Alice Munros Best

over the money. They both pretended not to look, but both did.
    “It’s worth it,” the woman said. “You only get married the once. Well, that’s not always strictly true –”
    “In my case it’ll be true,” Johanna said. Her face was hotly flushed because marriage had not, in fact, been mentioned. Not even in the last letter. She had revealed to this woman what she was counting on, and that had perhaps been an unlucky thing to do.
    “Where did you meet him?” said the woman, still in that tone of wistful gaiety. “What was your first date?”
    “Through family,” Johanna said truthfully. She wasn’t meaning to say any more but heard herself go on. “The Western Fair. In London.”
    “The Western Fair,” the woman said. “In London.” She could have been saying “the Castle Ball.”
    “We had his daughter and her friend with us,” said Johanna, thinking that in a way it would have been more accurate to say that he and Sabitha and Edith had her, Johanna, with them.
    “Well, I can say my day has not been wasted. I’ve provided the dress for somebody to be a happy bride in. That’s enough to justify my existence.” The woman tied a narrow pink ribbon around the dress box, making a big, unnecessary bow, then gave it a wicked snip with the scissors.
    “I’m here all day,” she said. “And sometimes I just wonder what I think I’m doing. I ask myself, What do you think you’re doing here? I put up a new display in the window and I do this and that to entice the people in, but there are days – there are
days
– when I do not see one soul come in that door. I know – people think these clothes are too expensive – but they’re
good.
They’re good clothes. If you want the quality you have to pay the price.”
    “They must come in when they want something like those,” said Johanna, looking towards the evening dresses. “Where else could they go?”
    “That’s just it. They don’t. They go to the city – that’s where they go. They’ll drive fifty miles, a hundred miles, never mind the gas, and tell themselves that way they get something better than I’ve got here. And they haven’t. Not better quality, not better selection. Nothing. Just that they’d be ashamed to say they bought their wedding outfits in town.Or they’ll come in and try something on and say they have to think about it. I’ll be back, they say. And I think, Oh, yes, I know what that means. It means they’ll try to find the same thing cheaper in London or Kitchener, and even if it isn’t cheaper, they’ll buy it there once they’ve driven all that way and got sick of looking.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe if I was a local person it would make a difference. It’s very clique-y here, I find. You’re not local, are you?”
    Johanna said, “No.”
    “Don’t you find it clique-y?”
    Cleeky.
    “Hard for an outsider to break in, is what I mean.”
    “I’m used to being on my own,” Johanna said.
    “But you found somebody. You won’t be on your own anymore and isn’t that lovely? Some days I think how grand it would be, to be married and stay at home. Of course, I used to be married, and I worked anyway. Ah, well. Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I’ll be all set!”
    JOHANNA HAD TO HURRY – that woman’s need for conversation had delayed her. She was hurrying to be back at the house, her purchase stowed away, before Sabitha got home from school.
    Then she remembered that Sabitha wasn’t there, having been carried off on the weekend by her mother’s cousin, her Aunt Roxanne, to live like a proper rich girl in Toronto and go to a rich girl’s school. But she continued to walk fast – so fast some smart aleck holding up the wall of the drugstore called out to her, “Where’s the fire?” and she slowed down a bit, not to attract attention.
    The dress box was awkward – how could she have known the store would have its own pink cardboard boxes, with
Milady’s
written across them in purple handwriting? A dead giveaway.
    She felt a fool for mentioning a wedding, when he hadn’t mentioned it and she ought to remember that. So much else had been said – or written – such fondness and yearning expressed, that the actual marrying seemed just to have been overlooked. The way you might speakabout getting up in the morning and not about having breakfast, though you certainly intended to have it.
    Nevertheless she should have kept her