For forty-eight hours Brendan had known she was coming. She had phoned, collect, from Calgary, and he had answered the phone. He had three questions to ask afterwards. His tone was distant, but calm.

How long is she staying?

Why didn’t you tell me?

Why did she phone collect?

“I don’t know,” said Lorna.

Now from the kitchen where she was preparing dinner, Lorna strained to hear what they would say to each other. Brendan had just come home. His greeting she could not hear, but Polly’s voice was loud and full of a risky jollity.

“So I really started out on the wrong foot, Brendan, wait till you hear what I said. Lorna and I are walking down the street from the bus stop and I’m saying, Oh, shoot, this is a pretty classy neighborhood you live in, Lorna-and then I say, But look at that place, what’s it doing here? I said, It looks like a barn.”

She couldn’t have started out worse. Brendan was very proud of their house. It was a contemporary house, built in the West Coast style called Post and Beam. Post and Beam houses were not painted; the idea was to fit in with the original forests. So the effect was plain and functional from the outside, with the roof flat and protruding beyond the walls. Inside, the beams were exposed and none of the wood was covered up. The fireplace in this house was set in a stone chimney that went up to the ceiling, and the windows were long and narrow and uncurtained. The architecture is always preeminent, the builder had told them, and Brendan repeated this, as well as the word “contemporary,” when introducing anybody to the house for the first time.

He did not bother to say this to Polly, or to get out the magazine in which there was an article about the style, with photographs-though not of this particular house.

Polly had brought from home the habit of starting off her sentences with the name of the person specifically addressed. “Lorna-” she would say, or “Brendan-” Lorna had forgotten about this way of talking-it seemed to her now rather peremptory and rude. Most of Polly’s sentences at the dinner table began with “Lorna-” and were about people known only to her and Polly. Lorna knew that Polly did not intend to be rude, that she was making a strident but brave effort to seem at ease. And she had at first tried to include Brendan. Both she and Lorna had done so, they had launched into explanations of whoever it was they were talking about-but it did not work. Brendan spoke only to call Lorna’s attention to something needed on the table, or to point out that Daniel had spilled his mashed food on the floor around his high chair.

Polly went on talking while she and Lorna cleared the table, and then as they washed the dishes. Lorna usually bathed the children and put them to bed before she started on the dishes, but tonight she was too rattled-she sensed that Polly was near tears-to attend to things in their proper order. She let Daniel crawl around on the floor while Elizabeth, with her interest in social occasions and new personalities, hung about listening to the conversation. This lasted until Daniel knocked the high chair over-fortunately not on himself, but he howled with fright-and Brendan came from the living room.

“Bedtime seems to have been postponed,” he said, as he removed his son from Lorna’s arms. “Elizabeth. Go and get ready for your bath.”

Polly had moved on from talking about people in town to describing how things were going at home. Not well. The owner of the hardware store-a man whom Lorna’s father had always spoken of as more of a friend than an employer-had sold the business without a word of what he was intending until the deed was done. The new man was expanding the store at the same time business was being lost to Canadian Tire, and there was not a day that he did not stir up some kind of a row with Lorna’s father. Lorna’s father came home from the shop so discouraged that all he wanted to do was lie on the couch. He was not interested in the paper or the news. He drank bicarbonate of soda but wouldn’t discuss the pains in his stomach.

Lorna mentioned a letter from her father in which he made light of these troubles.

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” said Polly. “To you.”

The upkeep of both houses, Polly said, was a continual nightmare. They should all move into one house and sell the other, but now that their grandmother had retired she picked on Polly’s mother all the time, and Lorna’s father could not stand the idea of living with the two of them. Polly often wanted to walk out and never come back, but what would they do without her?

“You should live your own life,” said Lorna. It felt strange to her, to be giving advice to Polly.

“Oh, sure, sure,” said Polly. “I should’ve got out while the going was good, that’s what I guess I should have done. But when was that? I don’t ever remember the going being so particularly good. I was stuck with having to see you through school first, for one thing.”

Lorna had spoken in a regretful, helpful voice, but she refused to stop in her work, to give Polly’s news its due. She accepted it as if it concerned some people she knew and liked, but was not responsible for. She thought of her father lying on the couch in the evenings, dosing himself for pains he wouldn’t admit to, and Aunt Beatrice next door, worried about what people were saying about her, afraid they were laughing behind her back, writing things about her on walls. Crying because she’d gone to church with her slip showing. To think of home caused Lorna pain, but she could not help feeling that Polly was hammering at her, trying to bring her to some capitulation, wrap her up in some intimate misery. And she was bound that she would not give in.

Just look at you. Look at your life. Your stainless-steel sink. Your house where the architecture is preeminent.

“If I ever went away now I think I’d just feel too guilty,” Polly said. “I couldn’t stand it. I’d feel too guilty leaving them.”

Of course some people never feel guilty. Some people never feel at all.

“Quite a tale of woe you got,” said Brendan, when they were lying side by side in the dark.

“It’s on her mind,” Lorna said.

“Just remember. We are not millionaires.”

Lorna was startled. “She doesn’t want money.”

“Doesn’t she?”

“That’s not what she’s telling me for.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

She lay rigid, not answering. Then she thought of something that might put him in a better mood.

“She’s only here for two weeks.”

His turn not to answer.

“Don’t you think she’s nice-looking?”

“No.”

She was about to say that Polly had made her wedding dress. She had planned to be married in her navy suit, and Polly had said, a few days before the wedding, “This isn’t going to do.” So she got out her own high-school formal (Polly had always been more popular than Lorna, she had gone to dances) and she put in gussets of white lace and sewed on white lace sleeves. Because, she said, a bride can’t do without sleeves.

But what could he have cared about that?

Lionel had gone away for a few days. His father had retired, and Lionel was helping him with the move from the town in the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver Island. On the day after Polly’s arrival, Lorna had a letter from him. Not a poem-a real letter, though it was very short.

I dreamt that I was giving you a ride on my bicycle. We were going quite fast. You did not seem to be afraid, though perhaps you should have been. We must not feel called upon to interpret this.

Brendan had gone off early. He was teaching summer school, he said he would eat breakfast at the cafeteria. Polly came out of her room as soon as he was gone. She wore slacks instead of the flounced skirt, and she smiled all the time, as if at a joke of her own. She kept ducking her head slightly to avoid Lorna’s eyes.