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wonders. Perhaps he should speak up, put aside his own trepidation about her departure. It might make things easier for her, he thinks, if he were to jump-start the conversation. But he’s by nature a quiet person, and so he says nothing.
    In the months after Ed’s death, Willard fully expected Marian to leave. Why would she want to stay with Ed gone? He supposed that she would move into Juliet, or to Swift Current, or back to Manitoba and her own people, but when she didn’t say anything and time passed, Willard thought about it less and less and became merely grateful that she’d decided to stay on for a while longer, although he had never come to believe that she was staying for good.
    He assumed people in town talked about the two of them living together in the house but he decided he didn’t care about gossip if Marian wasn’t bothered by it. In the long hours of winter, Willard grew to prefer Marian’s company to his own, although he had never really lived with just his own company. Ed and Marian had married late in life (or at least late in Ed’s life; he was a good ten years her senior) and before her arrival the two brothers had lived, always, together. Ed, the cantankerous older brother who once joined the Communist Party of Canada and talked at great length to whoever would listen about the benefits of living in Mother Russia, and Willard, the eccentric younger brother who never joined any questionable political movements but provided plenty to talk about anyway.
    Willard’s most famous exploit was buying Antoinette the camel so he could sell camel rides to tourists passing through on the Number One Highway. He came up with the idea after he heard the provincial minister of tourism talk about the uniqueness of the Saskatchewan landscape and about how Americans were generally better than Canadians at recognizing potential gold mines in the tourist industry.
    Willard looked around. He saw sand. He bought a camel from a wild animal park in Alberta and painted a huge sign in the shape of a cactus, saying, snake hills camel rides: see the desert the way god meant you to. The sign, which Willard stuck in the ditch by the approach to the drive-in, drove Ed crazy because he was an atheist. It also irritated Ed that, in the spring when the ditch was full of runoff, the cactus appeared to be growing not in the desert, but in standing water.
    When Willard came home with Antoinette, the people of Juliet were well entertained. They said Willard bought the camel because Ed had kicked him out of their double bed when he married Marian. They referred to Marian and Antoinette as the Shoenfeld women. Much of the teasing about the camel was to Willard’s face and he took it good-naturedly, as was his character. He had Antoinette for three years and, even though she was as ornery as Ed and didn’t work out as a tourist attraction, he became attached to her. He found out that Canadians don’t stop for the Canadian version of American trends, assuming (probably correctly) that they won’t be as good as the American counterparts. And the Americans, who did stop because they were used to such things, expressed their disappointment by saying, “One camel? You’ve got just the one?”
    Despite the fact that Antoinette was not a roaring financial success, Willard kept her and fed her, and when she appeared to be sick he called the vet, who was not a camel expert but did his best. Ed didn’t think Antoinette was worth the vet bill and didn’t hide the fact that he hoped she would die on Willard. He hated it when neighbours who had guests from other parts of the country would bring them to see the camel, especially if they had children visiting. Sometimes Willard would give them free camel rides just so he could enjoy Ed’s predictable irritation.
    One morning after Willard had had Antoinette for three years, he woke up and she was gone. He picked up her tracks north of