Free Open Secrets by Alice Munro Page B

starving. This is just a simple little buffet. We sometimes enjoy eating outside on a Sunday evening.”
    “Commence, commence!” cried Muriel, who had helped to carry out the various dishes—the potato salad, carrot salad, jellied salad, cabbage salad, the devilled eggs and cold roastchicken, the salmon loaf and warm biscuits, and relishes. Just when they had everything set out, Dorrie came around the side of the house, looking warm from her walk across the field, or from excitement. She was wearing her good summer dress, a navy-blue organdie with white dots and white collar, suitable for a little girl or an old lady. Threads showed where she had pulled the torn lace off the collar instead of mending it, and in spite of the hot day a rim of undershirt was hanging out of one sleeve. Her shoes had been so recently and sloppily cleaned that they left traces of whitener on the grass.
    “I would have been on time,” Dorrie said, “but I had to shoot a feral cat. She was prowling around my house and carrying on so. I was convinced she was rabid.”
    She had wet her hair and crimped it into place with bobby pins. With that, and her pink shiny face, she looked like a doll with a china head and limbs attached to a cloth body, firmly stuffed with straw.
    “I thought at first she might have been in heat, but she didn’t really behave that way. She didn’t do any of the rubbing along on her stomach such as I’m used to seeing. And I noticed some spitting. So I thought the only thing to do was to shoot her. Then I put her in a sack and called up Fred Nunn to see if he would run her over to Walley, to the vet. I want to know if she really was rabid, and Fred always likes the excuse to get out in his car. I told him to leave the sack on the step if the vet wasn’t home on a Sunday night.”
    “I wonder what he’ll think it is?” said Muriel. “A present?”
    “No. I pinned on a note, in case. There was definite spitting and dribbling.” She touched her own face to show where the dribbling had been. “Are you enjoying your visit here?” she said to the minister, who had been in town for three years and had been the one to bury her brother.
    “It is Mr. Speirs who is the visitor, Dorrie,” said Millicent. Dorrie acknowledged the introduction and seemed unembarrassedby her mistake. She said that the reason she took it for a feral cat was that its coat was all matted and hideous, and she thought that a feral cat would never come near the house unless it was rabid.
    “But I will put an explanation in the paper, just in case. I will be sorry if it is anybody’s pet. I lost my own pet three months ago—my dog Delilah. She was struck down by a car.”
    It was strange to hear that dog called a pet, that big black Delilah who used to lollop along with Dorrie all over the countryside, who tore across the fields in such savage glee to attack cars. Dorrie had not been distraught at the death; indeed she had said she had expected it someday. But now, to hear her say “pet,” Millicent thought, there might have been grief she didn’t show.
    “Come and fill up your plate or we’ll all have to starve,” Muriel said to Mr. Speirs. “You’re the guest, you have to go first. If the egg yolks look dark it’s just what the hens have been eating—they won’t poison you. I grated the carrots for that salad myself, so if you notice some blood it’s just where I got a little too enthusiastic and grated in some skin off my knuckles. I had better shut up now or Millicent will kill me.”
    And Millicent was laughing angrily, saying, “Oh, they are not! Oh, you did
not
!”
    Mr. Speirs had paid close attention to everything Dorrie said. Maybe that was what had made Muriel so saucy. Millicent thought that perhaps he saw Dorrie as a novelty, a Canadian wild woman who went around shooting things. He might be studying her so that he could go home and describe her to his friends in England.
    Dorrie kept quiet while eating and she ate