known what was going to happen and stayed on the bridge and got blown up with it. I think that’s what his character would have done and it would have been more dramatically effective.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Johnston said, in the tone of somebody who had been through this argument before. “Where’s the suspense?”

“I agree with Sunny,” I said. “I remember thinking the ending was too complicated.”

“Mike?” said Johnston.

“I thought it was pretty good,” Mike said. “Pretty good the way it was.”

“Guys against the women,” Johnston said. “Guys win.”