Carol Shields - Unless

Very gradually he became aware of someone knocking persistently at the back door. He wasn’t familiar with the house, and so it took him a little while to figure out where the knocking was coming from. Pet, no doubt, was still huddled in the kitchen, recovering from the clunk of the wine bottle and the sense of there being a stranger in the house.

It was Lois, with a dish of bread pudding in her hands, one of her rectangular Pyrex casseroles from fifty years ago.

She pushed her way into the warm house, explaining who she was, that she had awaited the usual signal that dinner was ready, the closing of the red curtains, and then she grew worried and thought she’d come over to investigate. She could see the flicker of the TV, so she knew someone was at home. She’d phoned, but there was no answer. She knew, of course, that a guest was expected to dinner, that’s why she’d made a larger than usual dessert.

She hoped he liked bread pudding.

Mr. Springer explained that he had had the volume turned up rather loudly. He also explained who he was and why he was in the house and where the rest of us had gone. He was all apologies. He hadn’t heard the phone ringing. He was so sorry. But, he exclaimed, it was an unexpected pleasure to meet Reta’s mother.

Mother-in-law, she corrected him. Reta was married to her son, Tom. Well, sort of married.

Oh.

Norah and pneumonia, she mused aloud. Well! Pneumonia was once a serious illness, but now it was more a matter of antibiotics and people up and about in no time. Still, it was gravely worrying.

Mr. Springer was sure Norah would be fine.

Lois mumbled something about Norah not being fine, that she hadn’t been fine for some time, this first and dearest granddaughter. Then she caught sight of Pet. The poor creature.

Had he been fed?

Mr. Springer was so sorry, he hadn’t thought about the dog, he didn’t exactly know what to do. He wasn’t very good with animals, they seem frightened of him, and he had, quite frankly, forgotten the dog was in the house.

Like all goldens, Pet is greedy. He consumes supper with great joy and afterwards presents a mighty belch. I’ll just get him looked after, Lois said, hanging up her coat and taking charge. Pet was used to being fed at around six-thirty, then he liked to be let out for a bit, he never strayed off the property, he had a keen sense of where he belonged.

Which is more than most of us have, Mr. Springer responded. He said this philosophically.

Yes, Lois agreed. Yes, indeed. Then she suggested that they go ahead and have a bite to eat. There was no telling how long Reta and the girls would be gone.

Mr. Springer remembered something about pasta in the fridge. He hadn’t taken in the details. Everything had happened in such a rush.

Lois busied herself with warming up the pasta in the microwave and she urged Mr.

Springer to go back to the TV. She would have the meal ready in two shakes.

He hoped he could help her. He had been watching the news and there was nothing interesting at all. Now and then, not often, there comes a day when nothing seems to happen.

Yes. Lois certainly agreed with him on that topic.

It’s like God’s decided to give us a day off, Mr. Springer said, or something to that effect.

Lois, taking in his smooth, strong face, explained how she could always tell from the first news item. If it was about new safety standards for hockey helmets, that was an indication that nothing terrible had happened. No bombs or murders or riots or fires.

I love those blank days, said Mr. Springer.

So do I.

They’re so rare.

Lois suggested they set the table in the kitchen, since there were only two of them.

An excellent idea. Mr. Springer insisted on helping. If Lois would just show him where the knives and forks were kept —

She dimmed the lights slightly. She explained, as she served out the pasta onto two heated plates — she was a genius at heating plates — that Reta had prepared her usual artichoke dish with black olives and chunks of tomato and asiago cheese. Reta always made the artichoke dish when she wasn’t sure if people were going to be vegetarians or not. It was safe. Unless they happened to be those people who don’t eat cheese, vegans they were called, but there weren’t too many of them, thank heaven.

Mr. Springer poured himself another glass of wine, but first he poured one for Lois, asking her with a lift of an eyebrow if she would care for a bit. She nodded, and then the two of them sat down, at the same instant, as though a gong had sounded.

And now, said Mr. Springer, leaning over his steaming plate of pasta: Tell me all about yourself, Lois.

Beginning With

So, she told him, beginning with a play she saw several years ago, she couldn’t remember the name of it or even whether she enjoyed it or not. Directly in front of her in the audience sat a young couple. The woman was exceptionally slender and beautiful, with a low voice and a smiling way of inclining her head toward her young man. He could scarcely take his eyes off her. He held her hand in his throughout the play. He kneaded it hungrily. Several times, while the actors shouted and dashed around the stage, he brought her hand to his lips and held it there. Lois had never seen such tenderness between a man and a woman. She scarcely slept that night, and several times she brought her curled hand up to her own mouth and pressed her lips against it. She was about forty years old at that time, a wife, the mother of a son.

Twelve years ago she was widowed, but she never uses that word. Instead she says, “My husband died in 1988. I’ve been alone since then.” She knew exactly how pathetic that sounded.

On winter days she often found herself in her kitchen looking out the window at the largest of the old and leafless oaks. But not quite leafless. One brown leaf, only one, remained. The wind blew and blew, but that particular little leaf refused to let go its grasp. There were two ways you could think about this leaf. Either it was exceptionally healthy and strong, or else it was somehow deformed and unable to engage the mechanism that allowed it to fall to the earth where all the normal leaves lay buried in snow. The unfallen leaf was an anomaly; something ailed it. Just as Pet was almost a golden retriever but not quite, standing two inches shorter than the regulation male dog, when only a single inch was the permitted tolerance for the breed, not that Lois cared one fig about that.

She hoped Mr. Springer liked a good bread pudding. She had a list of one hundred desserts, alphabetized in a recipe box, beginning with almond apples, moving to date pudding, on to nut brittle mousse (frozen) and ending with Zweiback pastry cheesecake; she rotated this list around the year. It is no longer easy to find Zweiback biscuits, but graham crackers can be substituted. Needless to say, seasonal ingredients mean that the desserts themselves are not served alphabetically. She once overheard her granddaughter Christine making fun of her dessert list. She can understand this in a way, but she still thought it was rather mean.

She was twenty-four hours in labour when Tom was born. When she first started having pains she insisted that her husband drive her to the hospital straight away. “Ten minutes apart?” the receptionist said coolly. “Didn’t they tell you not to come till the pains were at five minutes?” At that point a woman could be heard screaming from another floor. “Is that woman having a baby?” Lois asked the receptionist, who rolled her eyes and said, “That’s an Italian woman having a baby.”

Her first granddaughter was named Norah Charlotte Winters, a beautiful baby. The Charlotte was after a friend of Reta’s who died very young in a car accident. Lois never met this Charlotte person. She herself was in a car accident once, a fender bender really, but a terrible shock. So much so that she gave up driving.