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

take off my apron and comb my hair. I would like to have put some make-up on, but I was too afraid it would remind him of the way he first saw me, and that would humiliate me all over again.
    He had come and put another sign on the gate: NO RIDES THIS P.M. APOLOGIES . I worried that he wasn’t feeling well. No sign of him outside and the tent flap was down. I knocked on the pole.
    “Come in,” he said, in a voice that would just as soon have said Stay out .
    I lifted the flap.
    “Oh, it’s you. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”
    He had been just sitting on the side of the bed, smoking. Why not at least sit and smoke in the fresh air?
    “I brought a cake and hope you’re not sick,” I said.
    “Why would I be sick? Oh—that sign. That’s all right. I’m just tired of talking to people. I don’t mean you. Have a seat.” He pinned back the tent flap. “Get some fresh air in here.”
    I sat on the edge of the bed, there was no place else. It was one of those fold-up cots, really: I remembered and gave him his fiancée’s message.
    He ate some of the cake. “Good.”
    “Put the rest away for when you’re hungry later.”
    “I’ll tell you a secret. I won’t be around here much longer.”
    “Are you getting married?”
    “Ha ha. What time did you say they’d be back?”
    “Five o’clock.”
    “Well, by that time this place will have seen the last of me. A plane can get further than a car.” He unwrapped the cake and ate another piece of it, absent-mindedly.
    “Now you’ll be thirsty.”
    “There’s some water in the pail.”
    “It won’t be very cold. I could bring some fresh. I could bring some ice from the refrigerator.”
    “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to go. I want a nice long time of saying good-bye to you.”
    He put the cake away carefully and sat beside me and started those little kisses, so soft, I can’t ever let myself think about them, such kindness in his face and lovely kisses, all over my eyelids and neck and ears, all over, then me kissing back as well as I could (I had only kissed a boy on a dare before, and kissed my own arms for practice) and we lay back on the cot and pressed together, just gently, and he did some other things, not bad things or not in a bad way. It was lovely in the tent, that smell of grass and hot tent cloth with the sun beating down on it, and he said, “I wouldn’t do you any harm for the world.” Once, when he had rolled on top of me and we were sort of rocking together on the cot, he said softly, “Oh, no,” and freed himself and jumped up and got the water pail. He splashed some of it on his neck and face, and the little bit left, on me lying there.
    “That’s to cool us off, Miss.”
    When we said good-bye I wasn’t at all sad, because he held my face and said “I’m going to write you a letter. I’ll tell you where I am and maybe you can come and see me. Would you like that? Okay then. You wait.” I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn’t get the pleasure of till I considered them alone.

    No consternation at first about the plane being gone. They thought he had taken somebody up, and I didn’t enlighten them. Dr. Peebles had phoned he had to go to the country, so there was just us having supper, and then Loretta Bird thrusting her head in the door and saying, “I see he’s took off.”
    “What?” said Alice Kelling, and pushed back her chair.
    “The kids come and told me this afternoon he was taking down his tent. Did he think he’d run through all the business there was around here? He didn’t take off without letting you know, did he?”
    “He’ll send me word,” Alice Kelling said. “He’ll probably phone tonight. He’s terribly restless, since the War.”
    “Edie, he didn’t mention to you, did he?” Mrs. Peebles said. “When you took over the message?”
    “Yes,” I said. So far so true.
    “Well why didn’t you say?” All of them