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orange and gold — thrusting themselves boldly above the trees,higher even than the slim white spire of her church on the other side of town. She has been seeing Chinook all her life and barely notices it now: its few, tree-lined blocks of small, square frame houses painted white or the palest, most unassertive pink, green, or grey; its excessively wide main street, attesting to the failed dreams of its founders, and lined with the typical western false-fronted buildings, newly re-sided in up-to-date building materials. She can remember every one of their transformations over the years. Bank, grocery store, café, credit union, gas station, hotel — it feels as if the car drives itself over to the community hall and parks itself in the lot between Ardath Richards’s shiny new white half-ton and Marie Chapuis’s dark red sedan. She picks up her purse and her shoe bag, takes the angel food cake she got up early this morning to bake from the seat beside her, gets out and goes inside.
    The big wooden door slams shut behind her, the sound echoing through the shadowed emptiness of the hall. It’s only noon, the tea isn’t supposed to start till two, but she can hear by the distant sound of female voices that the owners of the other two vehicles are already at work in the kitchen. She notes that no tables and chairs have been set up yet, but the rush of energy she usually feels at a job to be done doesn’t come.
    The wide entrance area is also the cloakroom and Iris sets the wrapped cake, her purse, and her shoe bag containing her beige pumps — her homage to the season, this is the first time she has worn them since the previous summer — on the floor and leans against the imitation-wood wallboard, its ghastly brown surely the colour of no wood on earth, pulls off her muddy boots, shakes the shoes out of the bag and slips her feet into them. How many times has she done just this?
    She waits, arrested by the pictures she has unexpectedly conjured as they flip backwards in time like pages on a calendar in an old movie: standing here next to the coat racks with a frozen lemon dessert to serve at a wedding or two pumpkin pies for the Fowl Supper or Santa Claus-shaped sugar cookies for the children’s Christmas party or sandwiches or a pan of iced squares or two dozen buns for a wedding shower, an anniversary tea, a funeral reception, a fund-raising tea likethis one. She wonders if in an eternity of other lives she was just as she is now: a wife, a middle-aged member of a big, prosperous family, a leading member of a rural community as her mother was before her, and her grandmother before that. Her head feels thick, the beginning of a headache hovering behind her brow.
    Then, still leaning against the wall of the dimly lit cloakroom, her raincoat partly unbuttoned, she lets her arms fall to her sides, her head drift back to rest against the fake wood, and closes her eyes. She hears the voices from the kitchen rise to bright laughter, but she feels no answering desire to join the other women, although she knows in a moment she’ll have to give up this interlude of solitude. An ambience overtakes her, for the barest instant she’s plunged back into last night’s dream: a foreign country, hot, there are palm trees, and low, flat-roofed, rectangular houses. She is seated at a round table on a hill. A woman is seated there too. She is perhaps middle-aged, with a smooth olive-skinned face, not a line or a wrinkle, and very dark eyes. Her flowing white robes and headdress with its black band are a cross between an Arab woman’s and a nun’s. The woman gazes hard at Iris with eyes that show no fear, nor any favour. Eyes that see right through into her heart and her soul, that know everything there is to know about her. Eyes before which she feels reduced to a child again.
    She is still troubled by that piercing gaze, as if the woman were real and not merely a figment in a dream. More, she is troubled by her dreams themselves; in