Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro Page B

approve or disapprove,” says Neil, in a mincing voice. “Don’t care what you do.”
    That’s the signal, which one or the other had to give. A flash of hate, pure meanness, like the glint of a blade. The signal that the fight can come out into the open. Brenda takes a deep drink, as if she very much deserved it. She feels a desolate satisfaction. She stands up and says, “Time for me to go.”
    “What if I’m not ready to go yet?” Neil says.
    “I said me, not you.”
    “Oh. You got a car outside?”
    “I can walk.”
    “That’s five miles back to where the van is.”
    “People have walked five miles.”
    “In shoes like that?” says Neil. They both look at her yellow shoes, which match the appliquéd-satin birds on her turquoise sweater. Both things bought and worn for him!
    “You didn’t wear those shoes for walking,” he says. “You wore them so every step you took would show off your fat arse.”
    She walks along the lakeshore road, in the gravel, which bruises her feet through the shoes and makes her pay attention to each step, lest she should twist an ankle. The afternoon is now toocold for just a sweater. The wind off the lake blows at her sideways, and every time a vehicle passes, particularly a truck, an eddy of stiff wind whirls around her and grit blows into her face. Some of the trucks slow down, of course, and some cars do, too, and men yell at her out of the windows. One car skids onto the gravel and stops ahead of her. She stands still, she cannot think what else to do, and after a moment he churns back onto the pavement and she starts walking again.
    That’s all right, she’s not in any real danger. She doesn’t even worry about being seen by someone she knows. She feels too free to care. She thinks about the first time Neil came to the Furniture Barn, how he put his arm around Samson’s neck and said, “Not much of a watchdog you got here, Ma’am.” She thought the “Ma’am” was impudent, phony, out of some old Elvis Presley movie. And what he said next was worse. She looked at Samson, and she said, “He’s better at night.” And Neil said, “So am I.” Impudent, swaggering, conceited, she thought. And he’s not young enough to get away with it. Her opinion didn’t even change so much the second time. What happened was that all that became just something to get past. It was something she could let him know he didn’t have to do. It was her job to take his gifts seriously, so that he could be serious, too, and easy and grateful. How was she sure so soon that what she didn’t like about him wasn’t real?
    When she’s in the second mile, or maybe just the second half of the first mile, the Mercury catches up to her. It pulls onto the gravel across the road. She goes over and gets in. She doesn’t see why not. It doesn’t mean that she is going to talk to him, or be with him any longer than the few minutes it will take to drive to the swamp road and the van. His presence doesn’t need to weigh on her any more than the grit blowing beside the road.
    She winds the window all the way down so that there will be a rush of chilly wind across anything he may have to say.
    “I want to beg your pardon for the personal remarks,” he says.
    “Why?” she says. “It’s true. It is fat.”
    “No.”
    “It is,” she says, in a tone of bored finality that is quite sincere. It shuts him up for a few miles, until they’ve turned down the swamp road and are driving in under the trees.
    “If you thought there was a needle there in the drawer, there wasn’t.”
    “It isn’t any of my business what there was,” she says.
    “All that was in there was some Percs and Quaaludes and a little hash.”
    She remembers a fight she had with Cornelius, one that almost broke their engagement. It wasn’t the time he slapped her for smoking marijuana. They made that up quickly. It wasn’t about anything to do with their own lives. They were talking about a man Cornelius worked with at