Open Secrets by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online Page B

was hardly even interesting. Neither the first name nor the last was all that unusual.
    She did not know why she had sat down, or why she had come over here in the first place. She was beginning to feel a faintly sickening, familiar agitation. She could feel that over nothing. But once it got going, telling herself that it was over nothing did no good. The only thing to do was to get up and get away from here before any more people sat down and hemmed her in.
    The green woman intercepted her, asked if she was all right.
    “I have to catch a bus,” said Louisa in a croaky voice. She cleared her throat. “An out-of-town bus,” she said with better control, and marched away, not in the right direction for Simpsons. She thought in fact that she wouldn’t go there, she wouldn’t go to Birks for the wedding present or to a movie either. She would just go and sit in the bus depot until it was time for her to go home.
    Within half a block of the bus depot she remembered that the bus had not taken her there that morning. The depot was beingtorn down and rebuilt—there was a temporary depot several blocks away. She had not paid quite enough attention to which street it was on—York Street, east of the real depot, or King? At any rate, she had to detour, because both of these streets were being torn up, and she had almost decided she was lost when she realized she had been lucky enough to come upon the temporary depot by the back way. It was an old house—one of those tall yellow-gray brick houses dating from the time when this was a residential district. This was probably the last use it would be put to before being torn down. Houses all around it must have been torn down to make the large gravelled lot where the buses pulled in. There were still some trees at the edge of the lot and under them a few rows of chairs that she had not noticed when she got off the bus before noon. Two men were sitting on what used to be the veranda of the house, on old car seats. They wore brown shirts with the bus company’s insignia but they seemed to be halfhearted about their work, not getting up when she asked if the bus to Carstairs was leaving at six o’clock as scheduled and where could she get a soft drink?
    Six o’clock, far as they knew.
    Coffee shop down the street.
    Cooler inside but only Coke and orange left.
    She got herself a Coca-Cola out of the cooler in a dirty little indoor waiting room that smelled of a bad toilet. Moving the depot to this dilapidated house must have thrown everyone into a state of indolence and fecklessness. There was a fan in the room they used as an office, and she saw, as she went by, some papers blow off the desk. “Oh, shit,” said the office girl, and stamped her heel on them.
    The chairs set up in the shade of the dusty city trees were straight-backed old wooden chairs originally painted different colors—they looked as if they had come from various kitchens. Strips of old carpet and rubber bathroom mats were laiddown in front of them, to keep your feet off the gravel. Behind the first row of chairs she thought she saw a sheep lying on the ground, but it turned into a dirty-white dog, which trotted over and looked at her for a moment in a grave semiofficial way—gave a brief sniff at her shoes, and trotted away. She had not noticed if there were any drinking straws and did not feel like going back to look. She drank Coke from the bottle, tilting back her head and closing her eyes.
    When she opened them, a man was sitting one chair away, and was speaking to her.
    “I got here as soon as I could,” he said. “Nancy said you were going to catch a bus. As soon as I finished with the speech, I took off. But the bus depot is all torn up.”
    “Temporarily,” she said.
    “I knew you right away,” he said. “In spite of—well, many years. When I saw you, I was talking to somebody. Then I looked again and you’d disappeared.”
    “I don’t recognize you,” said Louisa.
    “Well, no,” he