Alice Munros Best

man said something like “Hey.”
    “I was actually looking for another place,” said Eve. “It was a place where I came once when I was a little girl. There was a wall with pictures on it all made with pieces of broken glass. I think a cement wall, whitewashed. When I saw those pillars by the road, I thought this must be it. You must have thought we were following you. It sounds so silly.”
    She heard the car door open. Philip got out, dragging Daisy behind him. Eve thought he had come to be close to her, and she put out her arm to welcome him. But he detached himself from Daisy and circled round Eve and spoke to the man. He had brought himself out of the alarm of a moment before and now he seemed steadier than Eve was.
    “Is your dog friendly?” he said in a challenging way.
    “She won’t hurt you,” the man said. “Long as I’m here, she’s okay. She gets in a tear because she’s not no more than a pup. She’s still not no more than a pup.”
    He was a small man, no taller than Eve. He was wearing jeans and one of those open vests of colorful weave, made in Peru or Guatemala. Gold chains and medallions sparkled on his hairless, tanned, and muscular chest. When he spoke he threw his head back and Eve could see that his face was older than his body. Some front teeth were missing.
    “We won’t bother you anymore,” she said. “Philip, I was just telling this man we drove down this road looking for a place I came when I was a little girl, and there were pictures made of colored glass set in a wall. But I made a mistake, this isn’t the place.”
    “What’s its name?” said Philip.
    “Trixie,” the man said, and on hearing her name the dog jumped up and bumped his arm. He swatted her down. “I don’t know about no pictures. I don’t live here. Harold, he’s the one would know.”
    “It’s all right,” said Eve, and hoisted Daisy up on her hip. “If you could just move the truck ahead, then I could turn around.”
    “I don’t know no pictures. See, if they was in the front part the house I never would’ve saw them because Harold, he’s got the front part of the house shut off.”
    “No, they were outside,” said Eve. “It doesn’t matter. This was years and years ago.”
    “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” the man was saying, warming to the conversation. “You come in and get Harold to tell you about it. You know Harold? He’s who owns it here. Mary, she owns it, but Harold he put her in the Home, so now he does. It wasn’t his fault, she had to go there.” He reached into the truck and took out two cases of beer. “I just had to go to town, Harold sent me into town. You go on. You go in. Harold be glad to see you.”
    “Here Trixie,” said Philip sternly.
    The dog came yelping and bounding around them, Daisy squealed with fright and pleasure and somehow they were all on the route to the house, Eve carrying Daisy, and Philip and Trixie scrambling around her up some earthen bumps that had once been steps. The man came close behind them, smelling of the beer that he must have been drinking in the truck.
    “Open it up, go ahead in,” he said. “Make your way through. You don’t mind it’s got a little untidy here? Mary’s in the Home, nobody to keep it tidied up like it used to be.”
    Massive disorder was what they had to make their way through – the kind that takes years to accumulate. The bottom layer of it made up of chairs and tables and couches and perhaps a stove or two, with old bedclothes and newspapers and window shades and dead potted plants and ends of lumber and empty bottles and broken lighting fixtures and curtain rods piled on top of that, up to the ceiling in some places, blocking nearly all the light from outside. To make up for that, a light was burning by the inside door.
    The man shifted the beer and got that door open, and shouted for Harold. It was hard to tell what sort of room they were in now – there were kitchen cupboards with the doors off the hinges, some cans on the shelves, but there were also a couple of cots with bare mattresses and rumpled blankets. The windows were so successfully covered up with furniture or hanging quilts that you could not tell where they were, and the smell was that of a junk store, a plugged sink, or maybe a plugged toilet, cooking and grease and cigarettes and human sweat and dog mess and unremoved garbage.
    Nobody answered the shouts. Eve turned around – there was room to turn around here, as there hadn’t been in