Alice Munros Best

all,” said Sylvia, thinking of Carla trying on the tailored pants and linen jacket. How quickly the young recover from a fit of despair and how handsome the girl had looked in the fresh clothes.
    The bus would stop in town at twenty past two. Sylvia decided to make omelettes for lunch, to set the table with the dark-blue cloth, and to get down the crystal glasses and open a bottle of wine.
    “I hope you’re hungry enough to eat something,” she said, when Carla came out clean and shining in her borrowed clothes. Her softly freckled skin was flushed from the shower, and her hair was damp and darkened, out of its braid, the sweet frizz now flat against her head. She said she was hungry, but when she tried to get a forkful of the omelette to her mouth her trembling hands made it impossible.
    “I don’t know why I’m shaking like this,” she said. “I must be excited. I never knew it would be this easy.”
    “It’s very sudden,” said Sylvia. “Probably it doesn’t seem quite real.”
    “It does, though. Everything now seems really real. Like the time before now, that’s when I was in a daze.”
    “Maybe when you make up your mind to something, when you really make up your mind, that’s how it is. Or that’s how it should be.”
    “If you’ve got a friend,” said Carla with a self-conscious smile and a flush spreading over her forehead. “If you’ve got a true friend. I mean like you.” She laid down the knife and fork and raised her wineglass awkwardly with both hands. “Drinking to a true friend,” she said, uncomfortably. “I probably shouldn’t even take a sip, but I will.”
    “Me too,” said Sylvia with a pretense of gaiety. She drank, but spoiled the moment by saying, “Are you going to phone him? Or what? He’ll have to know. At least he’ll have to know where you are by the time he’d be expecting you home.”
    “Not the phone,” said Carla, alarmed. “I can’t do it. Maybe if you –”
    “No,” said Sylvia. “No.”
    “No, that’s stupid. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just hard to think straight. What I maybe should do, I should put a note in the mailbox. But I don’t want him to get it too soon. I don’t want us to even drive past there when we’re going into town. I want to go the back way. Soif I write it – if I write it, could you, could you maybe slip it in the box when you come back?”
    Sylvia agreed to this, seeing no good alternative.
    She brought pen and paper. She poured a little more wine. Carla sat thinking, then wrote a few words.
    I HAVE GONE AWAY. I will be all write.
    These were the words that Sylvia read when she unfolded the paper, on her way back from the bus depot. She was sure Carla knew
right
from
write.
It was just that she had been talking about
writing
a note, and she was in a state of exalted confusion. More confusion perhaps than Sylvia had realized. The wine had brought out a stream of talk, but it had not seemed to be accompanied by any particular grief or upset. She had talked about the horse barn where she had worked and met Clark when she was eighteen and just out of high school. Her parents wanted her to go to college, and she had agreed as long as she could choose to be a veterinarian. All she really wanted, and had wanted all her life, was to work with animals and live in the country. She had been one of those dorky girls in high school, one of those girls they made rotten jokes about, but she didn’t care.
    Clark was the best riding teacher they had. Scads of women were after him, they would take up riding just to get him as their teacher. Carla teased him about his women and at first he seemed to like it, then he got annoyed. She apologized and tried to make up for it by getting him talking about his dream – his plan, really – to have a riding school, a horse stable, someplace out in the country. One day she came into the stable and saw him hanging up his saddle and realized she had fallen in love with him.
    Now she considered it was sex. It was probably just sex.
    WHEN FALL CAME and she was supposed to quit working and leave for college in Guelph, she refused to go, she said she needed a year off.
    Clark was very smart but he hadn’t waited even to finish high school. He had altogether lost touch with his family. He thought families werelike a poison in your blood. He had been an attendant in a mental hospital, a disc jockey on a radio station in Lethbridge, Alberta, a member of a road crew on the highways