Alice Munros Best

there’s party and there’s party, you know what I mean?”
    She turned in the seat and looked at Eve so steadily that Eve had to take her eyes from the road for a moment and look back. And what she saw was that this girl was much more drunk than she sounded. Her dark-brown eyes were glazed but held wide open, rounded with effort, and they had the imploring yet distant expression that drunks’ eyes get, a kind of last-ditch insistence on fooling you. Her skin was blotched in some places and ashy in others, her whole face crumpled with the effects of a mighty bingeing. She was a natural brunette – the gold spikes were intentionally and provocatively dark at the roots – and pretty enough, if you disregarded her present dinginess, to make you wonder how she had ever got mixed up with Harold and Harold’s crew. Her way of living and the style of the times must have taken fifteen or twenty natural pounds off her – but she wasn’t tall and she really wasn’t boyish. Her true inclination was to be a cuddly chunky girl, a darling dumpling.
    “Herb was crazy bringing you in there like that,” she said. “He’s got a screw loose, Herb.”
    Eve said, “I gathered that.”
    “I don’t know what he does around there, I guess he works for Harold. I don’t think Harold uses him too good, neither.”
    Eve had never believed herself to be attracted to women in a sexual way. And this girl in her soiled and crumpled state seemed unlikely to appeal to anybody. But perhaps the girl did not believe this possible – she must be so used to appealing to people. At any rate she slid her hand alongEve’s bare thigh, just getting a little way beyond the hem of her shorts. It was a practiced move, drunk as she was. To spread the fingers, to grasp flesh on the first try, would have been too much. A practiced, automatically hopeful move, yet so lacking in any true, strong, squirmy, comradely lust that Eve felt that the hand might easily have fallen short and caressed the car upholstery.
    “I’m okay,” the girl said, and her voice, like the hand, struggled to put herself and Eve on a new level of intimacy. “You know what I mean? You understand me. Okay?”
    “Of course,” said Eve briskly, and the hand trailed away, its tired whore’s courtesy done with. But it had not failed – not altogether. Blatant and halfhearted as it was, it had been enough to set some old wires twitching.
    And the fact that it could be effective in any way at all filled Eve with misgiving, flung a shadow backwards from this moment over all the rowdy and impulsive as well as all the hopeful and serious, the more or less unrepented-of, couplings of her life. Not a real flare-up of shame, a sense of sin – just a dirty shadow. What a joke on her, if she started to hanker now after a purer past and a cleaner slate.
    But it could be just that still, and always, she hankered after love.
    She said, “Where is it you want to go?”
    The girl jerked backwards, faced the road. She said, “Where you going? You live around here?” The blurred tone of seductiveness had changed, as no doubt it would change after sex, into a mean-sounding swagger.
    “There’s a bus goes through the village,” Eve said. “It stops at the gas station. I’ve seen the sign.”
    “Yeah but just one thing,” the girl said. “I got no money. See, I got away from there in such a hurry I never got to collect my money. So what use would it be me getting on a bus without no money?”
    The thing to do was not to recognize a threat. Tell her that she could hitchhike, if she had no money. It wasn’t likely that she had a gun in her jeans. She just wanted to sound as if she might have one.
    But a knife?
    The girl turned for the first time to look into the backseat.
    “You kids okay back there?” she said.
    No answer.
    “They’re cute,” she said. “They shy with strangers?”
    How stupid of Eve to think about sex, when the reality, the danger, were elsewhere.
    Eve’s purse was on the floor of the car in front of the girl’s feet. She didn’t know how much money was in it. Sixty, seventy dollars. Hardly more. If she offered money for a ticket the girl would name an expensive destination. Montreal. Or at least Toronto. If she said, “Just take what’s there,” the girl would see capitulation. She would sense Eve’s fear and might try to push further. What was the best she could do? Steal the car? If she left Eve and the children beside the road, the police would be