Alice Munros Best

those.
    “Pay when you ship,” he told her.
    “Also, I want a ticket for myself on the same train. Friday afternoon.”
    “Going same place?”
    “Yes.”
    “You can travel on the same train to Toronto, but then you have to wait for the Transcontinental, goes out ten-thirty at night. You want sleeper or coach? Sleeper you get a berth, coach you sit up in the day car.”
    She said she would sit up.
    “Wait in Sudbury for the Montreal train, but you won’t get off there, they’ll just shunt you around and hitch on the Montreal cars. Then onto Port Arthur and then to Kenora. You don’t get off till Regina, and there you have to get off and catch the branch-line train.”
    She nodded as if he should just get on and give her the ticket.
    Slowing down, he said, “But I won’t promise your furniture’ll arrive when you do, I wouldn’t think it would get in till a day or two after. It’s all the priorities. Somebody coming to meet you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Because it won’t likely be much of a station. Towns out there, they’re not like here. They’re mostly pretty rudimentary affairs.”
    She paid for the passenger ticket now, from a roll of bills in a cloth bag in her purse. Like an old lady. She counted her change, too. But not the way an old lady would count it – she held it in her hand and flicked her eyes over it, but you could tell she didn’t miss a penny. Then she turned away rudely, without a good-bye.
    “See you Friday,” he called out.
    She wore a long, drab coat on this warm September day, also a pair of clunky laced-up shoes, and ankle socks.
    He was getting a coffee out of his thermos when she came back and rapped on the wicket.
    “The furniture I’m sending,” she said. “It’s all good furniture, it’s like new. I wouldn’t want it to get scratched or banged up or in any way damaged. I don’t want it to smell like livestock, either.”
    “Oh, well,” he said. “The railway’s pretty used to shipping things. And they don’t use the same cars for shipping furniture they use for shipping pigs.”
    “I’m concerned that it gets there in just as good a shape as it leaves here.”
    “Well, you know, when you buy your furniture, it’s in the store, right? But did you ever think how it got there? It wasn’t made in the store, was it? No. It was made in some factory someplace, and it got shipped to the store, and that was done quite possibly by train. So that being the case, doesn’t it stand to reason the railway knows how to look after it?”
    She continued to look at him without a smile or any admission of her female foolishness.
    “I hope so,” she said. “I hope they do.”

    THE STATION AGENT would have said, without thinking about it, that he knew everybody in town. Which meant that he knew about half of them. And most of those he knew were the core people, the ones who really were “in town” in the sense that they had not arrived yesterday and had no plans to move on. He did not know the woman who was going to Saskatchewan because she did not go to his church or teach his children in school or work in any store or restaurant or office that he went into. Nor was she married to any of the men he knew in the Elks or the Oddfellows or the Lions Club or the Legion. A look at her left hand while she was getting the money out had told him – and he was not surprised – that she was not married to anybody. With those shoes, and ankle socks instead of stockings, and no hat or gloves in the afternoon, she might have been a farm woman. But she didn’t have the hesitation they generally had, the embarrassment. She didn’t have country manners – in fact, she had no manners at all. She had treated him as if he was an information machine. Besides, she had written a town address – Exhibition Road. The person she really reminded him of was a plainclothes nun he had seen on television, talking about the missionary work she did somewhere in the jungle – probably they had got out of their nuns’ clothes there because it made it easier for them to clamber around. This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around.
    ONE MORE THING Johanna meant to do she had been putting off doing. She had to go into the dress shop called Milady’s and buy herself an outfit. She had never been inside that