The cold from the concrete seeped through Ramona’s clothes. She wrapped her arms around her knees to keep warm as she watched a dried leaf scratch along the driveway in the autumn wind. She listened to the honking of a flock of wild geese flying through the gray clouds on their way south for the winter. They came from Canada, her father had once told her, but that was before he had gone away. Raindrops began to dot the driveway, and tears dotted Ramona’s skirt. She put her head down on her knees and cried. Why had she been so mean to her father? If he ever came back he could smoke all he wanted, fill the ashtrays and turn the air blue, and she wouldn’t say a single word. She just wanted her father back, black lungs and all.

And suddenly there he was, scrunching through the leaves on the driveway with the collar of his windbreaker turned up against the wind and his old fishing hat pulled down over his eyes. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, as he got out his key. “Is that what all this boohooing is about?”

Ramona wiped her sweater sleeve across her nose and stood up. She was so glad to see her father and so relieved that he had not gone away, that anger blazed up. Her tears became angry tears. Fathers were not supposed to worry their little girls. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to be here when I come home from school! I thought you had gone away and left me.”

“Take it easy. I wouldn’t go off and leave you. Why would I do a thing like that?” Mr. Quimby unlocked the door and, with a hand on Ramona’s shoulder, guided her into the living room. “I’m sorry I had to worry you. I was collecting my unemployment insurance, and I had to wait in a long line.”

Ramona’s anger faded. She knew all about long lines and understood how difficult they were. She had waited in lines for her turn at the slides in the park, she had waited in lines in the school lunchroom back in the days when her family could spare lunch money once in a while, she had waited in lines with her mother at the check-out counter in the market, when she was little she had waited in long, long lines to see Santa Claus in the department store, and—these were the worst, most boring lines of all—she had waited in lines with her mother in the bank. She felt bad because her father had had to wait in line, and she also understood that collecting unemployment insurance did not make him happy.

“Did somebody try to push ahead of you?” Ramona was wise in the ways of lines.