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hide at these stops. He walks with the swagger of someone who, for the moment, has the destiny of others in his hands. The semantics ofhis job pull him back to the reality of the morning as he lifts the sliding luggage compartment doors and begins to throw bags into the belly of the bus.
    Behind me the bus doors fold open with a mechanical sigh. I put my arms around Vern for a final hug. He hangs on for a moment after I let go.
    A part of me wants to tell him I’ll call for him when the time comes. That I will cry on his shoulder, lean on his strong body. But we both know it wouldn’t be true. Besides, I tell myself, there’s no need for him to be there. He only knows my mother from what I have told him. And she doesn’t know him at all. My mother gave up on the men in my life after my second husband. And for the last five years she’s been too busy dying.

Chapter Six
    I PLACE MY hand on the window in a silent wave to Vern as the bus backs away from the Greyhound station. He stands motionless beneath the neon sign, his shoulders hunched in his jacket, his hands thrust into his jean pockets. As his figure recedes into the morning mist I think about long ago summer mornings when I stood watching a bus pull away with my daughter on board. And I remember feeling that same sense of sadness and panic I now read on Vern’s face.
    When Jenny was ten years old I gave into my mother’s pleas to let her spend part of her summers at the farm. I couldn’t deny my daughter the chance to know her family. They were all she had besides me. Jenny’s father died when she was seven. He had no family to offer her. The men in my life were loving and loved by Jenny, but they had no shared history, no roots. Her uncles, Morgan and Carl, so different, so inseparable, both live on Queen Charlotte Island, off the West Coast. Jenny has seen them only sporadically over the years. Their infrequent visits were filled with laughter, joking and teasing. They bounced their only niece between them, jostling for her attention and adoration during their brief stops. But for the most part, while Jenny was growing up, I was it, the only real family she had. I was not enough.
    While I continued to find excuses not to return to Atwood, Jenny became my surrogate. The buffer between me, and Mom and Boyer. And every summer, after I put her on the bus, I began to worry that while she was there she would hear the old gossip. When she returned at the end of each visit I listened carefully as she shared her adventures. I listened and watched for any hint of a change in how she saw me; any sign of disappointment in finding out I wasn’t who she thought I was.
    The Greyhound bus pulls onto the highway, and just like every time I return to Atwood, I fight the panic I feel rising in my chest. I’ve only been back twice since Jenny settled there. Both times I stole into town like a thief and stayed cooped up in her rented house by the hospital, hardly seeing the light of day. Each afternoon Jenny brought Mom over to visit–as if I was the one who was the invalid. I ventured outside only for my daily runs.
    In the early mornings, in the half-light of dawn, I ran north along the highway, avoiding the streets of the sleeping town. I wore a hooded jacket and kept my head down whenever a car approached. Still, it’s unlikely that anyone old enough to remember the Ward Dairy Farm would recognize this lean, middle-aged woman as the chubby farmer’s daughter who once delivered milk to their doors. And certainly no one would see any resemblance to the only Wards left in Atwood now, Mom and Boyer; or to the town’s newest doctor.
    I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. Jenny’s words haunt me. What is it that she needs to talk to me about? What can be so important that she can’t discuss it on the phone? If it isn’t about Mom, then is this finally the conversation I’ve been avoiding?
    I knew someday I would