The landing is cramped and poorly lit, with barely enough room to turn around. Caroline makes her way cautiously up the narrow staircase, bracing herself with one hand against the dingy wall. Someone is boiling cabbage, the smell masking the underlying odour of mildew and unwashed clothes Caroline noticed in the stairwell the last time she was here.
Alice’s room is next to the communal bathroom, a bachelor’s suite, she calls it, although it’s really just a square box with her bed in the kitchen and not even a proper closet to hang up her clothes. Her door is slightly ajar and Caroline raps gently then pushes it open. Alice is sitting on the bed, propped on the heels of her hands. Susan is standing in front of her and she turns to the door when Caroline knocks. Her eyes are swollen and she’s holding a wadded tissue up to her nose. She looks a fright. Her hair, usually as brilliant as a raven’s wing, hangs in dull strands around her pale face.
“Caroline,” she wails.
Caroline drops her purse by the door and draws Susan in, hugging her close. “Oh, Susan. I’m so sorry.” She lets Susan weep on her shoulder while Alice stands up and motions to the clock on the wall, flashing ten fingers twice, then tracing a finger down each of her cheeks.
“Who wants tea?” Alice asks.
“Come, let’s sit.” There is only one chair in the suite, pushed up under the table, so Caroline leads Susan to the bed and sits next to her, folding her arm around her shoulder. “You’ll feel better once you have some tea. Then you can tell us all about it.”
Susan shakes off Caroline’s arm, springs from the bed and paces around the small room. “I can’t sit! I can’t drink tea. I can’t eat.” She pulls another tissue from the box on the table and blows her nose.
“I’ve told her she just needs to get over it and move on. There are plenty of fish in the sea,” Alice says as she empties the kettle into the teapot.
“I don’t want another fish,” Susan says, and begins sobbing again.
“He’s a barracuda, that’s what he is,” Alice says sharply. “Any man who preys on a young girl’s feelings like he did …” She slams the teapot down on the table and the lid clatters off and falls on the floor.
Two days earlier, Caroline received a phone call from Susan’s distraught mother. Susan was on her way home. She’d quit her summer job and was moving back, giving up on school, Mrs. Wawryk said, and it all had something to do with the man she’d been seeing. Would Caroline and Alice please try to talk some sense into her because there wasn’t a thing she or Susan’s father could say to make her listen to reason.
It troubled Caroline to see sensible, level-headed Susan like this, falling to pieces over a failed romance. What had that man done to her?
“I know whatever’s happened seems like the end of the world right now. But you’ll get through it. You’ve had your heart broken, and I can’t begin to understand how that feels, but it will mend in time. You can’t drop out of school over this.”
“But how can I ever go back? I’m registered for another one of his classes this fall, and even if I drop it, I’m sure to bump into him on campus. I couldn’t bear to see him. Not after the dreadful things I’ve found out about him.” She blows her nose pitifully into the tissue again. “And I’m just so ashamed. I feel as though everyone will know; gossip spreads like wildfire around such an intimate campus.”
“You’re making too much out of all of this,” Alice says, pouring the tea and handing Susan a cup. “I’d march right back into his class if I were you, show him he hasn’t got the best of you. What do you think, Caroline?”
Caroline takes a sip of tea — too hot — and puts her cup back in the saucer. “I think Susan needs to start at the beginning and tell us the entire story.”
Susan met John Talbott in her second year. He was much younger than her other professors; she was surprised on the first day when the attractive young man wearing a smartly cut jacket stepped onto the dais at the front of the class. He was a gifted lecturer, his voice melodious. When she got a C on her first essay, she was horrified by such a bad mark. He’d pencilled a note on the last page, asking her to make an appointment to see him. He charmed her at that first meeting and offered extra instruction outside of class. And so began a two-year romance, simple and sweet in the beginning, not even a kiss until Christmas that first year. He was married, he made that perfectly clear to Susan from the very beginning, with two small children not yet in school. But he was dreadfully unhappy; his wife — the daughter of his mother’s best friend he’d been coerced into marrying — was a shrew.
As time went on, he tempted Susan with the possibility of a future after the dissolution of his floundering marriage. He told her he loved her, he wanted to be with her and only her, forever. He couldn’t live without her.
“Oh, Susan. What were you thinking, carrying on with a married man?” Alice says as she plucks another tissue out of the box and pushes it across the table.
This sets Susan sobbing again and Caroline takes hold of her hand. Susan was as innocent and guileless as she had been, believing like she did in every promise Eldon made in those early days, falling for the show he put on, never suspecting the malice that lay beneath the facade. If only she’d been as perceptive as Eldon’s first fiancée must have been and caught on to his true nature before it was too late.
