Runaway

for Grace, because Sunday had remained her day off.
    The whole family would be there. No guests—unless you counted Grace. Neil and Mavis and their children would be staying at Mavis’ parents’ place, and having dinner there on Monday, but they would be spending Sunday at the Traverses’.
    By the time Maury brought Grace down to the lake on Sunday morning, the turkey was already in the oven. Because of the children, dinner would be early, around five o’clock. The pies were on the kitchen counter—pumpkin, apple, wild blueberry. Gretchen was in charge of the kitchen—as coordinated a cook as she was an athlete. Mrs. Travers sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and working at a jigsaw puzzle with Gretchen’s younger daughter, Dana.
    “Ah, Grace,” she said, jumping up for an embrace—the first time she had ever done this—and with a clumsy motion of her hand scattering the jigsaw pieces.
    Dana wailed,
“Grandma,”
and her older sister, Janey, who had been watching critically, scooped up the pieces.
    “We can put them back together,” she said. “Grandma didn’t mean to.”
    “Where do you keep the cranberry sauce?” said Gretchen.
    “In the cupboard,” said Mrs. Travers, still squeezing Grace’s arms and ignoring the destroyed puzzle.
    “
Where
in the cupboard?”
    “Oh. Cranberry sauce,” Mrs. Travers said. “Well—I make it. First I put the cranberries in a little water. Then I keep it on low heat—no, I think I soak them first—”
    “Well, I haven’t got time for all that,” Gretchen said. “You mean you don’t have any canned?”
    “I guess not. I must not have, because I make it.”
    “I’ll have to send somebody to get some.”
    “Maybe you could ask Mrs. Woods?”
    “No. I’ve hardly even spoken to her. I haven’t got the nerve. Somebody’ll have to go to the store.”
    “Dear—it’s Thanksgiving,” said Mrs. Travers gently. “Nowhere will be open.”
    “That place down the highway, it’s always open.” Gretchen raised her voice. “Where’s Wat?”
    “He’s out in the rowboat,” called Mavis from the back bedroom. She made it sound like a warning, because she was trying to get her baby to sleep. “He took Mikey out in the boat.”
    Mavis had driven over in her own car with Mikey and the baby. Neil was coming later—he had some phone calls to make.
    And Mr. Travers had gone golfing.
    “It’s just that I need somebody to go to the store,” Gretchen said. She waited, but no offer came from the bedroom. She raised her eyebrows at Grace.
    “You can’t drive, can you?”
    Grace said no.
    Mrs. Travers looked around to see where her chair was, and sat down, with a grateful sigh.
    “Well,” said Gretchen. “Maury can drive. Where’s Maury?”
    Maury was in the front bedroom looking for his swimming trunks, though everybody had told him that the water would be too cold for swimming. He said the store would not be open.
    “It will be,” said Gretchen. “They sell gas. And if it isn’t there’s that one just coming into Perth, you know, with the ice-cream cones—”
    Maury wanted Grace to come with him, but the two little girls, Janey and Dana, were pulling her to come with them to see the swing their grandfather had put up under the Norway maple at the side of the house.
    Going down the steps, she felt the strap of one of her sandals break. She took both shoes off and walked without difficulty on the sandy soil, the flat-pressed plantain, and the many curled leaves that had already fallen.
    First she pushed the children in the swing, then they pushed her. It was when she jumped off, barefoot, that one leg crumpled and she let out a yelp of pain, not knowing what had happened.
    It was her foot, not her leg. The pain had shot up from the sole of her left foot, which had been cut by the sharp edge of a clamshell.
    “Dana brought those shells,” Janey said. “She was going to make a house for her snail.”
    “He got away,” said Dana.
    Gretchen and Mrs. Travers and even Mavis had come hurrying out of the house, thinking the cry came from one of the children.
    “She’s got a bloody foot,” said Dana. “There’s blood all over the ground.”
    Janey said, “She cut it on a shell. Dana left those shells here, she was going to build a house for Ivan. Ivan her snail.”
    Then there was a basin brought out, water to wash the cut, a towel, and everyone was asking how much it hurt.
    “Not too bad,” said Grace, limping to the steps, with both