Her voice sharp enough to cut paper, she says, “I was six weeks old when my mother left me. Dumped me under her sister’s lilac bush in an old canvas bag and took off. I don’t know—or care—what happened to her, and who knows who my father was. I’m leaving for three hours, and you have a mother and a father. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

She’s out the side door before I can say another word.

Cassie’s dark blue eyes gaze up at me. I never even held her before. What if she poops?

She smiles at me. Dimples in her fat little cheeks. Her gums two bumpy pink ridges. Blindly I shove the nipple between them and she starts to suck. Bubbles gurgle into the bottle. Her eyes stick to mine, growing heavier and heavier until she falls asleep.

I don’t know what to do next, so I don’t do anything. Just sit there, feeling the weight of her, somehow knowing this is how it’ll be from now on.

I got that right.

After beating four eggs into a froth, I pour them in the warm frying pan and drop bread in the toaster. The eggs cook nice and fluffy. The toast doesn’t burn. But when I reach in the cupboard for plates, my chest muscles seize up, pain zapping me like an electric shock.

Cassie says, “He’s scary.” Carefully I put the plates on the counter and dole out the

eggs. “Yeah, he is.”

“Rover’s scared of him too.”

Him. He. Like he’s God. I sit down across from her and spoon jam on her toast. “Smart, that skunk. But I’ll look after both of you, Cassie. You don’t have to worry about Floyd. Now eat up.”

As she digs her fork into the eggs, she’s still scowling. On impulse I say, “Want to go to MacTaggart’s Store this morning?”

It’s two kilometers away on Route #539, the nearest paved road. “Walk?” she says. She likes dawdling along the road, picking flowers from the ditch. I’m the one who ends up carrying her piggyback.

“We’ll take the ATV. As long as we stick to the trails, the cops won’t bug us. You have to wear your helmet.”

Her scowl’s gone like an eraser passed over it. “I saved forty-seven cents.”

“You can buy candy.”

“Gummi bears.”

We follow the trail along the river, then cut in to the store past Beaver Lake. Before Floyd enrolled me in hockey, he taught me to skate there, the winter I was five. I remember asking him, after I’d fallen down for the umpteenth time, why God made ice so hard. I’d heard about God from Kendra, who worked at Happy Whale Daycare; I wasn’t sure I wanted two fathers.

“So you’ll quit falling down,” Floyd said.