Alice Munros Best

hadn’t known about it. This too was Bell’s Lake. I was glad to have seen it at last, but in some way not altogether glad of the surprise.
    Finally, a white frame building appeared, with verandas and potted flowers, and some twinkling poplar trees in front. The Wildwood Inn. Today the same building is covered with stucco and done up with Tudor beams and called the Hideaway. The poplar trees have been cut down for a parking lot.
    On the way back to the church to pick up my parents, Mr. Florence turned in to the farm next to ours, which belonged to the McAllisters. The McAllisters were Catholics. Our two families were neighborly but not close.
    “Come on, boys, out you get,” said Beryl to my brothers. “Not you,” she said to me. “You stay put.” She herded the little boys up to the porch, where some McAllisters were watching. They were in their raggedy home clothes, because their church, or Mass, or whatever it was, got out early. Mrs. McAllister came out and stood listening, rather dumbfounded, to Beryl’s laughing talk.
    Beryl came back to the car by herself. “There,” she said. “They’re going to play with the neighbor children.”
    Play with McAllisters? Besides being Catholics, all but the baby were girls.
    “They’ve still got their good clothes on,” I said.
    “So what? Can’t they have a good time with their good clothes on? I do!”
    My parents were taken by surprise as well. Beryl got out and told my father he was to ride in the front seat, for the legroom. She got into the back, with my mother and me. Mr. Florence turned again onto the Bell’sLake road, and Beryl announced that we were all going to the Wildwood Inn for dinner.
    “You’re all dressed up, why not take advantage?” she said. “We dropped the boys off with your neighbors. I thought they might be too young to appreciate it. The neighbors were happy to have them.” She said with a further emphasis that it was to be their treat. Hers and Mr. Florence’s.
    “Well, now,” said my father. He probably didn’t have five dollars in his pocket. “Well, now. I wonder do they let the farmers in?”
    He made various jokes along this line. In the hotel dining room, which was all in white – white tablecloths, white painted chairs – with sweating glass water pitchers and high, whirring fans, he picked up a table napkin the size of a diaper and spoke to me in a loud whisper, “Can you tell me what to do with this thing? Can I put it on my head to keep the draft off?”
    Of course he had eaten in hotel dining rooms before. He knew about table napkins and pie forks. And my mother knew – she wasn’t even a country woman, to begin with. Nevertheless this was a huge event. Not exactly a pleasure – as Beryl must have meant it to be – but a huge, unsettling event. Eating a meal in public, only a few miles from home, eating in a big room full of people you didn’t know, the food served by a stranger, a snippy-looking girl who was probably a college student working at a summer job.
    “I’d like the rooster,” my father said. “How long has he been in the pot?” It was only good manners, as he knew it, to joke with people who waited on him.
    “Beg your pardon?” the girl said.
    “Roast chicken,” said Beryl. “Is that okay for everybody?”
    Mr. Florence was looking gloomy. Perhaps he didn’t care for jokes when it was his money that was being spent. Perhaps he had counted on something better than ice water to fill up the glasses.
    The waitress put down a dish of celery and olives, and my mother said, “Just a minute while I give thanks.” She bowed her head and said quietly but audibly, “Lord, bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service, for Christ’s sake. Amen.” Refreshed, she sat up straight and passed the dish to me, saying, “Mind the olives. There’s stones in them.”
    Beryl was smiling around at the room.
    The waitress came back with a basket of rolls.
    “Parker House!” Beryl leaned over and breathed in their smell. “Eat them while they’re hot enough to melt the butter!”
    Mr. Florence twitched, and peered into the butter dish. “Is that what this is – butter? I thought it was Shirley Temple’s curls.”
    His face was hardly less gloomy than before, but it was a joke, and his making it seemed to convey to us something of the very thing that had just been publicly asked for – a blessing.
    “When he says something funny,” said Beryl – who often referred to Mr. Florence as