Runaway

about that.
Not you,
he would say, in his thick, dreary voice.
Not you.
    By this time he had hired a woman to work for him, and if somebody who was too young tried buying cigarettes from her she would laugh.
    “Who are you kidding, baby face.”
    But someone who was sixteen or over could collect the money from those who were younger and buy a dozen packs.
    Letter of the law, Harry said.
    Harry stopped eating his lunch there—it was too noisy—but he still came in for breakfast. He was hoping that one day Mr. Palagian would thaw out and tell the story of his life. Harry kept a file full of ideas for books and was always on the lookout for life stories. Someone like Mr. Palagian—or even that fat tough-talking waitress, he said—could be harboring a contemporary tragedy or adventure which would make a best seller.
    The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities—see the humanity—in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that.
Be
aware.
    Lauren made her own breakfast, usually cereal with maple syrup instead of milk. Eileen took her coffee back to bed and drank it slowly. She didn’t want to talk. She had to get herself in gear to face the day, working in the newspaper office. When she got herself sufficiently in gear—sometime after Lauren went off to school—she got out of bed and had a shower and got dressed in one of her casually provocative outfits. As the fall wore on this was usually a bulky sweater and a short leather skirt and brightly colored tights. Like Mr. Palagian, Eileen managed easily to look different from anybody else in that town, but unlike him she was beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner in the newspaper office was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles.
    They had rented a house at the edge of town. Just beyond their backyard began a vacationland wilderness of rocky knobs and granite slopes, cedar bogs, small lakes, and a transitional forest of poplars, soft maples, tamarack, and spruce. Harry loved it. He said that they might wake up one morning and look out at a moose in the backyard. Lauren came home after school when the sun was already getting low in the sky and the middling warmth of the autumn day was turning out to be a fraud. The house was chilly and smelled of last night’s dinner, of stale coffee grounds and the garbage which it was her job to take out. Harry was making a compost heap—next year he meant to have a vegetable garden. Lauren carried the pail of peelings, apple cores, coffee grounds, leftovers, out to the edge of the woods, from which a moose or a bear might appear. The poplar leaves had turned yellow, the tamaracks held furry orange spikes up against the dark evergreens. She dumped the garbage, and shovelled dirt and grass cuttings over it, the way that Harry had shown her.
    Her life was a lot different now from the way it had been just a few weeks ago, when she and Harry and Eileen were driving to one of the lakes to swim in the hot afternoons. Then later in the evenings, she and Harry had gone on adventure walks around the town, while Eileen sanded and painted and wall-papered the house, claiming she could do that faster and better on her own. All that she had wanted Harry to do then was to get all his boxes of papers and his filing cabinet and desk into a ratty little room in the basement, out of her way. Lauren had helped him.
    One cardboard box she picked up was oddly light and it seemed to hold something soft, not like paper, more like cloth or yarn. Just as she said, “What’s this?” Harry saw her holding it and he said, “Hey.” Then he said, “Oh God.”
    He took the box out of her hands and put it into a drawer of the filing cabinet, which he banged shut. “Oh God,” he said again.
    He had hardly ever spoken to her in such a rough and exasperated way. He looked around as if there might have been somebody watching them and clapped his hands on his trousers.
    “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to pick that up.” He put his elbows on the top of the filing cabinet and leaned his forehead on his hands.
    “Now,” he said. “Now, Lauren. I could make up some kind of a lie to tell you, but I am going to tell you the truth. Because I believe that children should be told the