Deep-Holes, by Alice Munroe

It was Kent, and within a week Savanna had found out all about him. No. Change that to found out all he wanted her to know. He had been living in Toronto for years. He had often passed the building where Savanna worked and thought he had spotted her a couple of times on the street. Of course, she wouldn’t have recognized him, because he was wearing a kind of robe.

“A Hare Krishna?” Sally said.

“Oh, Mom, if you’re a monk it doesn’t mean you’re a Hare Krishna. Anyway, he’s not that now.”

“So what is he?”

“He says he lives in the present. So I said, ‘Well, don’t we all, nowadays,’ and he said no, he meant in the real present.”

“Where we are now,” he had said, and Savanna had said, “You mean, in this dump?” Because it was—the coffee shop where he had asked her to meet him was a dump.

“I see it differently,” he said, but then he said he had no objection to her way of seeing it, or anybody else’s.

“Well, that’s big of you,” Savanna said, but she made a joke of it and he sort of laughed.

He said that he had seen Alex’s obituary in the paper and thought it was well done. He guessed Alex would have liked the reference to his contribution to geology. He had wondered if his own name would appear on the list of relatives, and he was rather surprised that it was there. Had his father told them what names he wanted listed, before he died? he asked.

Savanna had said no—he hadn’t been planning on dying anything like so soon. It was the rest of the family who’d had a conference and decided that Kent’s name should be included.

“Not Dad,” Kent had said. “Well, no.”

Then he had asked about Sally.

Sally felt a kind of inflated balloon in her chest.

“What did you say?”

“I said you were O.K., maybe at loose ends a little, you and Dad being so close and you not having much time yet to get used to being alone. Then he said, ‘Tell her she can come to see me, if she wants to,’ and I said I would ask you.”

Sally didn’t reply.

“You there, Mom?”

“Did he say when or where?”

“No. I’m supposed to meet him in a week in the same place and tell him what you said. I think he sort of enjoys calling the shots. I thought you’d agree right away.”

“Of course I agree. Did he really risk his life in the fire?”

“He won’t talk about it. But my information is yes. He’s quite well known, as it turns out, in certain parts of town and by certain people.”