Alice Munros Best

said, “They’ve both gone to sleep.”
    I had to get the boiler filled up before we started back, and while this was being done, Treece Herron came and stood close to me.
    “You have given us all a day to remember,” he said.
    I wasn’t above flirting with him. I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It’s quite a natural behavior, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage.
    I said he would forget all about it, once he got back to his friends in Toronto. He said no indeed, he would never forget, and he asked if he could write to me. I said nobody could stop him.
    On the way home I thought about this exchange and how ridiculous it would be if he should get a serious crush on me. A divinity student. I had no idea then of course that he would be getting out of Divinity and into Politics.
    “Too bad old Mr. Herron wasn’t able to talk to you,” I said to Old Annie.
    She said, “Well, I could talk to him.”
    Actually, Treece Herron did write to me, but he must have had a few misgivings as well because he enclosed some pamphlets about Mission Schools. Something about raising money for Mission Schools. That put me off and I didn’t write back. (Years later I would joke that I could have married him if I’d played my cards right.)
    I asked Old Annie if Mr. Herron could understand her when she talked to him, and she said, “Enough.” I asked if she was glad about seeing him again and she said yes. “And glad for him to get to see me,” she said, not without some gloating that probably referred to her dress and the vehicle.
    So we just puffed along in the Steamer under the high arching trees that lined the roads in those days. From miles away the lake could be seen – just glimpses of it, shots of light, held wide apart in the trees andhills so that Old Annie asked me if it could possibly be the same lake, all the same one that Walley was on?
    There were lots of old people going around then with ideas in their heads that didn’t add up – though I suppose Old Annie had more than most. I recall her telling me another time that a girl in the Home had a baby out of a big boil that burst on her stomach, and it was the size of a rat and had no life in it, but they put it in the oven and it puffed up to the right size and baked to a good color and started to kick its legs. (Ask an old woman to reminisce and you get the whole ragbag, is what you must be thinking by now.)
    I told her that wasn’t possible, it must have been a dream.
    “Maybe so,” she said, agreeing with me for once. “I did used to have the terriblest dreams.”

VANDALS
    “ LIZA, MY DEAR , I have never written you yet to thank you for going out to our house (poor old Dismal, I guess it really deserves the name now) in the teeth or anyway the aftermath of the storm last February and for letting me know what you found there. Thank your husband too, for taking you there on his snowmobile, also if as I suspect he was the one to board up the broken window to keep out the savage beasts, etc. Lay not up treasure on earth where moth and dust not to mention teenagers doth corrupt. I hear you are a Christian now, Liza, what a splendid thing to be! Are you born again? I always liked the sound of that!
    “Oh, Liza, I know it’s boring of me but I still think of you and poor little Kenny as pretty sunburned children slipping out from behind the trees to startle me and leaping and diving in the pond.
    “Ladner had not the least premonition of death on the night before his operation – or maybe it was the night before that, whenever I phoned you. It is not very often nowadays that people die during a simple bypass and also he really did not think about being mortal. He was just worried about things like whether he had turned the water off. He was obsessed more and more by that sort of detail. The one way his age showed. Though I suppose it is not such a detail if you consider the pipes bursting, that would be a calamity. But a calamity occurred anyway. I have been out there just once to look at it and the odd thing was it just looked natural to me. On top of Ladner’s death, it seemed almost the right way for things to be. What would seem unnatural would be to get to work and clean it up, though I suppose I shall have to do that, or hire somebody. I am tempted just to light a match and let everything go up in smoke, but I imagine that if I did that I would find myself locked up.
    “I wish in a way that I had had