Alice Munro's Best (66 page)

But it could be just that still, and always, she hankered after love.

She said, “Where is it you want to go?”

The girl jerked backwards, faced the road. She said, “Where you going? You live around here?” The blurred tone of seductiveness had changed, as no doubt it would change after sex, into a mean-sounding swagger.

“There's a bus goes through the village,” Eve said. “It stops at the gas station. I've seen the sign.”

“Yeah but just one thing,” the girl said. “I got no money. See, I got away from there in such a hurry I never got to collect my money. So what use would it be me getting on a bus without no money?”

The thing to do was not to recognize a threat. Tell her that she could hitchhike, if she had no money. It wasn't likely that she had a gun in her jeans. She just wanted to sound as if she might have one.

But a knife?

The girl turned for the first time to look into the backseat.

“You kids okay back there?” she said.

No answer.

“They're cute,” she said. “They shy with strangers?”

How stupid of Eve to think about sex, when the reality, the danger, were elsewhere.

Eve's purse was on the floor of the car in front of the girl's feet. She didn't know how much money was in it. Sixty, seventy dollars. Hardly more. If she offered money for a ticket the girl would name an expensive destination. Montreal. Or at least Toronto. If she said, “Just take what's there,” the girl would see capitulation. She would sense Eve's fear and might try to push further. What was the best she could do? Steal the car? If she left Eve and the children beside the road, the police would be after her in a hurry. If she left them dead in some thicket, she might get farther. Or if she took them along while she needed them, a knife against Eve's side or a child's throat.

Such things happen. But not as regularly as on television or in the movies. Such things don't often happen.

Eve turned onto the county road, which was fairly busy. Why did that make her feel better? Safety there was an illusion. She could be driving along the highway in the midst of the day's traffic taking herself and the children to their deaths.

The girl said, “Where's this road go?”

“It goes out to the main highway.”

“Let's drive out there.”

“That's where I am driving,” Eve said.

“Which way's the highway go?”

“It goes north to Owen Sound or up to Tobermory where you get the boat. Or south to – I don't know. But it joins another highway, you can get to Sarnia. Or London. Or Detroit or Toronto if you keep going.”

Nothing more was said until they reached the highway. Eve turned onto it and said, “This is it.”

“Which way you heading now?”

“I'm heading north,” Eve said.

“That the way you live then?”

“I'm going to the village. I'm going to stop for gas.”

“You got gas,” the girl said. “You got over half a tank.”

That was stupid. Eve should have said groceries.

Beside her the girl let out a long groan of decision, maybe of relinquishment.

“You know,” she said, “you know. I might as well get out here if I'm going to hitch a ride. I could get a ride here as easy as anyplace.”

Eve pulled over onto the gravel. Relief was turning into something like shame. It was probably true that the girl had run away without collecting any money, that she had nothing. What was it like to be drunk, wasted, with no money, at the side of the road?

“Which way you said we're going?”

“North,” Eve told her again.

“Which way you said to Sarnia?”

“South. Just cross the road, the cars'll be headed south. Watch out for the traffic.”

“Sure,” the girl said. Her voice was already distant; she was calculating new chances. She was half out of the car as she said, “See you.” And into the backseat, “See you guys. Be good.”

“Wait,” said Eve. She leaned over and felt in her purse for her wallet, got out a twenty-dollar bill. She got out of the car and came round to where the girl was waiting. “Here,” she said. “This'll help you.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” the girl said, stuffing the bill in her pocket, her eyes on the road.

“Listen,” said Eve. “If you're stranded I'll tell you where my house is. It's about two miles north of the village and the village is about half a mile north of here. North. This way. My family's there now, but they should be gone by evening, if that bothers you. It's got the name Ford on the mailbox. That's not my name, I don't know why it's there. It's all by itself in the middle of a field. It's got one ordinary window on one side of the front door and a funny-looking little window on the other. That's where they put in the bathroom.”

“Yeah,” the girl said.

“It's just that I thought, if you don't get a ride –”

“Okay,” the girl said. “Sure.”

When they had started driving again, Philip said, “Yuck. She smelled like vomit.”

A little farther on he said, “She didn't even know you should look at the sun to tell directions. She was stupid. Wasn't she?”

“I guess so,” Eve said.

“Yuck. I never ever saw anybody so stupid.”

As they went through the village he asked if they could stop for ice-cream cones. Eve said no.

“There's so many people stopping for ice cream it's hard to find a place to park,” she said. “We've got enough ice cream at home.”

“You shouldn't say ‘home,'” said Philip. “It's just where we're staying. You should say ‘the house.'”

The big hay rolls in a field to the east of the highway were facing ends-on into the sun, so tightly packed they looked like shields or gongs or faces of Aztec metal. Past that was a field of pale soft gold tails or feathers.

“That's called barley, that gold stuff with the tails on it,” she said to Philip.

