Runaway

something, when you really make up your mind, that’s how it is. Or that’s how it should be.”
    “If you’ve got a friend,” said Carla with a self-conscious smile and a flush spreading over her forehead. “If you’ve got a true friend. I mean like you.” She laid down the knife and fork and raised her wineglass awkwardly with both hands. “Drinking to a true friend,” she said, uncomfortably. “I probably shouldn’t even take a sip, but I will.”
    “Me too,” said Sylvia with a pretense of gaiety. She drank, but spoiled the moment by saying, “Are you going to phone him? Or what? He’ll have to know. At least he’ll have to know where you are by the time he’d be expecting you home.”
    “Not the phone,” said Carla, alarmed. “I can’t do it. Maybe if you—”
    “No,” said Sylvia. “No.”
    “No, that’s stupid. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just hard to think straight. What I maybe should do, I should put a note in the mailbox. But I don’t want him to get it too soon. I don’t want us to even drive past there when we’re going into town. I want to go the back way. So if I write it—if I write it, could you, could you maybe slip it in the box when you come back?”
    Sylvia agreed to this, seeing no good alternative.
    She brought pen and paper. She poured a little more wine. Carla sat thinking, then wrote a few words.
    I have gone away. I will be all write.
    These were the words that Sylvia read when she unfolded the paper, on her way back from the bus depot. She was sure Carla knew
right
from
write.
It was just that she had been talking about
writing
a note, and she was in a state of exalted confusion. More confusion perhaps than Sylvia had realized. The wine had brought out a stream of talk, but it had not seemed to be accompanied by any particular grief or upset. She had talked about the horse barn where she had worked and met Clark when she was eighteen and just out of high school. Her parents wanted her to go to college, and she had agreed as long as she could choose to be a veterinarian. All she really wanted, and had wanted all her life, was to work with animals and live in the country. She had been one of those dorky girls in high school, one of those girls they made rotten jokes about, but she didn’t care.
    Clark was the best riding teacher they had. Scads of women were after him, they would take up riding just to get him as their teacher. Carla teased him about his women and at first he seemed to like it, then he got annoyed. She apologized and tried to make up for it by getting him talking about his dream—his plan, really—to have a riding school, a horse stable, someplace out in the country. One day she came into the stable and saw him hanging up his saddle and realized she had fallen in love with him.
    Now she considered it was sex. It was probably just sex.
    When fall came and she was supposed to quit working and leave for college in Guelph, she refused to go, she said she needed a year off.
    Clark was very smart but he hadn’t waited even to finish high school. He had altogether lost touch with his family. He thought families were like a poison in your blood. He had been an attendant in a mental hospital, a disc jockey on a radio station in Lethbridge, Alberta, a member of a road crew on the highways near Thunder Bay, an apprentice barber, a salesman in an Army Surplus store. And those were only the jobs he told her about.
    She had nicknamed him Gypsy Rover, because of the song, an old song her mother used to sing. Now she took to singing it around the house all the time and her mother knew something was up.
    “ Last night she slept in a feather bed

With a silken quilt for cover

Tonight she’ll sleep on the cold hard ground—

Beside her gypsy lo-ov-ver.”

    Her mother said, “He’ll break your heart, that’s a sure thing.” Her stepfather, who was an engineer, did not even grant Clark that much power. “A loser,” he called him. “One of those drifters.” As if Clark was a bug he could just whisk off his clothes.
    So Carla said, “Does a drifter save up enough money to buy a farm? Which, by the way, he has done?” and he only said, “I’m not about to argue with you.” She was not his daughter anyway, he added, as if that was the clincher.
    So, naturally, Carla had to run away with Clark. The way her parents behaved, they were practically guaranteeing it.
    “Will you get in touch with your parents after you’re settled?” Sylvia