Patterns of Swallows Read Free Page B

customers. Glo's sense of
humour was as expansive and overabundant as everything else about
her.
    Jim and Glo were the closest
things Ruth had to family, and she couldn't help being curious about
them. One time, Glo showed her their wedding photo. Jim was
instantly recognizable. Except for the loss of a little hair, he
hadn't changed much. He still wore the same quiet, serious
expression. He looked younger, a little taller, a little less spare,
in his wedding photo, but the Jim of the old photo was the Jim of the
present.
    On the other hand, Ruth never
would have guessed the young, slim, glamourous woman in the wedding
photo to be the Glo Ruth knew if Glo hadn't prefaced the exhibition
of the photo by asking, "Would you like to see Jim and me's
wedding picture?" (As Glo told Ruth, she'd changed some since
the photo was taken.)
    The couple in the picture made a
handsome couple (in an outmoded kind of way. The old clothes looked
comical to Ruth's modern eyes). Ruth tried to recapture in her
imagination the romance of the young James and Morning Glory Metzke,
wildly in love. It was easily done from looking at the old photo,
but when Ruth looked at the present-day realities, her imagination
balked.
    But Jim and Glo were happy
together. Ruth hoped for as much herself some day. Wild romance was
all right in its place, but it did no one any good unless it made way
for or turned into the quieter, calmer assurance of lifelong
togetherness that Jim and Glo shared.
    The couple had three, grown
children, all still back in Texas. It was a whim of Glo's that
brought the couple to Arrowhead in their retirement years. Jim, an
accountant, had always had a dream to run a cafe, and Glo had always
had a dream to live in the Canadian wilderness. They picked
Arrowhead off of a map, probably because the name had a
Canadian-wilderness kind of a sound to it and because of the lake and
the mountains.
    Although they were both happy in
Arrowhead, they would probably go back to Texas when they retired for
the second time. Glo complained endlessly about seeing only once a
year the grandbabies who were already getting too big to sit on their
grandma's lap. It was no wonder Glo took Ruth under her ample wing.
Ruth needed family, and so did Glo and Jim. It was a good
arrangement.
    *
    * *
    The music was old-fashioned –
just old-timey fiddling, a banjo, and a piano – but even the
younger crowd couldn't keep their feet from moving although they
disdained the music with their mouths. In her mind, Ruth practised
the steps the others were doing. Would her feet ever be able to do
that? If anyone asked her to dance (but no one would), what would
she say?
    A middle-aged man she didn't
know approached, looking directly at her, and Ruth felt her spine
tense. But he moved to the punch bowl and helped himself to a glass.
Ruth let her spine relax, but it was a disappointed relaxing. The
middle-aged stranger might have been able to teach her the steps
without shaming her like someone she knew or someone her own age
might.
    Graham MacKellum came for a
glass of punch.
    "Hey, Wynnie," he
said.
    "Wynn!" she corrected,
forming her mouth into the tiny pout she'd practised in front of her
mirror.
    "Are
you serving the punch, Wynn ?"
he asked, extra emphasis on her name, drawing out the "nn."
    "Only for you," Wynn
flirted.
    "Hello, Ruth," he said
to Ruth (obviously!)
    "Hello, Graham," she
said back. And then she said nothing else. If there were anything
else to say, she would have said it. But there just wasn't.
    "Are you sticking to the
punch bowl all night, or are you dancing?" he asked Wynn.
    "Depends who's asking?"
Wynn said coyly.
    "I might. If you're nice
to me. Maybe if you're both nice to me, I might give you both a
whirl," Graham said leering at Ruth and Wynn.
    There was no other word for it.
Graham had leered at them.
    "We should be so lucky!"
Wynn said, rolling her eyes.
    "Does that really work?"
Ruth asked him. Her face had gone unimpressed.
    Amazing how fast