He said, “I know.”

“The tails are called beards sometimes.” She began to recite, “‘But the reapers, reaping early, in among the bearded barley –'”

Daisy said, “What does mean ‘pearly'?”

Philip said, “Bar-ley.”

“‘Only reapers, reaping early,'” Eve said. She tried to remember. “‘Save the reapers, reaping early –'” “Save” was what sounded best. Save the reapers.

SOPHIE AND IAN
had bought corn at a roadside stand. It was for dinner. Plans had changed – they weren't leaving till morning. And they had bought a bottle of gin and some tonic and limes. Ian made the drinks while Eve and Sophie sat husking the corn. Eve said, “Two dozen. That's crazy.”

“Wait and see,” said Sophie. “Ian loves corn.”

Ian bowed when he presented Eve with her drink, and after she had tasted it she said, “This is most heavenly.”

Ian wasn't much as she had remembered or pictured him. He was not tall, Teutonic, humorless. He was a slim fair-haired man of medium
height, quick moving, companionable. Sophie was less assured, more tentative in all she said and did, than she had seemed since she'd been here. But happier, too.

Eve told her story. She began with the checkerboard on the beach, the vanished hotel, the drives into the country. It included her mother's city-lady outfits, her sheer dresses and matching slips, but not the young Eve's feelings of repugnance. Then the things they went to see – the dwarf orchard, the shelf of old dolls, the marvellous pictures made of colored glass.

“They were a little like Chagall?” Eve said.

Ian said, “Yep. Even us urban geographers know about Chagall.”

Eve said, “Sor-ry.” Both laughed.

Now the gateposts, the sudden memory, the dark lane and ruined barn and rusted machinery, the house a shambles.

“The owner was in there playing cards with his friends,” Eve said. “He didn't know anything about it. Didn't know or didn't care. And my God, it could have been nearly sixty years ago I was there – think of that.”

Sophie said, “Oh, Mom. What a shame.” She was glowing with relief to see Ian and Eve getting on so well together.

“Are you sure it was even the right place?” she said.

“Maybe not,” said Eve. “Maybe not.”

She would not mention the fragment of wall she had seen beyond the bushes. Why bother, when there were so many things she thought best not to mention? First, the game that she had got Philip playing, overexciting him. And nearly everything about Harold and his companions. Everything, every single thing about the girl who had jumped into the car.

There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present graciousness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.

She could say that the house smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked altogether boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she herself was afraid. And never what she was afraid of.

Philip was in charge of gathering up the corn husks and carrying them outside to throw them along the edge of the field. Occasionally Daisy picked up a few on her own, and took them off to be distributed around the house. Philip had added nothing to Eve's story and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it. But once it was told, and Ian (interested in bringing this local anecdote into line with his professional studies) was asking Eve what she knew about the breakup of older patterns of village and rural life, about the spread of what was called agribusiness, Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work around the adults' feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.

What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future.

IF THE GIRL CAME
looking for her, they would all still be here. Then Eve's carefulness would go for nothing.

The girl wouldn't come. Much better offers would turn up before she'd stood ten minutes by the highway. More dangerous offers perhaps, but more interesting, likely to be more profitable.

The girl wouldn't come. Unless she found some homeless, heartless wastrel of her own age. (
I know where there's a place we can stay, if we can get rid of the old lady.
)

Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would lie down in this hollowed-out house, its board walls like a paper shell around her, willing herself to grow light, relieved of consequence, with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark.

CARLA HEARD THE
car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It's her, she thought. Mrs. Jamieson – Sylvia – home from her holiday in Greece. From the barn door – but far enough inside that she could not readily be seen – she watched the road Mrs. Jamieson would have to drive by on, her place being half a mile farther along the road than Clark and Carla's.

If it was somebody getting ready to turn in at their gate it would be slowing down by now. But still Carla hoped.
Let it not be her.

It was. Mrs. Jamieson turned her head once, quickly – she had all she could do maneuvering her car through the ruts and puddles the rain had made in the gravel – but she didn't lift a hand off the wheel to wave, she didn't spot Carla. Carla got a glimpse of a tanned arm bare to the shoulder, hair bleached a lighter color than it had been before, more white now than silver-blond, and an expression that was determined and exasperated and amused at her own exasperation – just the way Mrs. Jamieson would look negotiating such a road. When she turned her head there was something like a bright flash – of inquiry, of hopefulness – that made Carla shrink back.

So.

Maybe Clark didn't know yet. If he was sitting at the computer he would have his back to the window and the road.

But Mrs. Jamieson might have to make another trip. Driving home from the airport, she might not have stopped for groceries – not until she'd been home and figured out what she needed. Clark might see her then. And after dark, the lights of her house would show. But this was July, and it didn't get dark till late. She might be so tired that she wouldn't bother with the lights, she might go to bed early.

On the other hand, she might telephone. Any time now.