Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Munro Alice

Author:Munro, Alice [Munro, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

“I didn’t write these letters.”

“Aren’t you her?”

“No. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know.”

“Why did you take them?”

“I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what you were talking about. I’ve had a grief lately and sometimes I’m not—paying attention.”

“You must have thought I was crazy.”

“No. I didn’t know what to think.”

“You see what happened is—my husband died. He died in March. Well, I told you. And these letters keep coming. There’s no return address. There’s no surname. The postmark is Vancouver but what help is that? I’ve been expecting her to turn up. She is getting to sound so desperate.”

“Yes.”

“Did you read them all?”

“Yes.”

“Did it take you that long to figure out there’d been a mistake?”

“No. I was curious.”

“You look familiar to me. So many people do, because of the store. I see so many people.”

I tell her my name, my real name, why not? It means nothing to her.

“I see so many people.” She holds the bag of letters over the wastebasket, lets it drop. “I can’t keep them around any more.”

“No.”

“I will just have to let her suffer.”

“Eventually she will figure it out.”

“What if she doesn’t? It’s not my concern.”

“No.”

I no longer want to talk to her, I no longer want to hear her stories. The air around her seems harsh, as if she gave off a shriveling light.

She looks at me. “I don’t know why I got the idea it might be you. You don’t look much younger than I am. I always understood they were younger.”

Then she says, “You know more about my life than the girls who work for me or my friends or anybody, except I suppose her. I’m sorry. I really would like not to see you any more.”

“I don’t live here. I’m going away. In fact I might go away tomorrow.”

“It’s just life, you know. It’s just the usual thing. It isn’t that we didn’t have a good life together. We didn’t have children, but we did what we wanted. He was a very kind man, easy to be with. And successful. I always felt he could have been more successful, if he had pushed himself. But even so. If I told you his name you might recognize it.”

“You don’t need to.”

“No. Oh, no. I wouldn’t.”

She makes a little bitter face, a swallowing face, ending with a humorous line of the mouth, that would dispose of you. I turn away almost in time not to see it.

I go out onto the street and it is still light in the long evening. I walk and walk. In this city of my imagination I walk past stone walls up and down steep hills, and see in my mind that girl Patricia. Girl, woman, the sort of woman who would call her daughter Samantha—very slim, dark, fashionably dressed, slightly nervous, slightly artificial. Her long black hair. Her long black hair uncombed and her face blotched. She sits in the dark. She walks around the rooms. She tries smiling at herself in the glass. She tries putting on make-up.

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