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

herself in trouble.”
    â€œI believe her,” Mrs. Peebles said. “This is an awful scene.”
    â€œWell there is one way to find out,” said Alice Kelling, getting up. “After all, I am a nurse.”
    Mrs. Peebles drew a breath and said, “No. No. Go to your room, Edie. And stop that noise. That is too disgusting.”
    I heard the car start in a little while. I tried to stop crying, pulling back each wave as it started over me. Finally I succeeded, and lay heaving on the bed.
    Mrs. Peebles came and stood in the doorway.
    â€œShe’s gone,” she said. “That Bird woman too. Of course, you know you should never have gone near that man and that is the cause of all this trouble. I have a headache. As soon as you can, go and wash your face in cold water and get at the dishes and we will not say any more about this.”

    Nor we didn’t. I didn’t figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from. Mrs. Peebles was not very friendly to me afterwards, but she was fair. Not very friendly is the wrong way of describing what she was. She never had been very friendly. It was just that now she had to see me all the time and it got on her nerves, a little.
    As for me, I put it all out of my mind like a bad dream and concentrated on waiting for my letter. The mail came every day except Sunday, between one-thirty and two in the afternoon, a good time for me because Mrs. Peebles was always having her nap. I would get the kitchen all cleaned and then go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. I was perfectly happy, waiting, I forgot all about Alice Kelling and her misery and awful talk and Mrs. Peebles and her chilliness and the embarrassment of whether she had told Dr. Peebles and the face of Loretta Bird, getting her fill of other people’s troubles. I was always smiling when the mailman got there, and continued smiling even after he gave me the mail and I saw today wasn’t the day. The mailman was a Carmichael. I knew by his face because there are a lot of Carmichaels living out by us and so many of them have a sort of sticking-out top lip. So I asked his name (he was a young man, shy, but good humored, anybody couldask him anything) and then I said, “I knew by your face!” He was pleased by that and always glad to see me and got a little less shy. “You’ve got the smile I’ve been waiting on all day!” he used to holler out the car window.
    It never crossed my mind for a long time a letter might not come. I believed in it coming just like I believed the sun would rise in the morning. I just put off my hope from day to day, and there was the goldenrod out around the mailbox and the children gone back to school, and the leaves turning, and I was wearing a sweater when I went to wait. One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full-blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me:
No letter was ever going to come
. It was an impossible idea to get used to. No, not impossible. If I thought about Chris’s face when he said he was going to write to me, it was impossible, but if I forgot that and thought about the actual tin mailbox, empty, it was plain and true. I kept on going to meet the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead. I only smiled because I thought of the mailman counting on it, and he didn’t have an easy life, with the winter driving ahead.
    Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. Even though there