Runaway

wariness seemed hardened and deliberate.
    “She does one heck of a lot of work for a fairy,” Sam said, with his large strategic grin. “I’ll tell the world she does.”
    And now of course Juliet recalled the mention in letters of some woman who had come in to help, because of Sara’s strength having gone so drastically downhill. But she had thought of somebody much older. Irene was surely no older than she was herself.
    The car was the same Pontiac that Sam had got secondhand maybe ten years ago. The original blue paint showed in streaks here and there but was mostly faded to gray, and the effects of winter road salt could be seen in its petticoat fringe of rust.
    “The old gray mare,” said Sara, almost out of breath after the short walk from the railway platform.
    “She hasn’t given up,” said Juliet. She spoke admiringly, as seemed to be expected. She had forgotten that this was what they called the car, though it was the name she had thought up herself.
    “Oh, she never gives up,” said Sara, once she was settled with Irene’s help in the backseat. “And we’d never give up on her.”
    Juliet got into the front seat, juggling Penelope, who was beginning again to whimper. The heat inside the car was shocking, even though it had been parked with the windows down in the scanty shade of the station poplars.
    “Actually I’m considering—,” said Sam as he backed out, “I’m considering turning her in for a truck.”
    “He doesn’t mean it,” shrieked Sara.
    “For the business,” Sam continued. “It’d be a lot handier. And you’d get a certain amount of advertising every time you drove down the street, just from the name on the door.”
    “He’s teasing,” Sara said. “How am I going to ride around in a vehicle that says
Fresh Vegetables
? Am I supposed to be the squash or the cabbage?”
    “Better pipe down, Missus,” Sam said, “or you won’t have any breath left when we reach home.”
    After nearly thirty years of teaching in the public schools around the county—ten years in the last school—Sam had suddenly quit and decided to get into the business of selling vegetables, full-time. He had always cultivated a big vegetable garden, and raspberry canes, in the extra lot beside their house, and they had sold their surplus produce to a few people around town. But now, apparently, this was to change into his way of making a living, selling to grocery stores and perhaps eventually putting up a market stall at the front gate.
    “You’re serious about all this?” said Juliet quietly.
    “Darn right I am.”
    “You’re not going to miss teaching?”
    “Not on your Nelly-O. I was fed up. I was fed up to the eyeballs.”
    It was true that after all those years, he had never been offered, in any school, the job of principal. She supposed that was what he was fed up with. He was a remarkable teacher, the one whose antics and energy everyone would remember, his Grade Six unlike any other year in his pupils’ lives. Yet he had been passed over, time and again, and probably for that very reason. His methods could be seen to undercut authority. So you could imagine Authority saying that he was not the sort of man to be in charge, he’d do less harm where he was.
    He liked outdoor work, he was good at talking to people, he would probably do well, selling vegetables.
    But Sara would hate it.
    Juliet did not like it either. If there was a side to be on, however, she would have to choose his. She was not going to define herself as a snob.
    And the truth was that she saw herself—she saw herself and Sam and Sara, but particularly herself and Sam—as superior in their own way to everybody around them. So what should his peddling vegetables matter?
    Sam spoke now in a quieter, conspiratorial voice.
    “What’s her name?”
    He meant the baby’s.
    “Penelope. We’re never going to call her Penny. Penelope.”
    “No, I mean—I mean her last name.”
    “Oh. Well, it’s Henderson-Porteous I guess. Or Porteous-Henderson. But maybe that’s too much of a mouthful, when she’s already called Penelope? We knew that but we wanted Penelope. We’ll have to settle it somehow.”
    “So. He’s given her his name,” Sam said. “Well, that’s something. I mean, that’s good.”
    Juliet was surprised for a moment, then not.
    “Of course he has,” she said. Pretending to be mystified and amused. “She’s his.”
    “Oh yes. Yes. But given the circumstances.”
    “I forget about the