Read Online The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro - Free Book Online

those students’ heads, in her own head then and Rupert’s, made Enid feel a tenderness and wonder. It wasn’t that they had meant to be something that they hadn’t become. Nothing like that. Rupert couldn’t have imagined anything but farming this farm. It was a good farm, and he was an only son. And she herself had ended up doing exactly what she must have wanted to do. You couldn’t say that they had chosen the wrong lives or chosen against their will or not understood their choices. Just that they had not understood how time would pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used to be.
    “‘Bread of the Amazon,’” she said. “‘Bread of the Amazon’?”
    Rupert said, “Manioc?”
    Enid counted. “Seven letters,” she said. “Seven.”
    He said, “Cassava?”
    “Cassava? That’s a double
s?
Cassava.”
    •    •    •
    M RS . Q UINN became more capricious daily about her food. Sometimes she said she wanted toast, or bananas with milk on them. One day she said peanut-butter cookies. Enid prepared all these things—the children could eat them anyway—and when they were ready Mrs. Quinn could not stand the look or the smell of them. Even Jell-O had a smell she could not stand.
    Some days she hated all noise; she would not even have the fan going. Other days she wanted the radio on, she wanted the station that played requests for birthdays and anniversaries and called people up to ask them questions. If you got the answer right you won a trip to Niagara Falls, a tankful of gas, or a load of groceries or tickets to a movie.
    “It’s all fixed,” Mrs. Quinn said. “They just pretend to call somebody up—they’re in the next room and already got the answer told to them. I used to know somebody that worked for a radio, that’s the truth.”
    On these days her pulse was rapid. She talked very fast in a light, breathless voice. “What kind of car is that your mother’s got?” she said.
    “It’s a maroon-colored car,” said Enid.
    “What
make?”
said Mrs. Quinn.
    Enid said she did not know, which was the truth. She had known, but she had forgotten.
    “Was it new when she got it?”
    “Yes,” said Enid. “Yes. But that was three or four years ago.”
    “She lives in that big rock house next door to Willenses?”
    Yes, said Enid.
    “How many rooms it got? Sixteen?”
    “Too many.”
    “Did you go to Mr. Willens’s funeral when he got drownded?”
    Enid said no. “I’m not much for funerals.”
    “I was supposed to go. I wasn’t awfully sick then, I was going with Herveys up the highway, they said I could get a ride with them and then her mother and her sister wanted to go and there wasn’t enough room in back. Then Clive and Olive went in the truck and I could’ve scrunched up in their front seat but they never thought to ask me. Do you think he drownded himself?”
    Enid thought of Mr. Willens handing her a rose. His jokey gallantry that made the nerves of her teeth ache, as from too much sugar.
    “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.”
    “Did him and Mrs. Willens get along all right?”
    “As far as I know, they got along beautifully.”
    “Oh, is that so?” said Mrs. Quinn, trying to imitate Enid’s reserved tone. “Bee-you-tif-ley.”
    E NID slept on the couch in Mrs. Quinn’s room. Mrs. Quinn’s devastating itch had almost disappeared, as had her need to urinate. She slept through most of the night, though she would have spells of harsh and angry breathing. What woke Enid up and kept her awake was a trouble of her own. She had begun to have ugly dreams. These were unlike any dreams she had ever had before. She used to think that a bad dream was one of finding herself in an unfamiliar house where the rooms kept changing and there was always more work to do than she could handle, work undone that she thought she had done, innumerable distractions. And then, of course, she had what she thought of as romantic dreams, in which some man