"No," she said, and pushed back some hair behind her ear. She added, purely informatively: "He's been hitting the road regularly since he was two. But never very hard. I think the farthest he ever got- in the city, at least- was to the Mall in Central Park. Just a couple of blocks from home. The least far- or nearest-- he ever got was to the front door of our building. He stuck around to say goodbye to his father."
Both women at the table laughed.
"The Mall's where they all go skatin' in New York," Sandra said very sociably to Mrs. Snell. "The kids and all."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Snell.
"He was only three. It was just last year," Boo Boo said, taking out a pack of cigarettes and a folder of matches from a side pocket in her jeans. She lit a cigarette, while the two women spiritedly watched her. "Big excitement. We had the whole police force out looking for him."
"They find him?" said Mrs. Snell.
"Sure they found him!" said Sandra with contempt. "Wuddaya think?"
"They found him at a quarter past eleven of night, in the middle of- my God, February, I think. Not a child in the park. Just muggers, I guess, and an assortment of roaming degenerates. He was sitting on the floor of the bandstand, rolling a marble back and forth along a crack. Half-frozen to death and looking- "
"Holy Mackerel!" said Mrs. Snell. "How come he did it? I mean what was he runnin' away about?"
Boo Boo blew a single, faulty smoke-ring at a pane of glass. "Some child in the park that afternoon had come up to him with the dreamy misinformation, `You stink, kid.' At least, that's why we think he did it. I don't know, Mrs. Snell. It's all slightly over my head."
"How long's he been doin' it?" asked Mrs. Snell. "I mean how long's he been doin' it?"
"Well, at the age of two-and-a-half," Boo Boo said biographically, "he sought refuge under a sink in the basement of our apartment house. Down in the laundry. Naomi somebody- a close friend of his- told him she had a worm in her thermos bottle. At least, that's all we could get out of him." Boo Boo sighed, and came away from the window with a long ash on her cigarette. She started for the screen door. "I'll have another go at it," she said, by way of goodby to both women.
They laughed.
"Mildred," Sandra, still laughing, addressed Mrs. Snell, "you're gonna miss your bus if ya don't get a move on."
Boo Boo closed the screen door behind her.
She stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low, glaring, late afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards ahead of her, her son Lionel was sitting in the stem seat of his father's dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib sails, the dinghy floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the pier. Fifty feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski floated bottom up, but there were no pleasure boats to be seen on the lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its way over to Leech's Landing.