Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online

did it in the back shed after she closed the store up at night. She had the key to the shed.
    She also had the day-to-day control of the money. She emptied the till at night, she kept the books. Her parents trusted her to do this. Why not? She was good at arithmetic, and she was devoted to the business. She understood the whole operation better than they did. It seemed that they were very uncertain and superstitious about money, and they did not want to put it in the bank. They kept it in a safe or maybe just a strongbox somewhere, and got it as they needed it. They must have felt they couldn’t trust anybody, banks or anybody, outside of the family. What a godsend Maria must have seemed to them—steady and smart, not pretty enough to be tempted to put her hopes or energies into anything but the business. A pillar, Maria.
    She was a head taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier than those boys she paid.
    There are always a few bad moments after Brenda turns off the highway—where she has some excuse to be driving, should anyone see her—and onto the side road. The van is noticeable,unmistakable. But once she has taken the plunge, driving where she shouldn’t be, she feels stronger. When she turns onto the dead-end swamp road, there’s no excuse possible. Spotted here, she’s finished. She has about half a mile to drive out in the open before she gets to the trees. She’d hoped that they would plant corn, which would grow tall and shelter her, but they hadn’t, they’d planted beans. At least the roadsides here hadn’t been sprayed; the grass and weeds and berry bushes had grown tall, though not tall enough to hide a van. There was goldenrod and milkweed, with the pods burst open, and dangling bunches of bright, poisonous fruit, and wild grapevine flung over everything, even creeping onto the road. And finally she was in, she was into the tunnel of trees. Cedar, hemlock, farther back in the wetter ground the wispy-looking tamarack, lots of soft maples with leaves spotty yellow and brown. No standing water, no black pools, even far back in the trees. They’d had luck, with the dry summer and fall. She and Neil had had luck, not the farmers. If it had been a wet year, they could never have used this place. The hard ruts she eases the van through would have been slick mud and the turnaround spot at the end a soggy sinkhole.
    That’s about a mile and a half in. There are some tricky spots to drive—a couple of bumpy little hills rising out of the swamp, and a narrow log bridge over a creek where she can’t see any water, just choking, yellowy cress and nettles, sucking at dry mud.
    Neil drives an old blue Mercury—dark blue that can turn into a pool, a spot of swampy darkness under the trees. She strains to see it. She doesn’t mind getting there a few minutes ahead of him, to compose herself, brush out her hair and check her face and spray her throat with purse cologne (sometimes between her legs as well). More than a few minutes makes her nervous. She isn’t afraid of wild dogs or rapists or eyes watching her out of thickets—she used to pick berries in here when she was a child; that’s how she knew about the place. She is afraid of what may not be there, not what is. The absence of Neil, thepossibility of his defection, his sudden denial of her. That can turn any place, any thing, ugly and menacing and stupid. Trees or gardens or parking meters or coffee tables—it wouldn’t matter. Once, he didn’t come; he was sick: food poisoning or the most incredible hangover of his life—something terrible, he told her on the phone that night—and she had to pretend it was somebody calling to sell them a sofa. She never forgot the wait, the draining of hope, the heat and the bugs—it was in July—and her body oozing sweat, here on the seat of the van, like some sickly admission of defeat.
    He is there, he’s there first; she can see one eye of the Mercury in the deep cedar shade. It’s like hitting water when