Runaway

have to, with Tessa.”
    As she stood up she said, “Now. You may want me to look in, after a while, and say there is something I’d like to speak to you about. Then you can make your getaway. Tessa is quite smart and she knows the way the wind is blowing and she could be upset to see you leave without her. So I’ll give you an opportunity just to slip away.”
    Tessa wasn’t entirely gray. Her curls were held back in a tight net, showing her forehead unwrinkled, shining, even broader and higher and whiter than it used to be. Her figure had broadened, too. She had big breasts that looked as stiff as boulders, sheathed in her white baker’s garb, and in spite of this burden, in spite of her position at the moment—bent over a table, rolling out a great flap of dough—her shoulders were square and stately.
    She was alone in the bakery, except for a tall, thin, finefeatured girl—no, a woman—whose pretty face was constantly twitching into bizarre grimaces.
    “Oh, Nancy. It’s you,” said Tessa. She spoke quite naturally, though with the gallant catch of breath, the involuntary intimacy, of those who carry a noble load of flesh on their bones. “Stop that, Elinor. Don’t be silly. You go get my friend a chair.”
    Seeing that Nancy meant to embrace her, as people did now, she was flustered. “Oh, I’m all over flour. And for another thing, Elinor might bite you. Elinor doesn’t like when people get too friendly with me.”
    Elinor had returned in a hurry with a chair. Nancy made a point then of looking into her face and speaking nicely.
    “Thank you very much, Elinor.”
    “She doesn’t talk,” said Tessa. “She’s my good helper, though. I couldn’t manage without her, could I, Elinor?”
    “Well,” said Nancy. “I am surprised you knew me. I’ve withered quite a bit since olden times.”
    “Yes,” said Tessa. “I wondered if you would come.”
    “I could even have been dead, I suppose. Do you remember Ginny Ross? She’s dead.”
    “Yes.”
    Piecrust, was what Tessa was making. She cut out a round of dough and slapped it into a tin pie plate, and held it aloft, expertly turning it on one hand and cutting it with a knife held in the other. She did this rapidly several times.
    She said, “Wilf’s not dead?”
    “No, he’s not. But he’s gone a bit round the bend, Tessa.” Too late, Nancy realized that this had not been a tactful thing to say, and she tried to insert a lighter note. “He’s taken up some strange ways, poor Wolfie.” Years ago she had tried calling Wilf Wolfie, thinking that the name suited his long jaw and thin moustache and bright stern eyes. But he did not like it, he suspected mockery, so she had stopped. Now he didn’t mind, and just to say the name made her feel more bright and tender towards him, which was a help under the present circumstances.
    “For instance, he’s taken a scunner against rugs.”
    “Rugs?”
    “He walks around the room like this,” said Nancy, drawing a rectangle in the air. “I had to move the furniture away from the walls. Around and around and around.” Unexpectedly and somehow apologetically, she laughed.
    “Oh, there’s some in here that do that,” said Tessa with a nod, an insider’s air of confirmation. “They don’t want anything to get between them and the wall.”
    “And he’s very dependent. It’s Where’s Nancy? all the time. I’m the only one he trusts these days.”
    “Is he violent?” Tessa spoke again, as a professional, a connoisseur.
    “No. He’s suspicious, though. He thinks people are coming in and hiding things on him. He thinks somebody goes around changing the clocks and even the day on the newspaper. Then he’ll snap out of it when I mention somebody’s medical problem and do a spot-on diagnosis. The mind’s a weird piece of business.”
    There. Another nice lapse of tact.
    “He’s mixed up, but he’s not violent.”
    “That’s good.”
    Tessa set the pie plate down and began to ladle filling into it from a large, no-brand tin labelled
Blueberry.
The filling looked rather thin and glutinous.
    “Here. Elinor,” she said. “Here’s your scraps.”
    Elinor had been standing just behind Nancy’s chair—Nancy had been careful not to turn around and look. Now Elinor slid around the bake table without glancing up and began to mold together the pieces of dough that the knife had cut away.
    “That man is dead, though,” Tessa said. “I know that much.”
    “What man are you talking