Alice Munros Best

about the other gift she had brought. It hadn’t cost her anything (the horse had cost more than the girl could probably guess), it was only a beautiful small pinkish-white stone she had picked up along the road.
    “This is for Carla,” she had said to her friend Maggie, who was walking beside her. “I know it’s silly. I just want her to have a tiny piece of this land.”
    She had already mentioned Carla to Maggie, and to Soraya, her other friend there, telling them how the girl’s presence had come to mean more and more to her, how an indescribable bond had seemed to grow up between them, and had consoled her in the awful months of last spring.
    “It was just to see somebody – somebody so fresh and full of health coming into the house.”
    Maggie and Soraya had laughed in a kindly but annoying way.
    “There’s always a girl,” Soraya said, with an indolent stretch of her heavy brown arms, and Maggie said, “We all come to it sometime. A crush on a girl.”
    Sylvia was obscurely angered by that dated word –
crush.
    “Maybe it’s because Leon and I never had children,” she said. “It’s stupid. Displaced maternal love.”
    Her friends spoke at the same time, saying in slightly different ways something to the effect that it might be stupid but it was, after all, love.
    BUT THE GIRL was not, today, anything like the Carla Sylvia had been remembering, not at all the calm bright spirit, the carefree and generous young creature who had kept her company in Greece.
    She had been hardly interested in her gift. Almost sullen as she reached out for her mug of coffee.
    “There was one thing I thought you would have liked a lot,” said Sylvia energetically. “The goats. They were quite small even when they were full-grown. Some spotty and some white, and they were leaping around up on the rocks just like – like the spirits of the place.” She laughed in an artificial way, she couldn’t stop herself. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d had wreaths on their horns. How is your little goat? I forget her name.”
    Carla said, “Flora.”
    “Flora.”
    “She’s gone.”
    “Gone? Did you sell her?”
    “She disappeared. We don’t know where.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But isn’t there a chance she’ll turn up again?”
    No answer. Sylvia looked directly at the girl, something that up to now she had not quite been able to do, and saw that her eyes were full of tears, her face blotchy – in fact it looked grubby – and that she seemed bloated with distress.
    She didn’t do anything to avoid Sylvia’s look. She drew her lips tight over her teeth and shut her eyes and rocked back and forth as if in a soundless howl, and then, shockingly, she did howl. She howled and wept and gulped for air and tears ran down her cheeks and snot out of her nostrils and she began to look around wildly for something to wipe with. Sylvia ran and got handfuls of Kleenex.
    “Don’t worry, here you are, here, you’re all right,” she said, thinking that maybe the thing to do would be to take the girl in her arms. Butshe had not the least wish to do that, and it might make things worse. The girl might feel how little Sylvia wanted to do such a thing, how appalled she was in fact by this noisy fit.
    Carla said something, said the same thing again.
    “Awful,” she said. “Awful.”
    “No it’s not. We all have to cry sometimes. It’s all right, don’t worry.”
    “It’s awful.”
    And Sylvia could not help feeling how, with every moment of this show of misery, the girl made herself more ordinary, more like one of those soggy students in her – Sylvia’s – office. Some of them cried about their marks, but that was often tactical, a brief unconvincing bit of whimpering. The more infrequent, real waterworks would turn out to have something to do with a love affair, or their parents, or a pregnancy.
    “It’s not about your goat, is it?”
    “No. No.”
    “You better have a glass of water,” said Sylvia.
    She took time to run it cold, trying to think what else she should do or say, and when she returned with it Carla was already calming down.
    “Now. Now,” Sylvia said as the water was being swallowed. “Isn’t that better?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s not the goat. What is it?”
    Carla said, “I can’t stand it anymore.”
    What could she not stand?
    It turned out to be the husband.
    He was mad at her all the time. He acted as if he hated her. There was nothing she could do right, there