Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she
is preparing for her father. "Dad, I'm sorry. I know I was wrong. It's not
your fault, it's all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?" She says the words over
and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn't apologized
to anyone in years.
The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit
the road, and the asphalt steams. She's forgotten how dark it gets at night
out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often,
a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.
When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest,
the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, "Fifteen minutes,
folks. That's all we have here." Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She
checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick
off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders
if her parents will notice. If they're there.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect, and not one of the
thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she
sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse
City, Michigan, stands a group of 40 brothers and sisters and great-aunts
and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They
are all wearing ridiculous-looking party hats and blowing noisemakers, and
taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner
that reads "Welcome home!"
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She looks through tears
and begins the memorized ...
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