Real Life by Sharon Butala

miles from here where Astrid had happened to be in the lodge, treating herself to a fresh fish dinner after one of her solitary tramps. But this didn’t sound like Lucy. Or did it?
    “Hello?” she repeated. There was a long, crackling silence. The voice asked, ‘Are … all right?”
    “Who is this?”
    “… worry …” was all she could extract from the static of the reply. Then the line went dead. Frowning, Astrid hung up the phone and went back to her dinner.
    “Astrid? Is it you? So this is where you are!” Tom Gonnick had blurted. Then he’d blushed, as if it had just dawned on him that she wasn’t glad to see him.
    “How is everybody?” she’d asked, struggling to keep her voice even, meaning Lucy and the Woodwards, the two couples she and Donald had been friends with.
    “Everybody’s fine,” he said. “Darcy starts college this fall …” Lucy and Astrid were the same age, thirty-eight, but Lucy and Tom had three children, while Donald and Astrid, meeting andmarrying late, had put off having children. Their joy in each other felt complete, they told each other, children could wait. And now, she had left only her memory of him. Tom had fallen silent, brushing one hand over his thinning hair, puzzled and uncomfortable. She didn’t ask him to sit down. “You should write,” he said. “I mean—Donald—” She’d gazed steadily at him. His voice trailed away.
    “It’s better this way, Tom,” she said. He’d stared down at her for a moment more, then gone away.
    At Donald’s funeral, small, blonde Lucy had wept so hard, her face smeared with tears she couldn’t seem to stop, that Tom had to take her home. Astrid remembered Lucy’s blue eyes peering questioningly into hers, but little else about the funeral. Only that she was angry with Lucy for her excessive, even histrionic display, when Astrid herself had been unable to weep a tear, had felt that tears were for the merely brokenhearted, while she was beyond sadness, beyond even despair; she was dead too, like Donald.
    But Tom would ask the lodge owner where she’d come from, and would get the answer since she’d rented a cabin from him for the two-month hiatus from school. All through that short northern summer she’d hiked the woods around the lake. The old Indian who worked there had warned her about bears. He’d told her to sing or whistle when she was walking. “Don’t think of him when you walk,” he told her. “And never call him by name. Call him the Big One, so he won’t know you are thinking of him.”
    At noon on Monday she went in search of Warren and found him in the gym refereeing a junior boys’ basketball game. When he saw her in the wide doorway, he gave his whistle to a boy and came to her. She knew she baffled him. He wanted hisstaff to behave as if they were a family and she kept an unbending distance that he could find no way to breach. She saw him as shallow—doubtless he knew that too—although, she felt, amiable and probably decent-hearted enough.
    Before long, nine teachers were crowded into his office, the six women seated on worn wooden stacking chairs, the three men leaning against the fake-pine walls. Dwayne Johansen, perhaps guessing what this emergency meeting was about, was the last to enter, bringing their number to ten. He was tall and very fair, and in the office’s unshaded overhead lights, Astrid wondered if he were paler than usual.
    “Dwayne,” the principal said, “we’re going to need your help here.” Dwayne said nothing, folding his arms across his chest and staring down past the sharp press of his grey slacks to his polished black oxfords. The other men were wearing scuffed sneakers and shabby corduroy or denim pants. “As we all know, Pastor Vernon has told his parishioners that the world will end on Saturday night at 2:37 a.m.” The teachers glanced at each other, holding their faces straight. Somebody snickered. Dwayne nodded once, briskly, without taking his eyes off his