Alice Munros Best

weaker than he’d thought – he had to lean over and put one hand on the tank. Then he found some underwear on the floor of the hall closet where he kept clean clothes. He had figured out by now who this woman was. She had said she came to bring him his furniture, though he hadn’t asked her or anybody to do that – hadn’t asked for the furniture at all, just the money. He should know her name, but he couldn’t remember it. That was why he opened her purse, which wason the floor of the hall beside her suitcase. There was a name tag sewn to the lining.
    Johanna Parry, and the address of his father-in-law, on Exhibition Road.
    Some other things. A cloth bag with a few bills in it. Twenty-seven dollars. Another bag with change, which he didn’t bother to count. A bright blue bankbook. He opened it up automatically, without expectations of anything unusual.
    A couple of weeks ago Johanna had been able to transfer the whole of her inheritance from Mrs. Willets into her bank account, adding it to the amount of money she had saved. She had explained to the bank manager that she did not know when she might need it.
    The sum was not dazzling, but it was impressive. It gave her substance. In Ken Boudreau’s mind, it added a sleek upholstery to the name Johanna Parry.
    “Were you wearing a brown dress?” he said, when she came up with the coffee.
    “Yes, I was. When I first got here.”
    “I thought it was a dream. It was you.”
    “Like in your other dream,” Johanna said, her speckled forehead turning fiery. He didn’t know what that was all about and hadn’t the energy to inquire. Possibly a dream he’d wakened from when she was here in the night – one he couldn’t now remember. He coughed again in a more reasonable way, with her handing him some toilet paper.
    “Now,” she said, “where are you going to set your coffee?” She pushed up the wooden chair that she had moved to get at him more easily. “There,” she said. She lifted him under the arms and wedged the pillow in behind him. A dirty pillow, without a case, but she had covered it last night with a towel.
    “Could you see if there’s any cigarettes downstairs?”
    She shook her head, but said, “I’ll look. I’ve got biscuits in the oven.”
    KEN BOUDREAU WAS in the habit of lending money, as well as borrowing it. Much of the trouble that had come upon him – or that he hadgot into, to put it another way – had to do with not being able to say no to a friend. Loyalty. He had not been drummed out of the peacetime Air Force, but had resigned out of loyalty to the friend who had been hauled up for offering insults to the C.O. at a mess party. At a mess party, where everything was supposed to be a joke and no offense taken – it was not fair. And he had lost the job with the fertilizer company because he took a company truck across the American border without permission, on a Sunday, to pick up a buddy who had got into a fight and was afraid of being caught and charged.
    Part and parcel of the loyalty to friends was the difficulty with bosses. He would confess that he found it hard to knuckle under. “Yes, sir,” and “no, sir” were not ready words in his vocabulary. He had not been fired from the insurance company, but he had been passed over so many times that it seemed they were daring him to quit, and eventually he did.
    Drink had played a part, you had to admit that. And the idea that life should be a more heroic enterprise than it ever seemed to be nowadays.
    He liked to tell people he’d won the hotel in a poker game. He was not really much of a gambler, but women liked the sound of that. He didn’t want to admit that he’d taken it sight unseen in payment of a debt. And even after he saw it, he told himself it could be salvaged. The idea of being his own boss did appeal to him. He did not see it as a place where people would stay – except perhaps hunters, in the fall. He saw it as a drinking establishment and a restaurant. If he could get a good cook. But before anything much could happen money would have to be spent. Work had to be done – more than he could possibly do himself though he was not unhandy. If he could live through the winter doing what he could by himself, proving his good intentions, he thought maybe he could get a loan from the bank. But he needed a smaller loan just to get through the winter, and that was where his father-in-law came into the picture. He would rather have tried somebody else, but