Free Selected Stories by Alice Munro Page B

up and into the old lady’s room and said, “This is the new Mrs. MacQuarrie,” and that was that.
    I parked the car and rolled down the window. Then without thinking what I was going to do I leaned on the horn and sounded it as long and hard as I could stand.
    The sound released me, so I could yell. And I did. “Hey, Clare MacQuarrie, I want to talk to you!”
    No answer anywhere. “Clare MacQuarrie!” I shouted up at his dark house. “Clare, come on out!” I sounded the horn again, two, three, I don’t know how many times. In between I yelled. I felt as if I was watching myself, way down here, so little, pounding my fist and yelling and leaning on the horn. Carrying on a commotion, doing whatever came into my head. It was enjoyable, in a way. I almost forgot what I was doing it for. I started honking the horn rhythmically and yelling at the same time. “Clare, aren’t you ever coming out? Clare MacQuarrie for nuts-in-May, if he don’t come we’ll pull-him-away—” I was crying as well as yelling, right out in the street, and it didn’t bother me one bit.
    “Helen, you want to wake everybody up in this whole town?” said Buddy Shields, sticking his head in at the window. He is the night constable and I used to teach him in Sunday school.
    “I’m just conducting a shivaree for the newly married couple,” I said. “What is the matter with that?”
    “I got to tell you to stop that noise.”
    “I don’t feel like stopping.”
    “Oh yes you do, Helen, you’re just a little upset.”
    “I called and called him and he won’t come out,” I said. “All I want is him to come out.”
    “Well you got to be a good girl and stop honking that horn.”
    “I want him to come out.”
    “Stop it. Don’t honk that horn one more time.”
    “Will you make him come out?”
    “Helen, I can’t make a man come out of his own house if he don’t want to come.”
    “I thought you were the Law, Buddy Shields.”
    “I am but there is a limit to what the Law can do. If you want to see him why don’t you come back in the daytime and knock on his door nice the way any lady would do?”
    “He is married in case you didn’t know.”
    “Well, Helen, he is married just as much at night as in the daytime.”
    “Is that supposed to be funny?”
    “No it’s not, it’s supposed to be true. Now why don’t you move over and let me drive you home? Lookit the lights on up and down this street. There’s Grace Beecher watching us and I can see the Holmses got their windows up. You don’t want to give them anything more to talk about, do you?”
    “They got nothing to do but talk anyway, they may as well talk about me.”
    Then Buddy Shields straightened up and moved a little away from the car window and I saw somebody in dark clothes coming across the MacQuarries’ lawn and it was Clare. He was not wearing a dressing gown or anything, he was all dressed, in shirt and jacket and trousers. He came right up to the car while I sat there waiting to hear what I would say to him. He had not changed. He was a fat, comfortable, sleepy-faced man. But just his look, his everyday easygoing look, stopped me wanting to cry or yell. I could cry and yell till I was blue in the face and it would not change that look or make him get out of bed and across his yard one little bit faster.
    “Helen, go on home,” he said, like we had been watching television and so on all evening and now was time to go home and go to bed properly. “Give my love to your momma,” he said. “Go on home.”
    That was all he meant to say. He looked at Buddy and said, “You going to drive her?” and Buddy said yes. I was looking at Clare MacQuarrie and thinking, He is a man that goes his own way. It didn’t bother him too much how I was feeling when he did what he did on top of me, and it didn’t bother him too much what kind of ruckus I made in the street when he got married. And he was a man who didn’t give out explanations, maybe didn’t have any.