The wooden sign at the edge of town said PERTH in blue letters, and she read it twice from behind the wheel of the rental car. She was sixty. Her hip had been screaming since Ottawa, an hour back on the highway. Two weeks ago she had boarded a flight out of Calgary with two suitcases and left a drunk who lied about everything, and three cats she had fed that morning knowing she would not see them again. She had spent ten years waiting to feel better before living. She had stopped waiting. This was what stopping looked like: a rental car, a strange town, and her daughter's address written on a receipt on the dashboard. She pulled up to a light brown building with three floors, the bottom one sunk halfway into the ground. Her daughter came down the steps with the boyfriend behind her. They hugged on the sidewalk. The blue hard-shell suitcase sat on the curb next to a second bag, both scuffed from the belt in Ottawa. That was everything she owned now. She had budgeted her energy for the drive and the stairs, nothing more. She let them lift the heavier bag. The stairs to the second floor took longer than she wanted. She counted them going up, the way she counted most things these days. Her daughter held the door. The apartment smelled like someone else's cooking and someone else's soap. A folded sheet sat on the couch where she would sleep until they figured out something better. She set the blue suitcase against the wall and did not open it. Her daughter asked if she wanted coffee. She said yes. She sat down slowly, and the hip quieted by a degree, which was as close to relief as the day would offer. The boyfriend carried the last bag in and closed the door behind him. That was the end of the arrival. She was here now, under a roof that was not hers, in a town she had chosen from a list of places her daughter lived near. The quarantine hotel was done. The flight was done. The drive was done. What came next was the part she had not planned: how to build a life in a room that belonged to her child. She drank the coffee her daughter handed her and decided she would start tomorrow. Tonight she would sit, and the sitting would be enough.

A year and a half had passed since she set the blue suitcase against the wall. She was still on the couch. She had not looked for her own place, and no one had asked her to. The folded sheet had a shape now, worn into the cushions. On the morning of July 2, her son was driving to Lindsay to see her father in the hospital, and she was going with him. She had her shoes on. Her phone was in her hand, the glass warm from her palm. She had tried her dad twice for Father's Day and once for his birthday, and each time the line said the number was disconnected. She had told herself she would sort it out in person. She was reaching for the door when the phone rang. It was her brother. He said the words plainly. Her dad was gone. She stood in the doorway with her hand still on the knob and let the phone drop to her side. She had not said Happy Father's Day. She had not said Happy Birthday. She had not said goodbye. Somewhere behind her eyes a picture formed of him standing quiet in a blue shirt, glasses on, already turned slightly away, and she understood she would carry that picture now instead of a last conversation. Her daughter came out of the kitchen and saw her face and did not ask. They sat down on the couch that had been her bed for eighteen months, and they held each other and cried. Her hip burned. She let it burn. After an hour her daughter said they should go for a drive. Anywhere. Just out. She agreed because sitting had stopped helping. They took the car and drove past the edge of town and out onto a road with fields on both sides. Her daughter talked about him a little. She talked about him a little. Mostly they were quiet and watched the road. She did not try to make the grief into anything. She let it sit in the car with them like a third passenger. When they came back to the apartment that evening, she took her shoes off and set them by the couch again. The trip to Lindsay was not going to happen. The call she had been meaning to return could not be returned. Something in her that had still been waiting, quietly, for one more conversation with him, closed. She sat down on the sheet and understood that whatever life she was going to build here, she would build without him in it.