Runaway

breaking a promise, though she had noticed that adults often didn’t mind breaking theirs.
    “Don’t look so serious,” Delphine said. She took Lauren’s face in her hands and tapped her blackberry fingernails on her cheeks. “I’m only kidding.”
    The dryer in the hotel laundry was on the blink, Delphine had to hang up the wet sheets and towels, and because it was raining the best place to do that was in the old livery stable. Lauren helped carry the baskets piled with white linen across the little gravelled yard behind the hotel and into the empty stone barn. A cement floor had been put in there, but still a smell seeped through from the earth beneath, or maybe out of the stone-and-rubble walls. Damp dirt, horse hide, rich hints of piss and leather. The space was empty except for the clotheslines and a few broken chairs and bureaus. Their steps echoed.
    “Try calling your name,” said Delphine.
    Lauren called, “Del-phee-een.”
    “
Your
name. What are you up to?”
    “It’s better for the echo,” said Lauren, and called again, “Del-phee-een.”
    “I don’t like my name,” said Delphine. “Nobody likes their own name.”
    “I don’t
not
like mine.”
    “Lauren’s nice. It’s a nice name. They picked a nice name for you.”
    Delphine had disappeared behind the sheet she was pinning to the clothesline. Lauren wandered around whistling.
    “It’s singing that really sounds good in here,” Delphine said. “Sing your favorite song.”
    Lauren could not think of a song that was her favorite. That seemed to amaze Delphine, just as she had been amazed when she found out that Lauren did not know any jokes.
    “I have loads,” she said. And she began to sing.
    “Moon River, wider than a mile—”
    That was a song Harry sang sometimes, always making fun of the song, or himself. Delphine’s way of singing it was quite different. Lauren felt the calm sorrow of Delphine’s voice pulling her towards the wavering white sheets. The sheets themselves seemed as if they would dissolve around her—no, around her and Delphine—creating a feeling of acute sweetness. Delphine’s singing was like an embrace, wide-open, that you could rush into. At the same time, its loose emotion gave Lauren a shiver in her stomach, a distant threat of being sick.
    “Waiting round the bend

My huckleberry friend—”

    Lauren interrupted by catching up a chair with the seat out and scraping its leg along the floor.
    “Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Lauren said resolutely to Harry and Eileen, at the dinner table. “Is there any sort of chance I could be adopted?”
    “Where did you get that idea?” said Eileen.
    Harry stopped eating, raised his eyebrows warningly at Lauren, then began to joke. “If we were going to adopt a kid,” he said, “do you think we’d get one that asked so many nosey questions?”
    Eileen stood up, fiddling with her skirt zipper. The skirt fell down, and then she rolled down her tights and underpants.
    “Look here,” she said. “That ought to tell you.”
    Her stomach, which looked flat when she was dressed, now showed a slight fullness and sag. Its surface, still lightly tanned down to the bikini mark, was streaked with some dead-white tracks that glistened in the kitchen light. Lauren had seen these before but had thought nothing of them—they had just seemed to be a part of Eileen’s particular body, like the twin moles on her collarbone.
    “That is from the skin stretching,” Eileen said. “I carried you way out in front.” She held her hand an impossible distance in front of her body. “So now are you convinced?”
    Harry put his head against Eileen, nuzzled her bare stomach. Then he pulled back and spoke to Lauren.
    “In case you’re wondering why we didn’t have any more, the answer is that you are the only kid we need. You’re smart and good-looking and you have a sense of humor. How could we be sure we’d get another that good? Plus, we are not your average family. We like to move around. Try things, be flexible. We have got one kid who is perfect and adaptable. No need to push our luck.”
    His face, which Eileen could not see, was directing at Lauren a look far more serious than his words. A continued warning, mixed with disappointment and surprise.
    If Eileen had not been there, Lauren would have questioned him. What if they had lost both babies, instead of just the one? What if she herself had never been inside Eileen and was not responsible for