She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to him like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water. “I’m happy to see you,” she said, and pulled his earlobes. “You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.” He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance.
—
Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” (via meaghano)
“Then she started to go on about her dad and something about losing her keys again. He realized then what he knew all along.
He should’ve driven away from this horrible trollop, never to return.”
