Runaway

classical for Father whose favourite piece is “My Old Kentucky Home.” You can see him getting restless, that kind of music makes him feel that the world is going woozy on him, and for his sake we will start up some conversation. Then he—Father—is the one who will make a point of telling Wilf how we all enjoyed his playing and Wilf says thank-you in a polite absent-minded way. Ollie and I know not to say anything because we know that in this case he does not care about our opinions one way or the other.
    One time I caught Ollie singing along very faintly with Wilf’s playing.
    “Morning is dawning and Peer Gynt is yawning—”
    I whispered, “What?”
    “Nothing,” Ollie said. “That’s what he’s playing.”
    I made him spell it. P-e-e-r G-y-n-t.
    I should learn more about music, it would be something for Wilf and me to have in common.
    The weather has suddenly got hot. The peonies are full out as big as babies’ bottoms and the flowers on the spirea bushes are dropping like snow. Mrs. Box goes around saying that if this lasts everything will be dried up by the time of the wedding.
    While writing this I have had three cups of coffee and have not even fixed my hair. Mrs. Box says, “You’re going to have to change your ways pretty soon.”
    She meant because Elsie Thingamabob has told Wilf she’s going to retire so I can be in charge of the house.
    So now I am changing my ways and Good-bye Diary at least for the present. I used to have a feeling something really unusual would occur in my life, and it would be important to have recorded everything. Was that just a feeling?
    GIRL IN A MIDDY
    “Don’t think you can loll around here,” said Nancy. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
    Ollie said, “You’re full of surprises.”
    This was on a Sunday, and Ollie had rather hoped he could loll around. A thing he didn’t always appreciate, in Nancy, was her energy.
    He supposed she’d be needing it soon, for the household that Wilf—in his stolid, ordinary way—was counting on.
    After church Wilf had gone straight to the Hospital and Ollie had come back to eat dinner with Nancy and her father. They ate a cold meal on Sundays—Mrs. Box went to her own church on that day and spent the afternoon having a long rest in her own little house. Ollie had helped Nancy tidy up the kitchen. There were some thoroughgoing snores from the dining room.
    “Your father,” Ollie said, after glancing in. “He’s asleep in his rocker with the
Saturday Evening Post
on his knee.”
    “He never admits he’s going to sleep Sunday afternoons,” Nancy said, “he always thinks he’s going to read.”
    Nancy was wearing an apron that tied around her waist—not the sort of apron worn for serious kitchen work. She took it off and hung it over the doorknob and fluffed up her hair in front of a small mirror by the kitchen door.
    “I’m a mess,” she said, in a plaintive, not displeased voice.
    “It’s true. I can’t figure out what Wilf sees in you.”
    “Look out or I’ll bat you one.”
    She led him out the door and around the currant bushes and under the maple tree where—she had already told him two or three times—she used to have her swing. Then along the back lane to the end of the block. Nobody was cutting the grass, this being Sunday. In fact there was nobody out in the backyards at all and the houses had a closed-up, proud, and sheltering look, as if inside every one of them there were dignified people like Nancy’s father, temporarily dead to the world as they took their Well Earned Rest.
    This did not mean that the town was entirely quiet. Sunday afternoon was the time that the country people and people from the country villages descended on the beach, which was about a quarter of a mile away at the bottom of a bluff. There was a mixture of shrieks from the water slide and the cries of children ducking and splashing, and car horns and toots of the ice-cream truck and the hollers of young men in a frenzy of showing off and the mothers in a frenzy of anxiety. All of this thrown together in one addled shout.
    At the end of the lane, across a poorer, unpaved street, was an empty building that Nancy said was the old icehouse, and beyond that was a vacant lot and a plank bridge over a dry ditch, and then they were on a road just wide enough for one car—or preferably for one horse and buggy. On either side of this road was a wall of thorny bushes with bright little green leaves and a scattering of