Runaway

Grace, with nothing to do, leaned back, pushed her seat back, in order to count them. She did this both foolishly and seriously, the way you could pull petals off a flower, but not with any words so blatant as
He loves me, he loves me not.
    Lucky. Not. Lucky. Not.
That was all she dared.
    She found that it was hard to keep track of bricks arranged in this zigzag fashion, especially since the line flattened out above the door.
    She knew. What else could this be? A bootlegger’s place. She thought of the bootlegger at home—a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious. He sat on his front step with a shotgun on Halloween night. And he painted numbers on the sticks of firewood stacked by his door so he’d know if any were stolen. She thought of him—or this one—dozing in the heat in his dirty but tidy room (she knew it would be that way by the mended patches in the screen). Getting up from his creaky cot or couch, with the stained quilt on it that some woman relative of his, some woman now dead, had made long ago.
    Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable, and some that were not. She knew how things were.
    How strange that she’d thought of marrying Maury. A kind of treachery it would be. A treachery to herself. But not a treachery to be riding with Neil, because he knew some of the same things she did. And she knew more and more, all the time, about him.
    And now in the doorway it seemed that she could see her uncle, stooped and baffled, looking out at her, as if she had been away for years and years. As if she had promised to go home and then she had forgotten about it, and in all this time he should have died but he hadn’t.
    She struggled to speak to him, but he was lost. She was waking up, moving. She was in the car with Neil, on the road again. She had been asleep with her mouth open and she was thirsty. He turned to her for a moment, and she noticed, even with the wind that they made blowing round them, a fresh smell of whisky.
    It was true.
    “You awake? You were fast asleep when I came out of there,” he said. “Sorry—I had to be sociable for a while. How’s your bladder?”
    That was a problem she had been thinking about, in fact, when they were stopped at the house. She had seen a toilet back there, beyond the house, but had felt shy about getting out and walking to it.
    He said, “This looks like a possible place,” and stopped the car. She got out and walked in amongst some blooming golden-rod and Queen Anne’s lace and wild aster, to squat down. He stood in such flowers on the other side of the road, with his back to her. When she got back into the car she saw the bottle on the floor beside her feet. More than a third of its contents seemed already to be gone.
    He saw her looking.
    “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I just poured some in here.” He held up a flask. “Easier when I’m driving.”
    On the floor there was also another Coca-Cola. He told her to look in the glove compartment and find the bottle opener.
    “It’s cold,” she said in surprise.
    “Icebox. They cut ice off the lakes in the winter and store it in sawdust. He keeps it under the house.”
    “I thought I saw my uncle in the doorway of that house,” she said. “But I was dreaming.”
    “You could tell me about your uncle. Tell me about where you live. Your job. Anything. I just like to hear you talk.”
    There was a new strength in his voice, and a change in his face, but it wasn’t any manic glow of drunkenness. It was just as if he’d been sick—not terribly sick, just down, under the weather—and was now wanting to assure you he was better. He capped the flask and laid it down and reached for her hand. He held it lightly, a comrade’s clasp.
    “He’s quite old,” said Grace. “He’s really my great-uncle. He’s a caner—that means he canes chairs. I can’t explain that to you, but I could show you if we had a chair to cane—”
    “I don’t see one.”
    She laughed, and said, “It’s boring, really.”
    “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
    She said, “You do.”
    “Oh. What interests you about me?” His hand slid away.
    “What you’re doing now,” said Grace determinedly. “Why.”
    “You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
    “Because I know what you’d