Susan takes a deep, shuddering breath. “There was always some reason he couldn’t tell his wife it was over — the baby was teething, her mother was sick — on and on it went. On some level, I considered he might never leave his wife, but he made me feel I should be content with what we had and I convinced myself I could carry on that way, as his mistress, and I kept it up. I was there for him whenever he wanted me.”
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?” Caroline asks gently.
Susan covers her face with her hands. “I was ashamed. He was married. And he insisted we keep our affair a secret so I did, even though it was gnawing away at me from inside.”
“Uh oh,” Alice says. “I know where this is going. You know that saying, your secret’s safe with me? It doesn’t happen, someone always slips up. A secret’s next to impossible to keep.” She nods wisely.
“A few weeks ago, I got a letter from a girl named Etta Winters,” Susan continues. “She’s a graduate student, studying Victorian literature. I’d seen her come out of John’s office once or twice. She said she’d found out about me from John’s teaching assistant and she wanted to meet with me.”
“You don’t even have to tell me …” Alice says, a look of indignation sweeping across her face.
Caroline knows what Susan is about to say, too. This man of Susan’s is even worse than she imagined. The two young women met and the stories they’d been told were remarkably similar. John loved Etta, he couldn’t live without her, it was impossible to leave his wife, if only she’d wait. He’d already been having an affair with Etta for two years when he invited Susan, so young and naive, to his office. They confronted him, threatening to tell the dean he’d taken advantage of them, but he laughed and said he would deny it. They were infatuated, hysterical girls; he, a tenured professor. Who would the dean believe?
“I’ve been sitting in my room for the last two weeks, trying to decide what to do. Mom and Dad don’t know the half of it. They think it’s just a boyfriend who’s dumped me. Mom, especially, thinks I’ve lost my mind, throwing my life away over a man.”
“Well, aren’t you?” Alice says, standing up and clearing away the cups. “There’s no reason for you not to go back to school in a few weeks, waltz straight back into his classroom, and stare him in his two-timing face!”
“But how can I face him without falling apart? I love him and I want him to choose me.” Susan crumples to the bed, her face covered by a curtain of hair.
Caroline reaches for her hair, pushes it away from her eyes.
“I tried to talk to him, to convince him it’s me that he loves. He called me a foolish little girl,” Susan whimpers. “He said I knew he was married and I didn’t seem to care so why should it matter now that I knew about Etta?”
There is a soft pop, then the gurgling of water on the other side of the wall. Caroline’s head is spinning, swirling like water flowing down a drain. How easy it is to ignore your own moral compass when you’re hopelessly in love. She knows it’s wrong to carry on an affair with Nick while she’s married to Eldon, but she, like Susan, finds it impossible to stop.
“I still don’t see why this means you have to quit school.” Alice sits cross-legged on the floor and hands Susan another tissue.
“There’s no way I can avoid seeing him on campus. He teaches in the same building as most of my classes.”
“So what?” Alice says.
“It’ll take time, but you’ll get over this. You have to go back to school in September,” Caroline says.
Susan’s face is grey, and blue-black circles stain the hollows under her eyes. “I’m just so tired. I can’t even think about this anymore.”
Caroline and Alice stand up, settling Susan’s head onto the pillow. “Why don’t you rest here awhile?” Caroline says. “I have to get going. Eldon’s likely waiting. Alice, can you walk me out?” She hugs Susan and tucks a blanket up under her chin. “I’ll get Eldon to drive me out to see you in a few days.”
“I think it’s helped her to tell us,” Alice says when they’re out on the street. “She should have told us about this man long ago. That’s the trouble with secrets; they eat at you if you keep them bottled up inside.” She laces a tissue she’s holding through her fingers, up one and down the other like a running stitch, and avoids Caroline’s eyes. “There’s something I’ve been keeping from you, too, and I’ve been meaning to tell you but the time never seems right. We’re either at the café and there are people nearby, or I’ve been avoiding the topic altogether.”
“What is it? Is everything all right?” Caroline is alarmed. She can’t take much more bad news in one day.
Alice looks away, her eyes bright. “It’s Bill. He’s been avoiding me. The first few dates were fine, but he seems to have lost interest in me. It’s not a wife he wants. He’s just putting in time here at the bank before he moves on to a bigger and better town … and he’s shown me what he’s really after while he’s here.” Her eyes brim over and a tear trickles out from behind her glasses and down the side of her nose.
Caroline pictures Bill, with his manicured moustache and that perfectly coiffed hair. She had her reservations about him, thought him too slick for a decent girl like Alice. “I didn’t care for him when I first met him, to be honest,” she says. “Someone better is sure to come along. You’ll see.”
“I didn’t give in to him and that’s why he’s ignoring me. Why did we all think this falling in love business would be easy?” Alice is still looking across the street and she gives a weak wave. “There’s Eldon,” she says. “He just came out of the drug store. He doesn’t look happy you’ve kept him waiting.”
