Alice Munros Best

look how she too had gone against him.
    He walked to town and went into the hotel for his breakfast. The waitress said, “You’re bright and early this morning.”
    And while she was still pouring out his coffee he began to tell her about how his housekeeper had walked out on him without any warning or provocation, not only left her job with no notice but taken a load offurniture that had belonged to his daughter, that now was supposed to belong to his son-in-law but didn’t really, having been bought with his daughter’s wedding money. He told her how his daughter had married an airman, a good-looking, plausible fellow who wasn’t to be trusted around the corner.
    “Excuse me,” the waitress said. “I’d love to chat, but I got people waiting on their breakfast. Excuse me –”
    He climbed the stairs to his office, and there, spread out on his desk, were the old maps he had been studying yesterday in an effort to locate exactly the very first burying ground in the county (abandoned, he believed, in 1839). He turned on the light and sat down, but he found he could not concentrate. After the waitress’s reproof – or what he took for a reproof – he hadn’t been able to eat his breakfast or enjoy his coffee. He decided to go out for a walk to calm himself down.
    But instead of walking along in his usual way, greeting people and passing a few words with them, he found himself bursting into speech. The minute anybody asked him how he was this morning he began in a most uncharacteristic, even shameful way to blurt out his woes, and like the waitress, these people had business to attend to and they nodded and shuffled and made excuses to get away. The morning didn’t seem to be warming up in the way foggy fall mornings usually did; his jacket wasn’t warm enough, so he sought the comfort of the shops.
    People who had known him the longest were the most dismayed. He had never been anything but reticent – the well-mannered gentleman, his mind on other times, his courtesy a deft apology for privilege (which was a bit of a joke, because the privilege was mostly in his recollections and not apparent to others). He should have been the last person to air wrongs or ask for sympathy – he hadn’t when his wife died, or even when his daughter died – yet here he was, pulling out some letter, asking if it wasn’t a shame the way this fellow had taken him for money over and over again, and even now when he’d taken pity on him once more the fellow had connived with his housekeeper to steal the furniture. Some thought it was his own furniture he was talking about – they believed the old man had been left without a bed or a chair in his house. They advised him to go to the police.
    “That’s no good, that’s no good,” he said. “How can you get blood from a stone?”
    He went into the Shoe Repair shop and greeted Herman Shultz.
    “Do you remember those boots you resoled for me, the ones I got in England? You resoled them four or five years ago.”
    The shop was like a cave, with shaded bulbs hanging down over various workplaces. It was abominably ventilated, but its manly smells – of glue and leather and shoe-blacking and fresh-cut felt soles and rotted old ones – were comfortable to Mr. McCauley. Here his neighbor Herman Shultz, a sallow, expert, spectacled workman, bent-shouldered, was occupied in all seasons – driving in iron nails and clinch nails and, with a wicked hooked knife, cutting the desired shapes out of leather. The felt was cut by something like a miniature circular saw. The buffers made a scuffing noise and the sandpaper wheel made a rasp and the emery stone on a tool’s edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. All the sounds and smells and precise activities of the place had been familiar to Mr. McCauley for years but never identified or reflected upon before. Now Herman, in his blackened leather apron with a boot on one hand, straightened up, smiled, nodded, and Mr. McCauley saw the man’s whole life in this cave. He wished to express sympathy or admiration or something more that he didn’t understand.
    “Yes, I do,” Herman said. “They were nice boots.”
    “Fine boots. You know I got them on my wedding trip. I got them in England. I can’t remember now where, but it wasn’t in London.”
    “I remember you telling me.”
    “You did a fine job on them. They’re still doing well. Fine job,