Runaway

not the history.
    She told him that Orion was blinded by Enopion but had got his sight back by looking at the sun.
    “He was blinded because he was so beautiful, but Hephaestus came to his rescue. Then he was killed anyway, by Artemis, but he got changed into a constellation. It often happened when somebody really valuable got into bad trouble, they were changed into a constellation. Where is Cassiopeia?”
    He directed her to a not very obvious W.
    “It’s supposed to be a woman sitting down.”
    “That was on account of beauty too,” she said.
    “Beauty was dangerous?”
    “You bet. She was married to the king of Ethiopia and she was the mother of Andromeda. And she bragged about her beauty and for punishment she was banished to the sky. Isn’t there an Andromeda, too?”
    “That’s a galaxy. You should be able to see it tonight. It’s the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye.”
    Even when guiding her, telling her where to look in the sky, he never touched her. Of course not. He was married.
    “Who was Andromeda?” he asked her.
    “She was chained to a rock but Perseus rescued her.”
    Whale Bay.
    A long dock, a number of large boats, a gas station and store that has a sign in the window saying that it is also the bus stop and the Post Office.
    A car parked at the side of this store has in its window a homemade taxi sign. She stands just where she stepped down from the bus. The bus pulls away. The taxi toots its horn. The driver gets out and comes towards her.
    “All by yourself,” he says. “Where are you headed for?”
    She asks if there is a place where tourists stay. Obviously there won’t be a hotel.
    “I don’t know if there’s anybody renting rooms out this year. I could ask them inside. You don’t know anybody around here?”
    Nothing to do but to say Eric’s name.
    “Oh sure,” he says with relief. “Hop in, we’ll get you there in no time. But it’s too bad, you pretty well missed the wake.”
    At first she thinks that he said
wait.
Or
weight
? She thinks of fishing competitions.
    “Sad time,” the driver says, now getting in behind the wheel. “Still, she wasn’t ever going to get any better.”
    Wake.
The wife. Ann.
    “Never mind,” he says. “I expect there’ll still be some people hanging around. Of course you did miss the funeral. Yesterday. It was a monster. Couldn’t get away?”
    Juliet says, “No.”
    “I shouldn’t be calling it a wake, should I? Wake is what you have before they’re buried, isn’t it? I don’t know what you call what takes place after. You wouldn’t want to call it a party, would you? I can just run you up and show you all the flowers and tributes, okay?”
    Inland, off the highway, after a quarter of a mile or so of rough dirt road, is Whale Bay Union Cemetery. And close to the fence is the mound of earth altogether buried in flowers. Faded real flowers, bright artificial flowers, a little wooden cross with the name and date. Tinselly curled ribbons that have blown about all over the cemetery grass. He draws her attention to all the ruts, the mess the wheels of so many cars made yesterday.
    “Half of them had never even seen her. But they knew him, so they wanted to come anyway. Everybody knows Eric.”
    They turn around, drive back, but not all the way back to the highway. She wants to tell the driver that she has changed her mind, she does not want to visit anybody, she wants to wait at the store to catch the bus going the other way. She can say that she really did get the day wrong, and now she is so ashamed of having missed the funeral that she does not want to show up at all.
    But she cannot get started. And he will report on her, no matter what.
    They are following narrow, winding back roads, past a few houses. Every time they go by a driveway without turning in, there is a feeling of reprieve.
    “Well, here’s a surprise,” the driver says, and now they do turn in. “Where’s everybody gone? Half a dozen cars when I drove past an hour ago. Even his truck’s gone. Party over. Sorry—I shouldn’t’ve said that.”
    “If there’s nobody here,” Juliet says eagerly, “I could just go back down.”
    “Oh, somebody’s here, don’t worry about that. Ailo’s here. There’s her bike. You ever meet Ailo? You know, she’s the one took care of things?” He is out and opening her door.
    As soon as Juliet steps out, a large yellow dog comes bounding and barking, and a woman calls from the porch of the