Alice Munros Best

was sold for more than ten times what he had paid for it. A young couple from Ottawa bought it. They have painted the outside a pale gray with oyster trim, and have put in skylights and a handsome front door with carriage lamps on either side. Inside, they’ve changed it around so much that I’ve been told I’d never recognize it.
    I did get in once, before this happened, during the year that the house was empty and for sale. The company I work for was handling it, and I had a key, though the house was being shown by another agent. I let myself in on a Sunday afternoon. I had a man with me, not a client but a friend – Bob Marks, whom I was seeing a lot at the time.
    “This is that hippie place,” Bob Marks said when I stopped the car. “I’ve been by here before.”
    He was a lawyer, a Catholic, separated from his wife. He thought he wanted to settle down and start up a practice here in town. But there already was one Catholic lawyer. Business was slow. A couple of times a week, Bob Marks would be fairly drunk before supper.
    “It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s where I was born. Where I grew up.” We walked through the weeds, and I unlocked the door.
    He said that he had thought, from the way I talked, that it would be farther out.
    “It seemed farther then.”
    All the rooms were bare, and the floors swept clean. The woodwork was freshly painted – I was surprised to see no smudges on the glass. Some new panes, some old wavy ones. Some of the walls had been stripped of their paper and painted. A wall in the kitchen was painted a deep blue, with an enormous dove on it. On a wall in the front room, giant sunflowers appeared, and a butterfly of almost the same size.
    Bob Marks whistled. “Somebody was an artist.”
    “If that’s what you want to call it,” I said, and turned back to the kitchen. The same woodstove was there. “My mother once burned up three thousand dollars,” I said. “She burned three thousand dollars in that stove.”
    He whistled again, differently. “What do you mean? She threw in a check?”
    “No, no. It was in bills. She did it deliberately. She went into town to the bank and she had them give it all to her, in a shoebox. She brought it home and put it in the stove. She put it in just a few bills at a time, so it wouldn’t make too big a blaze. My father stood and watched her.”
    “What are you talking about?” said Bob Marks. “I thought you were so poor.”
    “We were. We were very poor.”
    “So how come she had three thousand dollars? That would be like thirty thousand today. Easily. More than thirty thousand today.”
    “It was her legacy,” I said. “It was what she got from her father. Her father died in Seattle and left her three thousand dollars, and she burned it up because she hated him. She didn’t want his money. She hated him.”
    “That’s a lot of hate,” Bob Marks said.
    “That isn’t the point. Her hating him, or whether he was bad enough for her to have a right to hate him. Not likely he was. That isn’t the point.”
    “Money,” he said. “Money’s always the point.”
    “No. My father letting her do it is the point. To me it is. My father stood and watched and he never protested. If anybody had tried to stop her, he would have protected her. I consider that love.”
    “Some people would consider it lunacy.”
    I remember that that had been Beryl’s opinion, exactly.
    I went into the front room and stared at the butterfly, with its pink-and-orange wings. Then I went into the front bedroom and found two human figures painted on the wall. A man and a woman holding hands and facing straight ahead. They were naked, and larger than life size.
    “It reminds me of that John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture,” I said to Bob Marks, who had come in behind me. “That record cover, wasn’t it?”I didn’t want him to think that anything he had said in the kitchen had upset me.
    Bob Marks said, “Different color hair.”
    That was true. Both figures had yellow hair painted in a solid mass, the way they do it in the comic strips. Horsetails of yellow hair curling over their shoulders and little pigtails of yellow hair decorating their not so private parts. Their skin was a flat beige pink and their eyes a staring blue, the same blue that was on the kitchen wall.
    I noticed that they hadn’t quite finished peeling the wallpaper away before making this painting. In the corner, there was some paper left that matched the paper on the