Runaway

little girls competing to hold her up and generally getting in her way.
    “Oh, that’s nasty,” Gretchen said. “But why weren’t you wearing your shoes?”
    “Broke her strap,” said Dana and Janey together, as a wine-colored convertible, making very little sound, swerved neatly round in the parking space.
    “Now, that is what I call opportune,” said Mrs. Travers. “Here ’s the very man we need. The doctor.”
    This was Neil, the first time Grace had ever seen him. He was tall, spare, quick-moving.
    “Your bag,” cried Mrs. Travers gaily. “We’ve already got a case for you.”
    “Nice piece of junk you’ve got there,” said Gretchen. “New?”
    Neil said, “Piece of folly.”
    “Now the baby’s wakened.” Mavis gave a sigh of unspecific accusation and she went back into the house.
    Janey said severely, “You can’t do anything without that baby waking up.”
    “
You
better be quiet,” said Gretchen.
    “Don’t tell me you haven’t got it with you,” said Mrs. Travers. But Neil swung a doctor’s bag out of the backseat, and she said, “Oh, yes you have, that’s good, you never know.”
    “You the patient?” Neil said to Dana. “What’s the matter? Swallow a toad?”
    “It’s her,” said Dana with dignity. “It’s Grace.”
    “I see. She swallowed the toad.”
    “She cut her foot. It’s bleeding and bleeding.”
    “On a clamshell,” said Janey.
    Now Neil said “Move over” to his nieces, and sat on the step below Grace, and carefully lifted the foot and said, “Give me that cloth or whatever,” then carefully blotted away the blood to get a look at the cut. Now that he was so close to her, Grace noticed a smell she had learned to identify this summer working at the inn—the smell of liquor edged with mint.
    “It sure is,” he said. “It’s bleeding and bleeding. That’s a good thing, clean it out. Hurts?”
    Grace said, “Some.”
    He looked searchingly, though briefly, into her face. Perhaps wondering if she had caught the smell, and what she thought about it.
    “I bet. See that flap? We have to get under there and make sure it’s clean, then I’ll put a stitch or two in it. I’ve got some stuff I can rub on so that won’t hurt as bad as you might think.” He looked up at Gretchen. “Hey. Let’s get the audience out of the way here.”
    He had not spoken a word, as yet, to his mother, who now repeated that it was such a good thing that he had come along just when he did.
    “Boy Scout,” he said. “Always at the ready.”
    His hands didn’t feel drunk, and his eyes didn’t look it. Neither did he look like the jolly uncle he had impersonated when he talked to the children, or the purveyor of reassuring patter he had chosen to be with Grace. He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain.
    When the cut had been bandaged, out on the steps— Gretchen having gone back to the kitchen and made the children come with her, but Mrs. Travers remaining, watching intently, with her lips pressed together as if promising that she would not make any interruptions—Neil said that he thought it would be a good idea to run Grace into town, to the hospital.
    “For an anti-tetanus shot.”
    “It doesn’t feel too bad,” said Grace.
    Neil said, “That’s not the point.”
    “I agree,” said Mrs. Travers. “Tetanus—that’s terrible.”
    “We shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Here. Grace? Grace, I’ll get you to the car.” He held her under one arm. She had strapped on the one sandal, and managed to get her toes into the other so that she could drag it along. The bandage was very neat and tight.
    “I’ll just run in,” he said, when she was sitting in the car. “Make my apologies.”
    To Gretchen? To Mavis.
    Mrs. Travers came down from the verandah, wearing the look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her, and indeed irrepressible, on this day. She put her hand on the car door.
    “This is good,” she said. “This is very good. Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
    Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence, a weepy gladness leaking