She left the kitchen with the cake on the floor. I scraped it up, and sampled it from the dustpan, and it tasted like nothing. I’d never seen her waste food. I thought I was kind to leave her, so she could take better care of herself. Or I thought I was unkind to leave her, but I needed to stop living in her pain.

My bus arrived, blue and silver with tinted windows, blasting a warm toxic smell from its undercarriage. There were only six passengers. Bay picked up my backpack and my suitcase. “What do you have in here?” he said.

Peter Pan shirts and oxford shoes, a jacket, cold medicine, a Xeroxed copy of Evasion. “Nothing,” I said. I wanted him to leave my bags on the ground. I wanted him to invite me to meet his family.

“Doesn’t feel that way,” he said. He hoisted the bags into the hold. “You’ll want to keep your wallet,” he said, taking it from my backpack.

I looked searchingly at Bay. Behind him, the entrance of the tunnel arched over him, and the two rows of gold lights pointed right at his head. In the hills above him, a hawk fell like a spear.

Bay closed the hold’s door. “Why don’t you catch your bags in Durham, since there’s nothing in them,” he said. “There’ll be another bus in an hour.” The driver climbed into his high seat. He was going to carry away my bags, and I was not going to stop him. I watched the bus fall into the tunnel. Clouds blew over the sun, seeming to stop and start. A cold air was settling from the highest part of the sky. “Can I have my wallet?” I asked Bay.

He withdrew my wallet—an embroidered, Velcro-closed thing—and opened it. There was no money inside. “So I’m paying for dinner,” he said.

“I’m leaving in an hour,” I reminded him.

He found the photo of my father. “I was wrong, earlier,” he said, turning it back and forth in the light like a prism.

“I guess,” I said.

“He looks good,” Bay said, “like a good man.” My father and I didn’t have a relationship. He’d vanished, leaving me with a blurry assortment of sensations—it must have been him who gripped me by the arms and whirled me around when I was so small it didn’t hurt. He was the one who gave me a pair of glasses that turned all points of light into hearts. Or maybe I was just remembering what my mother told me.

“I’m glad he left,” I said. I’d thought this many times, but I had never said it aloud.