Runaway

realized that he was doing all the wrong kinds of things, so he changed. That was years ago now. He apprenticed to a boatbuilder. Then he got in with a man who ran deep-sea fishing. He looked after boats for a multimillionaire. This was in Oregon. He worked his way back up to Canada, and he hung around here—Vancouver—for a while and then picked up a bit of land on Sechelt—waterfront, when it was still going cheap. He started a kayak business. Building, renting, selling, giving lessons. There came a time he began to feel that Sechelt was too crowded, and he let his land go for practically nothing to a friend. He was the only person he knew of who hadn’t made money from land on Sechelt.
    “But my life’s not about money,” he said.
    He heard about land you could get on Texada Island. And now he didn’t often leave there. He did this and that to make a living. Some kayak business still, and some fishing. He hired out as a handyman, a housebuilder, a carpenter.
    “I get by,” he said.
    He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter.
    He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
    All the time he was telling her this, Nancy had an unhappy feeling. It was not disbelief—in spite of the one major discrepancy. It was more a feeling of increasing puzzlement, then of disappointment. He was talking the way some other men talked. (For instance, a man she had spent time with on the cruise ship—where she had not been so consistently standoffish, so unsociable, as she had led Ollie to believe.) Plenty of men never had a word to say about their lives, beyond when and where. But there were others, more up-to-date, who gave these casual-sounding yet practiced speeches in which it was said that life was indeed a bumpy road, but misfortunes had pointed the way to better things, lessons were learned, and without a doubt joy came in the morning.
    She did not object to other men talking this way—she could usually think about something else—but when Ollie did it, leaning across the rickety little table and across the wooden platter of alarming pieces of fish, a sadness spread through her.
    He was not the same. He was truly not the same.
    And what about her? Oh, the trouble there was that she
was
quite the same. Talking about the cruise, she had got all keyed up—she had enjoyed listening to herself, to the description that was pouring out of her. Not that that was really the way she used to talk to Ollie—it was more the way she wished she had talked, and had sometimes talked to him in her mind, after he was gone. (Not until she got over being angry at him, of course.) Something would come up that made her think, I wish I could tell Ollie about that. When she talked the way she wanted to other people, she sometimes went too far. She could see what they were thinking.
Sarcastic,
or
critical,
or even
bitter.
Wilf would not use those words, but he would perhaps be thinking them, she never could tell. Ginny would smile, but not the way she used to smile. In her unmarried middle age she had become secretive, mild, and charitable. (The secret came out shortly before her death when she admitted to having become a Buddhist.)
    So Nancy had missed Ollie a lot without ever figuring out just what it was that she missed. Something troublesome burning in him like a low-grade fever, something she couldn’t get the better of. The things that had got on her nerves during that short time she had known him turned out to be just the things, in retrospect, that shone.
    Now he talked earnestly. He smiled into her eyes. She was reminded of the handy way he used to have of being charming. But she had believed that was never to be used on her.
    She was half-afraid he would say, “I’m not boring you, am I?” or, “Isn’t life amazing?”
    “I have been incredibly lucky,” he said. “Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They’d say I hadn’t stuck with anything, or that I hadn’t made any money. They’d say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that’s not true.
    “I heard