After Alice by Karen Hofmann

abrupt, for the woman colours and says, a little sharply, “Boyfriend, then.”
    Sidonie waits. She is good at waiting, making people say more than they intend to.
    Of course, for both Alice and her, there must have been a kinship taboo in place. They had grown up too much with Hugh and Graham to consider them as romantic partners. And vice versa. Though there had been other objections, other barriers, as well. She remembers the odd conversation with Mother, in Mother’s last illness: Alice could have married anyone, Mother had said. We didn’t need Betty Inglis trying to foist off that Gordon Defoe on us . She thought she was better than us, you know . But Cecil Inglis came here as a manager for the land company . Somehow he arranged to get paid in shares when the company was doing badly in the 30s, and he traded those shares for that big parcel of land that they called Sans Souci . Really, they weren’t anyone . Betty was a soldier’s wife, and Cecil was just an officer in India . They’d had to leave . They were fresh off the boat .
    Fresh off the boat: she remembers her mother using that phrase. She can remember what her mother said almost perfectly, she thinks. She had been horrified, appalled. It had seared into her. Her mother complaining in an unfamiliar, petulant voice: but they always had a little more money than us, and Betty acted like Hugh and Graham were headed for Oxford . It was her idea to send them to that private school in Vancouver, you know . And they sent Graham off to the one in England when he was fifteen . But he got sick and had to come back, and then Betty said that the air here was healthier . But it was because Graham was not right, even then . She had it in her head that the boys would both marry upper-class girls . She thought Alice wasn’t as good as them, though Alice was the prettiest girl around, and your father would have been titled, back in Europe .
    Mother, rambling, displaying unattractive grudges and jealousies, letting loose some old secrets, in her last weeks. She had been in pain, and the morphine had disinhibited her, of course. But a shock to find all of that festering, when she had grown up knowing Betty Inglis as her mother’s closest friend. A shock to have secrets revealed.
    Revealed and not revealed. She had thought, then, that Mother had meant that Alice should have married Graham or Hugh. But Graham had become ill in his early twenties, and Hugh, who was Alice’s age, had never seemed like a possible partner for her. He had been a boy still, when Alice was already grown. And they’d all grown up as siblings. There had been no possibility of romance between them. Had there?
    And she herself had been too much younger, had left the valley before she was grown up, so the question had not arisen. There had been no possibility of romance between herself and Graham, or herself and Hugh.
    Had there?

POMONA
    She could have found her way on her own, but Walt Rilke is waiting for her in the long, rutted driveway, in his green gabardine work clothes, his leather work boots planted squarely on the centre ridge, among the colonizing dandelions and plantain and a dwarfish, determined race of mustard, as though nothing has changed in two decades.
    Though as she gets out of her car and walks toward him, she thinks, for an instant: No, not Walt . White hair tufts out from under his cap, at the sides; the skin of his neck and face has leathered to a permanent tobacco-brown, is shirred around his prominent blue eyes, stretched taut and shiny at his knobby cheekbones. Moles of various species cultivate his cheeks and forearms. His grin as usual — full curving lips pulled back over serviceable teeth, eyes disappearing into their puckered lids. Who is this old man?
    She would not have recognized him, except that he resembles his father. Then the images of him, past and present, serigraph in her mind and he is just Walt, whom she has known nearly all