Read Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories for Free Online Page A

and tacks. While Rose sits on the table waiting, she looks at the floor, at this satisfying arrangement of rectangles, triangles, some other shape whose name she is trying to remember. She hears Flo coming back through the woodshed, on thecreaky plank walk laid over the dirt floor. She is loitering, waiting too. She and Rose can carry this no further by themselves.
    Rose hears her father come in. She stiffens, a tremor runs through her legs, she feels them shiver on the oilcloth. Called away from some peaceful, absorbing task, away from the words running in his head, called out of himself, her father has to say something. He says, “Well? What’s wrong?”
    Now comes another voice of Flo’s. Enriched, hurt, apologetic, it seems to have been manufactured on the spot. She is sorry to have called him from his work. Would never have done it if Rose was not driving her to distraction. How to distraction? With her back talk and impudence and her terrible tongue. The things Rose has said to Flo are such that if Flo had said them to her mother, she knows her father would have thrashed her into the ground.
    Rose tries to butt in, to say this isn’t true.
    What isn’t true?
    Her father raises a hand, doesn’t look at her, says, “Be quiet.”
    When she says it isn’t true, Rose means that she herself didn’t start this, only responded, that she was goaded by Flo, who is now, she believes, telling the grossest sort of lies, twisting everything to suit herself. Rose puts aside her other knowledge that whatever Flo has said or done, whatever she herself has said or done, does not really matter at all. It is the struggle itself that counts, and that can’t be stopped, can never be stopped, short of where it has got to now.
    Flo’s knees are dirty, in spite of the pad. The scrub rag is still hanging over Rose’s foot.
    Her father wipes his hands, listening to Flo. He takes his time. He is slow at getting into the spirit of things, tired in advance, maybe, on the verge of rejecting the role he has to play. He won’t look at Rose, but at any sound or stirring from Rose, he holds up his hand.
    “Well, we don’t need the public in on this, that’s for sure,” Flo says, and she goes to lock the door of the store, putting in the store window the sign that says BACK SOON , a sign Rose made for her with a great deal of fancy curving and shading of letters in black and red crayon. When she comes back she shuts the door to the store, then the door to the stairs, then the door to the woodshed.
    Her shoes have left marks on the clean wet part of the floor.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” she says now, in a voice worn down from its emotional peak. “I don’t know what to do about her.” She looks down and sees her dirty knees (following Rose’s eyes) and rubs at them viciously with her bare hands, smearing the dirt around.
    “She humiliates me,” she says, straightening up. There it is, the explanation. “She humiliates me,” she repeats with satisfaction. “She has no respect.”
    “I do not!”
    “Quiet, you!” says her father.
    “If I hadn’t called your father you’d still be sitting there with that grin on your face! What other way is there to manage you?”
    Rose detects in her father some objections to Flo’s rhetoric, some embarrassment and reluctance. She is wrong, and ought to know she is wrong, in thinking that she can count on this. The fact that she knows about it, and he knows she knows, will not make things any better. He is beginning to warm up. He gives her a look. This look is at first cold and challenging. It informs her of his judgment, of the hopelessness of her position. Then it clears, it begins to fill up with something else, the way a spring fills up when you clear the leaves away. It fills with hatred and pleasure. Rose sees that and knows it. Is that just a description of anger, should she see his eyes filling up with anger? No. Hatred is right. Pleasure is right. His face loosens and changes and