Runaway

something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seemed to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
    And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody has come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?
    Mr. Travers had built the house—that is, he had it built, as a surprise wedding present for Mrs. Travers. When Grace first saw it, it would have been perhaps thirty years old. Mrs. Travers’ children were widely spaced—Gretchen around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, already married and a mother herself, and Maury twenty-one, going into his last year at college. And then there was Neil, in his midthirties. But Neil was not a Travers. He was Neil Borrow. Mrs. Travers had been married before, to a man who had died. She had earned her living, and supported her child, as a teacher of Business English at a secretarial school. Mr. Travers, when he referred to this time in her life before he met her, spoke of it as a time of hardship almost like penal servitude, something hardly to be made up for by a whole lifetime of comfort, which he would happily provide.
    Mrs. Travers herself didn’t speak of it this way at all. She had lived with Neil in a big old house broken up into apartments, not far from the railway tracks in the town of Pembroke, and many of the stories she told at the dinner table were about events there, about her fellow tenants, and the French-Canadian land-lord, whose harsh French and tangled English she imitated. The stories might have had titles, like the stories of Thurber’s that Grace had read in
The Anthology of American Humor,
found unaccountably on the library shelf at the back of her Grade Ten classroom. (Also on that shelf was
The Last of the Barons,
and
Two Years Before the Mast.
)
    “The Night Old Mrs. Cromarty Got Out on the Roof.” “How the Postman Courted Miss Flowers.” “The Dog Who Ate Sardines.”
    Mr. Travers never told stories and had little to say at dinner, but if he came upon you looking, say, at the fieldstone fireplace, he might say, “Are you interested in rocks?” and tell you where each of them had come from, and how he had searched and searched for the particular pink granite, because Mrs. Travers had once exclaimed over a rock like that, glimpsed in a road cut. Or he might show you such not really unusual features as he himself had added to the house design—the corner cupboard shelves swinging outwards in the kitchen, the storage space under the window seats. He was a tall stooped man with a soft voice and thin hair slicked over his scalp. He wore bathing shoes when he went into the water, and though he did not look fat in his usual clothes, he displayed then a pancake fold of white flesh slopping over the top of his bathing trunks.
    Grace worked that summer at the hotel at Bailey’s Falls, north of Little Sabot Lake. Early in the season the Travers family had come to dinner there. She had not noticed them—they were not at one of her tables and it was a busy night. She was setting up a table for a new party when she realized that someone was waiting to speak to her.
    It was Maury. He said, “I was wondering if you would like to go out with me sometime?”
    Grace barely looked up from shooting out the silverware. She said, “Is this a dare?” Because his voice was high and nervous and he stood there stiffly, as if forcing himself. And it was known that sometimes a party of young men from the cottages would dare one another to ask a waitress out. It wasn’t entirely a joke—they really would show up, if accepted, though sometimes they only meant to park, without taking you to a movie or even for coffee. So it was considered rather shameful, rather hard up, for a girl to agree.
    “What?” he said painfully, and then Grace did stop and look at him. It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined.
    “Okay,” she said quickly. She might have meant, okay, calm down, I know it’s not a dare, I know you wouldn’t do that. Or, okay, I’ll go out with you. She herself hardly knew which. But he took it as agreement, and at once arranged—without lowering his voice, or noticing the looks he was getting from diners around them—that he would pick her up after work on the following