Alice Munros Best

other walls – a modernistic design of intersecting pink and gray and mauve bubbles. The man from Toronto must have put that on. The paper underneath hadn’t been stripped off when this new paper went on. I could see an edge of it, the cornflowers on a white ground.
    “I guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,” Bob Marks said, in a tone familiar to me. That thickened, sad, uneasy, but determined tone. The not particularly friendly lust of middle-aged respectable men.
    I didn’t say anything. I worked away some of the bubble paper to see more of the cornflowers. Suddenly I hit a loose spot, and ripped away a big swatch of it. But the cornflower paper came too, and a little shower of dried plaster.
    “Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words
hippie
or
commune
and all you guys can think about is screwing! As if there wasn’t anything at all behind it but orgies and fancy combinations and non-stop screwing! I get so sick of that – it’s all so stupid it just makes me sick!”
    IN THE CAR , on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before – the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me. Their heated bodies pressed against me, through cloth; their smells crowded out the smells of the cedar bushwe passed through, and the pockets of bog, where Beryl exclaimed at the water lilies. Beryl smelled of all those things in pots and bottles. My mother smelled of flour and hard soap and the warm crêpe of her good dress and the kerosene she had used to take the spots off.
    “A lovely meal,” my mother said. “Thank you, Beryl. Thank you, Mr. Florence.”
    “I don’t know who is going to be fit to do the milking,” my father said. “Now that we’ve all ate in such style.”
    “Speaking of money,” said Beryl – though nobody actually had been – “do you mind my asking what you did with yours? I put mine in real estate. Real estate in California – you can’t lose. I was thinking you could get an electric stove, so you wouldn’t have to bother with a fire in summer or fool with that coal-oil thing, either one.”
    All the other people in the car laughed, even Mr. Florence.
    “That’s a good idea, Beryl,” said my father. “We could use it to set things on till we get the electricity.”
    “Oh, Lord,” said Beryl. “How stupid can I get?”
    “And we don’t actually have the money, either,” my mother said cheerfully, as if she was continuing the joke.
    But Beryl spoke sharply. “You wrote me you got it. You got the same as me.”
    My father half turned in his seat. “What money are you talking about?” he said. “What’s this money?”
    “From Daddy’s will,” Beryl said. “That you got last year. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. If you had to pay something off, that’s still a good use, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. We’re all family here. Practically.”
    “We didn’t have to use it to pay anything off,” my mother said. “I burned it.”
    Then she told how she went into town in the truck, one day almost a year ago, and got them to give her the money in a box she had brought along for the purpose. She took it home, and put it in the stove and burned it.
    My father turned around and faced the road ahead.
    I could feel Beryl twisting beside me while my mother talked. She was twisting, and moaning a little, as if she had a pain she couldn’t suppress.At the end of the story, she let out a sound of astonishment and suffering, an angry groan.
    “So you burned up money!” she said. “You burned up money in the stove.”
    My mother was still cheerful. “You sound as if I’d burned up one of my children.”
    “You burned their chances. You burned up everything the money could have got for them.”
    “The last thing my children need is money. None of us need his money.”
    “That’s criminal,” Beryl said harshly. She pitched her voice into the front seat: “Why did you let her?”
    “He wasn’t there,” my mother said. “Nobody was there.”
    My father said, “It was her money, Beryl.”
    “Never mind,” Beryl said. “That’s criminal.”
    “Criminal is for when you call in the police,” Mr. Florence said. Like other things he had said that day, this created a little island of surprise and a peculiar gratitude.
    Gratitude not felt