Runaway

But I didn’t want him to know that.”
    “No.”
    She sat down at the table. “I’d like a drink but I don’t like whisky.”
    “So you drink now, too?”
    “Wine. We make our own wine. Everybody in the Bay does.”
    He told her a joke then, the sort of joke that he would never have told her before. It involved a couple going to a motel, and it ended up with the line “So it’s like what I always tell the girls at Sunday school—you don’t have to drink and smoke to have a good time.”
    She laughed but felt her face go hot, as with Charlie.
    “Why did you quit your job?” she said. “Were you let go because of me?”
    “Come on now.” Sam laughed. “Don’t think you’re so important. I wasn’t let go. I wasn’t fired.”
    “All right then. You quit.”
    “I quit.”
    “Did it have anything at all to do with me?”
    “I quit because I got goddamn sick of my neck always in that noose. I was on the point of quitting for years.”
    “It had nothing to do with me?”
    “All right,” Sam said. “I got into an argument. There were things said.”
    “What things?”
    “You don’t need to know.
    “And don’t worry,” he said after a moment. “They didn’t fire me. They couldn’t have fired me. There are rules. It’s like I told you—I was ready to go anyway.”
    “But you don’t realize,” said Juliet. “You don’t
realize.
You don’t realize just how
stupid
this is and what a disgusting place this is to live in, where people say that kind of thing, and how if I told people I know this, they wouldn’t believe it. It would seem like a joke.”
    “Well. Unfortunately your mother and I don’t live where you live. Here is where we live. Does that fellow of yours think it’s a joke too? I don’t want to talk any more about this tonight, I’m going to bed. I’m going to look in on Mother and then I’m going to bed.”
    “The passenger train—,” said Juliet with continued energy, even scorn. “It does still stop here. Doesn’t it? You didn’t want me getting off here. Did you?”
    On his way out of the room, her father did not answer.
    Light from the last streetlight in town now fell across Juliet’s bed. The big soft maple tree had been cut down, replaced by a patch of Sam’s rhubarb. Last night she had left the curtains closed to shade the bed, but tonight she felt that she needed the outside air. So she had to switch the pillow down to the foot of the bed, along with Penelope, who had slept like an angel with the full light in her face.
    She wished she had drunk a little of the whisky. She lay stiff with frustration and anger, composing in her head a letter to Eric.
I don’t know what I’m doing here, I should never have come
here, I can’t wait to go home.
    Home.
    When it was barely light in the morning, she woke to the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Then a voice—Sam’s—interrupted this noise, and she must have fallen asleep again. When she woke up later, she thought it must have been a dream. Otherwise Penelope would have woken up, and she hadn’t.
    The kitchen was cooler this morning, no longer full of the smell of simmering fruit. Irene was fixing little caps of gingham cloth, and labels, onto all the jars.
    “I thought I heard you vacuuming,” said Juliet, dredging up cheerfulness. “I must have dreamed it. It was only about five o’clock in the morning.”
    Irene did not answer for a moment. She was writing on a label. She wrote with great concentration, her lips caught between her teeth.
    “That was her,” she said when she had finished. “She woke your dad up and he had to go and make her quit.”
    This seemed unlikely. Yesterday Sara had left her bed only to go to the bathroom.
    “He told me,” said Irene. “She wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks she’s going to do something and then he has to get up and make her quit.”
    “She must have a spurt of energy then,” said Juliet.
    “Yeah.” Irene was getting to work on another label. When that was done, she faced Juliet.
    “Wants to wake your dad up and get attention, that’s it. Him dead tired and he’s got to get out of bed and tend to her.”
    Juliet turned away. Not wanting to set Penelope down—as if the child wasn’t safe here—she juggled her on one hip while she fished the egg out with a spoon, tapped and shelled and mashed it with one hand.
    While she fed Penelope she was afraid to speak, lest the tone of her voice alarm the baby and set her wailing. Something