Runaway

together.” He looked at Delphine, then Eileen, and they all said, “This is Lauren,” with Delphine’s voice very quiet, mumbling, and Eileen’s full of strained sincerity and Harry’s sonorous, presiding, deeply serious.
    “And we say good-bye to her and commit her to the snow—”
    At the end Eileen said hurriedly, “Forgive us our sins. Our trespasses. Forgive us our trespasses.”
    Delphine got into the backseat with Lauren for the ride into town. Harry had held the door open for her to get into the front seat beside him, but she stumbled past him into the back. Relinquishing the more important seat, now that she was not the bearer of the box. She reached into the pocket of her ski jacket to get a Kleenex and in doing so dragged out something that fell on the floor of the car. She gave an involuntary grunt, reaching down to locate it, but Lauren had been quicker. Lauren picked up one of the earrings she had often seen Delphine wear—shoulder-length earrings of rainbow beads that sparkled through her hair. Earrings she must have been wearing this evening, but had thought better to stuff away in her pocket. And just the feel of this earring, the feeling of the cold bright beads slithering through her fingers, made Lauren long suddenly for any number of things to vanish, for Delphine to turn back into the person she had been at the beginning, sitting behind the hotel desk, bold and frisky.
    Delphine did not say a word. She took the earring without their fingers touching. But for the first time that evening she and Lauren looked each other in the face. Delphine’s eyes widened and for an instant there was a familiar expression in them, of mockery and conspiracy. She shrugged her shoulders and put the earring in her pocket. That was all—from then on she just looked at the back of Harry’s head.
    When Harry slowed to let her out at the hotel, he said, “It would be nice if you could come and have supper with us, some night when you’re not working.”
    “I’m pretty much always working,” Delphine said. She got out of the car and said, “Good-bye,” to none of them in particular, and stumped along the mushy sidewalk into the hotel.
    On the way home Eileen said, “I knew she wouldn’t.”
    Harry said, “Well. Maybe she appreciated that we asked.”
    “She doesn’t care about us. She only cared about Lauren, when she thought Lauren was hers. Now she doesn’t care about her either.”
    “Well, we care,” said Harry, his voice rising. “She’s ours.”
    “We love you, Lauren,” he said. “I just want to tell you one more time.”
    Hers. Ours.
    Something was prickling Lauren’s bare ankles. She reached down and found that burrs, whole clusters of burrs, were clinging to her pajama legs.
    “I got burrs from under the snow. I’ve got
hundreds
of burrs.”
    “I’ll get them off you when we get home,” Eileen said. “I can’t do anything about them now.”
    Lauren was furiously pulling the burrs off her pajamas. And as soon as she got those loose she found that they were hanging on to her fingers. She tried to loosen them with the other hand and in no time they were clinging to all the other fingers. She was so sick of these burrs that she wanted to beat her hands and yell out loud, but she knew that the only thing she could do was just sit and wait.

TRICKS

    I
    I’ll die,” said Robin, on an evening years ago. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready.” They were in the screen porch of the dark-green clap-board house on Isaac Street. Willard Greig, who lived next door, was playing rummy at the card table with Robin’s sister, Joanne. Robin was sitting on the couch, frowning at a magazine. The smell of nicotiana fought with a smell of ketchup simmering in some kitchen along the street.
    Willard watched Joanne barely smile, before she inquired in a neutral voice, “What did you say?”
    “I said, I’ll die.” Robin was defiant. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready by tomorrow. The cleaners.”
    “That’s what I thought you said. You’d die?”
    You could never catch Joanne on any remark of that sort. Her tone was so mild, her scorn so immensely quiet, her smile—now vanished—was just the tiny lifting of a corner of her mouth.
    “Well, I will,” said Robin defiantly. “I need it.”
    “She needs it, she’ll die, she’s going to the play,” said Joanne to Willard, in a confidential tone.
    Willard said, “Now, Joanne.” His parents, and he