The Love of a Good Woman

ACCLAIM FOR Alice Munro’s
    THE LOVE OF

A GOOD WOMAN
    “Masterly … miraculous in their detail and startlingly true to life…. Munro demonstrates an understanding of human nature that goes beyond what the rest of us are ordinarily able to grasp.”
    —
The Wall Street Journal
    “Splendid … spectacular … [Munro is] a writer for the ages.”
    —
Newsday
    “Full-blooded … beguiling … [Munro] seems to write whole novels in a few thousand words and leaves you wondering what conventional novelists do with all those extra pages.”
    —
The Philadelphia Inquirer
    “Alice Munro is one of the best short-story writers working today. Her tales leave one musing over the secret of a magic which is her own.”
    —
The Washington Times
    “Shimmering … emotionally rending … [Munro] attacks big themes—love and death, passion and betrayal, expectation and disappointment—in richly detailed, unassuming prose.”
    —
The San Diego Union-Tribune
    “Munro’s austere and magisterial stories of lust and loss are, if anything, more enigmatic than ever, and yet their opacity occasionally gestures toward something akin to hope.”
    —The New Yorker
    “Astonishing … thrillingly unpredictable Munro is not only one of the world’s greatest writers, she’s also one of its toughest, fearlessly exploring the difficult truths of female experience.”
    —Francine Prose,
Elle
    “A triumph … her books get better and better, spilling with the kind of secrets we instantly recognize, and with generous consolations as well.”
    —
Mirabella
    “Munro’s fiction is intelligence-gathering of a high order that feeds the reader’s need to know but never violates or debases the essential mystery that is at the source of all great art…. She has brought to light some of the most beautifully embellished, long short fictional shapes this century has seen.”
    —
Chicago Tribune
    “[Munro’s] stories are like pulsars, a few dazzling teaspoons of which weigh tons … all the complexity and nuance of a novel, concentrated within several dozen pages.”
    —The Plain Dealer
    “She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries.”
    —Cynthia Ozick

Alice Munro
    THE LOVE OF
A GOOD WOMAN
    Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten collections of stories, as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women.
During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three Governor General’s Literary Awards—Canada’s highest; the Lannan Literary Award; the W. H. Smith Award, given to
Open Secrets
as the best book published in the United Kingdom in 1995; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Love of a Good Woman.
Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

ALSO BY Alice Munro
    Selected Stories
    Open Secrets
    Friend of My Youth
    The Progress of Love
    The Moons of Jupiter
    The Beggar Maid
    Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
    Lives of Girls and Women
    Dance of the Happy Shades



For Ann Close

My valued editor and constant friend

AUTHOR’S NOTE
    For certain expert information essential to these stories, my thanks to Ruth Roy, Mary Carr, and D. C. Coleman. And for his inspired and ingenious research on many occasions, I thank Reg Thompson.
    Stories included in this collection that were previously published in
The New Yorker
appeared there in very different form.

THE LOVE OF
A GOOD WOMAN

    F OR the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley, dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an old dentist’s chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the pretty little porcelain-and-glass insulators that were used on telegraph poles.
    Also there is a red box, which has the letters D. M. W ILLENS , O PTOMETRIST printed on it, and a note beside it, saying, “This box of optometrist’s instruments though not very old has considerable local significance, since it belonged to Mr. D. M. Willens, who drowned in the Peregrine River, 1951. It escaped the catastrophe and was found, presumably by the anonymous donor, who dispatched it to be a feature of our collection.”
    The