Runaway

Her paint job was hasty—she didn’t know, at that time, that you should take the hinges off the cupboard doors. Or that you should line the curtains, which had since faded.
    What Clark balked at was tearing up the carpet, which was the same in every room and the thing that she had most counted on replacing. It was divided into small brown squares, each with a pattern of darker brown and rust and tan squiggles and shapes. For a long time she had thought these were the same squiggles and shapes, arranged in the same way, in each square. Then when she had had more time, a lot of time, to examine them, she decided that there were four patterns joined together to make identical larger squares. Sometimes she could pick out the arrangement easily and sometimes she had to work to see it.
    She did this when it was raining outside and Clark’s mood weighted down all their inside space, and he did not want to pay attention to anything but the computer screen. But the best thing to do then was to invent or remember some job to do in the barn. The horses would not look at her when she was unhappy, but Flora, who was never tied up, would come and rub against her, and look up with an expression that was not quite sympathy—it was more like comradely mockery—in her shimmering yellow-green eyes.
    Flora had been a half-grown kid when Clark brought her home from a farm where he had gone to bargain for some horse tackle. The people there were giving up on the country life, or at least on the raising of animals—they had sold their horses but failed to get rid of their goats. He had heard about how a goat was able to bring a sense of ease and comfort into a horse stable and he wanted to try it. They had meant to breed her someday but there had never been any signs of her coming into heat.
    At first she had been Clark’s pet entirely, following him everywhere, dancing for his attention. She was quick and graceful and provocative as a kitten, and her resemblance to a guileless girl in love had made them both laugh. But as she grew older she seemed to attach herself to Carla, and in this attachment she was suddenly much wiser, less skittish—she seemed capable, instead, of a subdued and ironic sort of humor. Carla’s behavior with the horses was tender and strict and rather maternal, but the comradeship with Flora was quite different, Flora allowing her no sense of superiority.
    “Still no sign of Flora?” she said, as she pulled off her barn boots. Clark had posted a Lost Goat notice on the Web.
    “Not so far,” he said, in a preoccupied but not unfriendly voice. He suggested, not for the first time, that Flora might have just gone off to find herself a billy.
    No word about Mrs. Jamieson. Carla put the kettle on. Clark was humming to himself as he often did when he sat in front of the computer.
    Sometimes he talked back to it.
Bullshit,
he would say, replying to some challenge. Or he would laugh—but could not remember what the joke was, when she asked him afterwards.
    Carla called, “Do you want tea?” and to her surprise he got up and came into the kitchen.
    “So,” he said. “So, Carla.”
    “What?”
    “So she phoned.”
    “Who?”
    “Her Majesty. Queen Sylvia. She just got back.”
    “I didn’t hear the car.”
    “I didn’t ask you if you did.”
    “So what did she phone for?”
    “She wants you to go and help her straighten up the house. That’s what she said. Tomorrow.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I told her sure. But you better phone up and confirm.”
    Carla said, “I don’t see why I have to, if you told her.” She poured out their mugs of tea. “I cleaned up her house before she left. I don’t see what there could be to do so soon.”
    “Maybe some coons got in and made a mess of it while she was gone. You never know.”
    “I don’t have to phone her right this minute,” she said. “I want to drink my tea and I want to have a shower.”
    “The sooner the better.”
    Carla took her tea into the bathroom, calling back, “We have to go to the laundromat. Even when the towels dry out they smell moldy.”
    “We’re not changing the subject, Carla.”
    Even after she’d got in the shower he stood outside the door and called to her.
    “I am not going to let you off the hook, Carla.”
    She thought he might still be standing there when she came out, but he was back at the computer. She dressed as if she was going to town—she hoped that if they could get out of here, go to the