Runaway

Eileen said.
    Harry said, “It’s not very far off the road.”
    “It’s far enough.”
    This was the year after Harry had quit his job on a news-magazine because he was burned out. He had bought the weekly newspaper in this small town which he remembered from his childhood. His family used to have a summer place on one of the little lakes around here, and he remembered drinking his first beer in the hotel on the main street. He and Eileen and Lauren went there for dinner on their first Sunday night in town.
    But the bar was closed. Harry and Eileen had to drink water.
    “How come?” said Eileen.
    Harry raised his eyebrows at the hotel owner, who was also their waiter.
    “Sunday?” he said.
    “No license.” The owner had a thick—and, it seemed, disdainful—accent. He wore a shirt and tie, a cardigan, and trousers that looked as if they had grown together—all soft, rumpled, fuzzy, like an outer skin that was flaky and graying as his real skin must be underneath.
    “Change from the old days,” said Harry, and when the man did not reply he went on to order roast beef all round.
    “Friendly,” Eileen said.
    “European,” said Harry. “It’s cultural. They don’t feel obliged to smile all the time.” He pointed out things in the dining room that were just the same—the high ceiling, the slowly rotating fan, even a murky oil painting showing a hunting dog with a rusty-feathered bird in its mouth.
    In came some other diners. A family party. Little girls in patent shoes and scratchy frills, a toddling baby, a teenaged boy in a suit, half-dead with embarrassment, various parents and parents of parents—a skinny and distracted old man and an old woman flopped sideways in a wheelchair and wearing a corsage. Any one of the women in their flowery dresses would have made about four of Eileen.
    “Wedding anniversary,” Harry whispered.
    On the way out he stopped to introduce himself and his family, to tell them that he was the new fellow at the paper, and to offer his congratulations. He hoped they wouldn’t mind if he took down their names. Harry was a broad-faced, boyish-looking man with a tanned skin and shining light-brown hair. His glow of well-being and general appreciation spread around the table—though not perhaps to the teenaged boy or the old couple. He asked how long those two had been married and was told sixty-five years.
    “Sixty-five years,” cried Harry, reeling at the thought. He asked if he might kiss the bride and did, touching his lips to the long flap of her ear as she moved her head aside.
    “Now you have to kiss the groom,” he said to Eileen, who smiled tightly and pecked the old man on the top of his head.
    Harry asked the recipe for a happy marriage.
    “Momma can’t talk,” said one of the big women. “But let me ask Daddy.” She shouted in her father’s ear, “Your advice for a happy marriage?”
    He wrinkled up his face roguishly.
    “All-eeze keep a foot on er neck.”
    All the grown-ups laughed, and Harry said, “Okay. I’ll just put in the paper that you always made sure to get your wife’s agreement.”
    Outside, Eileen said, “How do they manage to get that fat? I don’t understand it. You’d have to eat day and night to get that fat.”
    “Strange,” said Harry.
    “Those were canned green beans,” she said. “In August. Isn’t that when green beans are ripe? And out here in the middle of the country, where they are supposed to grow things?”
    “Stranger than strange,” he said happily.
    Almost immediately changes came to the hotel. In the former dining room there was a false ceiling put in—paperboard squares supported by strips of metal. The big round tables were replaced by small square tables, and the heavy wooden chairs by light metal chairs with maroon plastic–covered seats. Because of the lowered ceiling, the windows had to be reduced to squat rectangles. A neon sign in one of them said WELCOME COFFEE SHOP.
    The owner, whose name was Mr. Palagian, never smiled or said a word more than he could help to anybody, in spite of the sign.
    Just the same, the coffee shop filled up with customers at noon, or in the later hours of the afternoon. The customers were high school students, mostly from Grade Nine to Grade Eleven. Also some of the older students from the grade school. The great attraction of the place was that anybody could smoke there. Not that you could buy cigarettes if you looked to be under sixteen. Mr. Palagian was strict