Runaway

no matter what kind of work she had to do. She liked to wear inky-blue or plum fingernail polish. And she liked to wear earrings, big and clattery ones, even at her work. She had no use for the little button kind.
    She was not afraid of snakes, but she had a weird feeling about cats. She thought that a cat must have come and lain on top of her when she was a baby, being attracted to the smell of milk.
    “So what about you?” she said to Lauren. “What are you scared of? What’s your favorite color? Did you ever walk in your sleep? Do you get a tan or a sunburn? Does your hair grow fast or slow?”
    It was not as if Lauren was unused to somebody being interested in her. Harry and Eileen were interested—particularly Harry—in her thoughts and opinions and what she felt about things. Sometimes this interest got on her nerves. But she had never realized that there could be all these other things, arbitrary facts, that could seem delightfully important. And she never got the feeling—as she did at home—that there was any other question behind Delphine’s questions, never the feeling that if she didn’t watch out she would be pried open.
    Delphine taught her jokes. She said she knew hundreds of jokes, but she would only tell Lauren the ones that were fit. Harry would not have agreed that the jokes about people from Newfoundland (Newfies) were fit, but Lauren laughed obligingly.
    She told Harry and Eileen that she was going to a friend’s place, after school. That was not really a lie. They seemed pleased. But because of them she did not take the gold chain with her name when Delphine said she could. She pretended to be concerned that somebody it belonged to might still come looking for it.
    Delphine knew Harry, she brought him his breakfast in the coffee shop, and she could have mentioned Lauren’s visits to him, but apparently she didn’t.
    She sometimes put up a sign—
Ring Bell for Service
—and took Lauren with her into other parts of the hotel. Guests did stay there once in a while, and their beds had to be made up, their toilets and sinks scrubbed, their floors vacuumed. Lauren was not allowed to help. “Just sit there and talk to me,” Delphine said. “It’s lonesome kind of work.”
    But she was the one who talked. She talked about her life without getting it in any kind of order. Characters appeared and disappeared and Lauren was supposed to know who they were without asking. People called Mr. and Mrs. were good bosses. Other bosses were Old Sowbelly, Old Horse’s Arse (Don’t
repeat my language),
and they were terrible. Delphine had worked in hospitals
(As a nurse? Are you kidding?)
and in tobacco fields and in okay restaurants and in dives and in a lumber camp where she cooked and in a bus depot where she cleaned and saw things too gross to talk about and in an all-night convenience store where she was held up and quit.
    Sometimes she was palling around with Lorraine and sometimes Phyl. Phyl had a way of borrowing your things without asking—she borrowed Delphine’s blouse and wore it to a dance and sweated so much she rotted out the underarms. Lorraine had graduated from high school but she made a big mistake when she married the lamebrain she did and now she was surely sorry.
    Delphine could have got married. Some men she had gone out with had done well, some had turned into bums, some she had no idea what had happened to them. She was fond of a boy named Tommy Kilbride but he was a Catholic.
    “You probably don’t know what that means for a woman.”
    “It means you can’t use birth control,” Lauren said. “Eileen was a Catholic, but she quit because she didn’t agree. Eileen my mom.”
    “Your mom wouldn’t have to worry anyway, the way it turned out.”
    Lauren did not understand. Then she thought Delphine must be talking about her—Lauren—being an only child. She must think that Harry and Eileen would have liked to have more children after they had her but that Eileen had not been able to have them. As far as Lauren knew, that wasn’t the case.
    She said, “They could’ve had more if they’d wanted. After they had me.”
    “That what you think, eh?” Delphine said jokingly. “Maybe they couldn’t have any. Could have adopted you.”
    “No. They didn’t. I know they didn’t.” Lauren was on the verge of telling about what happened when Eileen was pregnant, but she held back because Harry had made so much of its being a secret. She was superstitious about