Alice Munros Best

near Thunder Bay, an apprentice barber, a salesman in an Army Surplus store. And those were only the jobs he told her about.
    She had nicknamed him Gypsy Rover, because of the song, an old song her mother used to sing. Now she took to singing it around the house all the time and her mother knew something was up.
    “Last night she slept in a feather bed
With a silken quilt for cover
Tonight she’ll sleep on the cold hard ground –
Beside her gypsy lo-ov-ver.”
    Her mother said, “He’ll break your heart, that’s a sure thing.” Her stepfather, who was an engineer, did not even grant Clark that much power. “A loser,” he called him. “One of those drifters.” As if Clark was a bug he could just whisk off his clothes.
    So Carla said, “Does a drifter save up enough money to buy a farm? Which, by the way, he has done?” and he only said, “I’m not about to argue with you.” She was not his daughter anyway, he added, as if that was the clincher.
    So, naturally, Carla had to run away with Clark. The way her parents behaved, they were practically guaranteeing it.
    “Will you get in touch with your parents after you’re settled?” Sylvia said. “In Toronto?”
    Carla lifted her eyebrows, pulled in her cheeks and made a saucy O of her mouth. She said, “Nope.”
    Definitely a little drunk.
    BACK HOME , having left the note in the mailbox, Sylvia cleaned up the dishes that were still on the table, washed and polished the omelette pan, threw the blue napkins and tablecloth in the laundry basket, and opened the windows. She did this with a confusing sense of regret and irritation.She had put out a fresh cake of apple-scented soap for the girl’s shower and the smell of it lingered in the house, as it had in the air of the car.
    The rain was holding off. She could not stay still, so she went for a walk along the path that Leon had cleared. The gravel he had dumped in the boggy places had mostly washed away. They used to go walking every spring, to look for wild orchids. She taught him the name of every wildflower – all of which, except for trillium, he forgot. He used to call her his Dorothy Wordsworth.
    Last spring she went out once and picked him a small bunch of dog’s-tooth violets, but he looked at them – as he sometimes looked at her – with mere exhaustion, disavowal.
    She kept seeing Carla, Carla stepping onto the bus. Her thanks had been sincere but already almost casual, her wave jaunty. She had got used to her salvation.
    Back in the house, at around six o’clock, Sylvia put in a call to Toronto, to Ruth, knowing that Carla would not have arrived yet. She got the answering machine.
    “Ruth,” said Sylvia. “Sylvia. It’s about this girl I sent you. I hope she doesn’t turn out to be a bother to you. I hope it’ll be all right. You may find her a little full of herself. Maybe it’s just youth. Let me know. Okay?”
    She phoned again before she went to bed but got the machine, so she said, “Sylvia again. Just checking,” and hung up. It was between nine and ten o’clock, not even really dark. Ruth must still be out and the girl would not want to pick up the phone in a strange house. She tried to think of the name of Ruth’s upstairs tenants. They surely wouldn’t have gone to bed yet. But she could not remember. And just as well. Phoning them would have meant making too much of a fuss, being too anxious, going too far.
    She got into the bed but it was impossible to stay there, so she took a light quilt and went out to the living room and lay down on the sofa, where she had slept for the last three months of Leon’s life. She did not think it likely that she would get to sleep there either – there were no curtains on the bank of windows and she could tell by the look of the sky that the moon had risen, though she could not see it.
    The next thing she knew she was on a bus somewhere – in Greece? – with a lot of people she did not know, and the engine of the bus was making an alarming knocking sound. She woke to find the knocking was at her front door.
    Carla?
    CARLA HAD KEPT her head down until the bus was clear of town. The windows were tinted, nobody could see in, but she had to guard herself against seeing out. Lest Clark appear. Coming out of a store or waiting to cross the street, all ignorant of her abandoning him, thinking this an ordinary afternoon. No, thinking it the afternoon when their scheme – his scheme – was put in motion, eager to know how far she had