He is standing in front of Clarice Hubley’s parked Crown Victoria, lighting a cigarette, when he sees that Caroline has noticed him. He points at his watch then beckons her over.
Tomorrow she has another rendezvous planned with Nick for when Eldon takes his mother to church. They’ve met four times now, the passion mounting with each encounter, but it’s the conversation she waits for; hearing Nick reveal bits and pieces about himself, learning about the sort of man he is, and noting his attentive eyes when she does the same. Sundays, church day, are the best days to meet. She can slip away, guaranteeing herself a full hour, and be back before Eldon gets home. But she doesn’t know how much longer she can continue this charade; Elvina is starting to ask questions about her absence from church. How much longer can she say she’s feeling unwell? And what would Susan and Alice think if they knew she was carrying on with Nick behind Eldon’s back? Her secret is getting harder and harder to keep. She feels the burden of it weighing her down like stones in her pockets.
Caroline balances on the edge of the porch rocker, washing cucumbers. She pulled out the vines and plucked off the last of them this morning, leaving the old, yellow ones in a heap in the garden. There are just enough to grind for one more batch of sweet relish. She reaches to the bottom of the galvanized washtub, swishes her hand around, and scoops out the last cucumber, small and curled as a snail, with spiky spines. It reminds her of a photograph from a science textbook, a human embryo floating adrift in a womb.
She stands and stretches the cramp out of her back. There is the unmistakable scent of autumn in the air even though it’s not quite September. Harvest arrived early this year, with a stretch of clear, dry weather the last two weeks. The wheat is bountiful, plump, and red, and their good fortune has put Eldon in unusually good spirits, even though he’s been toiling long hours. She, too, has been working like mad, especially on the days of her meetings with Nick. She picks and pickles and cans all morning, cramming a day’s work into a half, so Eldon will see the jars of sweet pickles, chokecherry jam, and pink crabapples lining the countertop when he comes in at night. He just left in the grain truck to take a load of wheat to town. There is sure to be a lineup at the elevator and Caroline estimates she has an hour with Nick at the tree.
She puts the bowl of clean cucumbers on the kitchen table then sets out on her bike. She’s taken it to meet Nick the last few times; it’s easy to drive on the grass path now that it’s tamped down, and quicker, too, than walking. Sport pads along beside her, used to her frequent visits out to the tree, where he lies, muzzle on paws, watching her and Nick without judgment.
When she gets there, she finds Nick standing at the edge of the river. It is barely a trickle at this time of the year; stones poke through the shallow surface like a handful of marbles tossed by a boy. Caroline picks up a pebble and flings it over his head so it lands in the water with a soft plop. He turns and a smile lights up his face.
“God, I’ve missed you. Last night it was so damn hot in my room, I took my pillow and went out to the cot on the porch. I nearly made myself crazy, thinking about you. It was all I could do to stop myself from coming to you. Not even half a mile but it might as well be a hundred. It kills me, wanting you when you’re so close and knowing I can’t have you, that you’re with him.”
“I miss you, too. I wasn’t even sure I’d see you today, if you’d be able to slip away on such a perfect harvest day.”
“It’s not getting any easier finding excuses to get away. I told Anton I was taking a shovel to Coyle’s to get fixed. He said it was a damn stupid time to do it, but I said the cultivator needs to be ready for the fall work.”
“Won’t he wonder what you were doing when he sees the shovel isn’t fixed?”
“I ran it into town, left it with Coyle, and told him I’d be back in an hour to pick it up. Anton will think I’ve been in town the whole time.”
Caroline takes his hand and leads him up the small rise toward the tree. “We never have enough time together, just these little crumbs we snatch when we can.”
“It’s only a matter of time, you know, before someone figures out what we’re up to,” Nick says. He takes the jacket he has slung over his shoulder and spreads it out on the grass. “I think Anton’s beginning to wonder where I go when I take off. I’m not very good at lying to him.”
“I don’t even want to think what Eldon would do if he ever found out.”
“I worry about that, too.” Nick runs a hand through his hair. “Sometimes I wish we could just run off together, head to Alberta and make a fresh start.”
Caroline buries her face in the hollow under his shoulder and breathes in his familiar scent, then takes another deep breath, storing up the soap-and-water smell of him. She’s thought about the same thing, lying alone in her bed at night when sleep won’t come; if only she could start over with Nick, put her life with Eldon behind her, chalk her short marriage up to a hasty mistake. But it will never happen. Divorce is out of the question. Eldon will never let her go.
“What do you think about that?” Nick asks, pulling her away and putting his hands on her shoulders.
She steps back, looking up at him, not sure how to tell him leaving with him is impossible.
