Runaway

laundromat, get a takeout at the cappuccino place, they might be able to talk in a different way, some release might be possible. She went into the living room with a brisk step and put her arms around him from behind. But as soon as she did that a wave of grief swallowed her up—it must have been the heat of the shower, loosening her tears—and she bent over him, all crumbling and crying.
    He took his hands off the keyboard but sat still.
    “Just don’t be mad at me,” she said.
    “I’m not mad. I hate when you’re like this, that’s all.”
    “I’m like this because you’re mad.”
    “Don’t tell me what I am. You’re choking me. Start supper.”
    That was what she did. It was obvious by now that the five o’clock person wasn’t coming. She got out the potatoes and began to peel them, but her tears would not stop and she could not see what she was doing. She wiped her face with a paper towel and tore off a fresh one to take with her and went out into the rain. She didn’t go into the barn because it was too miserable in there without Flora. She walked along the lane back to the woods. The horses were in the other field. They came over to the fence to watch her. All of them except Lizzie, who capered and snorted a bit, had the sense to understand that her attention was elsewhere.
    It had started when they read the obituary, Mr. Jamieson’s obituary. That was in the city paper, and his face had been on the evening news. Up until the year before, they had known the Jamiesons only as neighbors who kept to themselves. She taught Botany at the college forty miles away, so she had to spend a good deal of her time on the road. He was a poet.
    Everybody knew that much. But he seemed to be occupied with other things. For a poet, and for an old man—perhaps twenty years older than Mrs. Jamieson—he was rugged and active. He improved the drainage system on his place, cleaning out the culvert and lining it with rocks. He dug and planted and fenced a vegetable garden, cut paths through the woods, looked after repairs on the house.
    The house itself was an odd-looking triangular affair that he had built years ago, with some friends, on the foundation of an old wrecked farmhouse. Those people were spoken of as hippies—though Mr. Jamieson must have been a bit old for that, even then, before Mrs. Jamieson’s time. There was a story that they grew marijuana in the woods, sold it, and stored the money in sealed glass jars, which were buried around the property. Clark had heard this from the people he got to know in town. He said it was bullshit.
    “Else somebody would have got in and dug it up, before now. Somebody would have found a way to make him tell where it was.”
    When they read the obituary Carla and Clark learned for the first time that Leon Jamieson had been the recipient of a large prize, five years before his death. A prize for poetry. Nobody had ever mentioned this. It seemed that people could believe in dope money buried in glass jars, but not in money won for writing poetry.
    Shortly after this Clark said, “We could’ve made him pay.”
    Carla knew at once what he was talking about, but she took it as a joke.
    “Too late now,” she said. “You can’t pay once you’re dead.”
    “He can’t. She could.”
    “She’s gone to Greece.”
    “She’s not going to stay in Greece.”
    “She didn’t know,” said Carla more soberly.
    “I didn’t say she did.”
    “She doesn’t have a clue about it.”
    “We could fix that.”
    Carla said, “No. No.”
    Clark went on as if she had not spoken.
    “We could say we’re going to sue. People get money for stuff like that all the time.”
    “How could you do that? You can’t sue a dead person.”
    “Threaten to go to the papers. Big-time poet. The papers would eat it up. All we have to do is threaten and she’d cave in.”
    “You’re just fantasizing,” Carla said. “You’re joking.”
    “No,” said Clark. “Actually, I’m not.”
    Carla said she did not want to talk about it anymore and he said okay.
    But they talked about it the next day, and the next and the next. He sometimes got notions like this that were not practicable, which might even be illegal. He talked about them with growing excitement and then—she wasn’t sure why—he dropped them. If the rain had stopped, if this had turned into something like a normal summer, he might have let this idea go the way of the others. But that had not happened, and during the