" The Children Stay "

by Alice Munro

 "The Children Stay" appeared as the fifth story in the collection  The Love of a Good Woman (1998).
The book includes the following stories:

• "The Love of a Good Woman"
• "Jakarta"
• "Cortes Island"
• "Save the Reaper"
• "The Children Stay"
• "Rich as Stink"
• "Before the Change"
• "My Mother's Dream"

Story Summary

The text is speaking about a family who go on the east coast of Vancouver Island on vacation. The place was chosen by the grandfather of
the husband Brian.Brian is an energetic math teacher. His wife Pauline is studying her lines for an amateur production. The young couple
has two small daughters. During the vacation Pauline went accoss the river to walk with her little daughter. In september she will back home in victoria. Jeffrey Toom is the director of an amateur production of Anouih's '' Eurydice'' the place where Pauline was studying.

Jeffrey is a son of a widowed french teacher and he is spending the summer with his mother and working as night clerk in a downtown hotel. he is 25, a year younger than Pauline and invite her to play the lead role in ''Eurydice'' because he didn't want a girl who looked ethereal. The family holiday is important to him and he is grateful to Pauline for agreing to go, along and not being miserable.Pauline and Brian talk about the play. "Logically, I can see killing yourself so you won't turn into your parents," Brian says. "I just don't believe
anybody would do it." Jeffrey had once invited Pauline to Vancouver and told her"I just wanted you in my bed. First she had refused. After she wonders if she should have gone. Jeffrey, who is staying at a motel near their vacation spot, calls her. Pauline makes an excuse to meet him, and then calls her husband and tells him she is with him. Her husband wasn't surprise. She thinks about the things she has given up. When she got to the motel, Jeffrey said that he had decided that they must stay together and that Pauline would go with him to Washington State where he would be teaching college drama in the fall. The next morning, when she goes in her town to get some things, she remembers of her children, Caitlin, 5, and Mara, 16 months. Brian had said, "Remember. The children stay." Thirty years later, her children grown and they don't hate or forgive her.