“I don’t see why we can’t just start over somewhere else,” he says. “Just like my grandparents did when they left the old country with ten dollars for a homestead and a trunk-load of tools. We’ll be homesteading for ourselves, crossing the prairie instead of the ocean, carrying all we need in the box of my truck. What’s stopping us?”
Caroline can’t bear the look of hope in his eyes. “I’d go anywhere with you, you know that, don’t you?” Her fingers climb up the front of his shirt, toy with a button. “But this is all too much for me to think about just now.” Her hands glide down, deftly opening each button. “We have so little time, only this moment. Let’s not waste it.” He’s about to answer when she cups his face with her hands and kisses him, inhaling the words from his lips and swallowing them whole so she won’t have to hear whatever it is he has to say. She feels his lips relax as he falls into the slow river of her kiss. She never wants it to end, this tender kiss, this spool of love unwinding.
Elvina’s new car, square and ugly as a boxcar, is sitting beside the house when Caroline gets home. She rubs a hand over her lips, as though evidence of Nick’s sweet kisses might be visible there, and tries to affect an innocent gaze before she walks into the kitchen. The cucumbers are still in the middle of the table, just where she left them, the kitchen quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. Caroline gently closes the screen door and steps inside.
Upstairs, she hears the scraping of a box being dragged over the floor and then the heavy thump of Elvina’s feet on the stairs. Elvina claps a hand to her thick bosom when she walks into the kitchen, carrying a cumbersome glass vase, quite likely the most hideous thing Caroline has ever seen.
“Mercy, you startled me. What are you doing here?” Elvina puts the vase on the table next to the cucumbers. “I mean, where have you been until now? I searched through the house and walked out to the garden but you were nowhere to be found. I needed your help with a box in the attic. It’s hot as Hades up there.” Elvina sinks into a kitchen chair and lifts the hem of her skirt to her knees, flapping it a few times.
“I went for a bike ride. The house was closing in on me and I needed some fresh air.”
“Hmmm,” Elvina says. “Eldon tells me you’ve been under the weather lately.” She gets two glasses from the cupboard and fills them with water from the pitcher in the fridge. “I hope you’re taking proper care of yourself.”
“What’s the vase for?” Caroline sits down across from Elvina and takes a sip.
“It’s the Morrises’ fiftieth wedding anniversary this Sunday and we’re having a tea for them after the service. Vivian Waller has all those spectacular mums in her garden and we’re short a few vases. You will be in church this Sunday, won’t you? Millie Tupper’s been asking questions, raising those painted-on eyebrows of hers; she seems unusually interested in your well-being and wonders why you’ve been missing services.”
Caroline’s missed two Sundays in a row and she doesn’t need Millie Tupper spreading any rumours. “I’ve been feeling better this week so I’m sure I’ll be there. I wouldn’t want to miss the Morrises’ tea.”
Elvina drains her glass of water in one long swallow and swipes the wet circle it leaves on the table with the sleeve of her blouse. “There’s nothing you’d like to tell me, is there?”
Caroline’s heart stutters. Elvina can be so much like Eldon, trying to trick her into saying something she hadn’t intended to say. What does she mean, exactly? What does she know?
“I know some women don’t like to announce anything until they’re absolutely sure, but if you’re anything like me, I knew straight away,” she continues. “I was so sick each morning, I could scarcely get out of bed, my stomach rolling and pitching until noon. William’s cigars were the worst, the smell sent me running to the bucket, day or night. I haven’t said anything about my suspicions to Eldon and he hasn’t commented one way or the other so I’m assuming you haven’t told him yet.”
Elvina is looking at her in such a kind way that it throws Caroline off; she feels as though the kitchen floor has suddenly tilted on its joists.
“You’re looking a little peaked all of a sudden, dear. Have some more water,” Elvina says, getting up to refill Caroline’s glass. “Of course, I didn’t say anything when Millie asked, although she was hoping for confirmation, I could tell. Even Betty Cornforth mentioned the telltale glow she noticed the last time she saw you.”
There is a distant rumble of thunder and Sport whines at the door, denting the screen with his nose. Within minutes, rain is pelting down on the windows and drumming on the roof. Elvina leaves with her horrid vase, wanting to get her new car home and into the garage in the event of hail. Caroline still feels unsettled, so she steps out on the porch and sits on the rocking chair with Sport’s head on her lap, breathing in the fresh smell and listening to the rain from the gutters pour into the rain barrel as though a giant hand is pumping it off the roof.
There is a reason for the rosy glow on her face and it’s these feelings for Nick, but thanks to Millie Tupper, Betty and Elvina have been fooled into believing it’s because Eldon’s baby is growing inside her. She knows it’s untrue; she’s just finished her monthly and Nick’s been careful not to spill his seed inside her. She could set them all straight on Sunday after the tea, but it’s a convenient ruse, and one she can use for another month, maybe two, until they discover she’s not pregnant at all.