Alice Munros Best

were not executed, after all.
    The ceremony was to take place at three o’clock and the chief speakers were to be one of the local ministers, and Mr. John (Jack) Agnew, a union spokesman from Toronto.
    It was a quarter after two when Louisa came out of the doctor’s office. The bus to Carstairs did not leave until six o’clock. She had thought she would go and have tea and something to eat on the top floor of Simpsons, then shop for a wedding present, or if the time fitted go to an afternoon movie. Victoria Park lay between the doctor’s office and Simpsons, and she decided to cut across it. The day was hot and the shade of the trees pleasant. She could not avoid seeing where the chairs had been set up, and a small speakers’ platform draped in yellow cloth, with a Canadian flag on the one side and what she supposed must be a Labor Union flag on the other. A group of people had collected and she found herself changing course in order to get a look at them. Some were old people, very plainly but decently dressed, the women with kerchiefs around their heads on the hot day, Europeans. Others were factory workers, men in clean short-sleeved shirts and women in fresh blouses and slacks, let out early. A few women must have come from home, because they were wearing summer dresses and sandals and trying to keep track of small children. Louisa thought that they would not care at all for the way she was dressed – fashionably, as always, in beige shantung with a crimson silk tam – but she noticed, just then, a woman more elegantly got up than she was, in green silk with her dark hair drawn tightly back, tied with a green-and-gold scarf. She might have been forty – her face was worn, but beautiful. She came over to Louisa at once, smiling, showed her a chair and gave her a mimeographed paper. Louisa could not readthe purple printing. She tried to get a look at some men who were talking beside the platform. Were the speakers among them?
    The coincidence of the name was hardly even interesting. Neither the first name nor the last was all that unusual.
    She did not know why she had sat down, or why she had come over here in the first place. She was beginning to feel a faintly sickening, familiar agitation. She could feel that over nothing. But once it got going, telling herself that it was over nothing did no good. The only thing to do was to get up and get away from here before any more people sat down and hemmed her in.
    The green woman intercepted her, asked if she was all right.
    “I have to catch a bus,” said Louisa in a croaky voice. She cleared her throat. “An out-of-town bus,” she said with better control, and marched away, not in the right direction for Simpsons. She thought in fact that she wouldn’t go there, she wouldn’t go to Birks for the wedding present or to a movie either. She would just go and sit in the bus depot until it was time for her to go home.
    WITHIN HALF A BLOCK of the bus depot she remembered that the bus had not taken her there that morning. The depot was being torn down and rebuilt – there was a temporary depot several blocks away. She had not paid quite enough attention to which street it was on – York Street, east of the real depot, or King? At any rate, she had to detour, because both of these streets were being torn up, and she had almost decided she was lost when she realized she had been lucky enough to come upon the temporary depot by the back way. It was an old house – one of those tall yellow-gray brick houses dating from the time when this was a residential district. This was probably the last use it would be put to before being torn down. Houses all around it must have been torn down to make the large gravelled lot where the buses pulled in. There were still some trees at the edge of the lot and under them a few rows of chairs that she had not noticed when she got off the bus before noon. Two men were sitting on what used to be the veranda of the house, on old car seats. They wore brown shirts withthe bus company’s insignia but they seemed to be halfhearted about their work, not getting up when she asked if the bus to Carstairs was leaving at six o’clock as scheduled and where could she get a soft drink?
    Six o’clock, far as they knew.
    Coffee shop down the street.
    Cooler inside but only Coke and orange left.
    She got herself a Coca-Cola out of the cooler in a dirty little indoor waiting room that smelled of a bad toilet. Moving the depot to this