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up to it she clambered up its entry steps. The bus driver grinned at her, but she was too out of breath from running to reproach him. She reclaimed her seat by the window asthe bus rolled forward again, and glanced back at the ice cream parlor falling behind, suddenly remembering she hadn’t paid for her cone. Somehow guilt evaded her. In her mind, she had done the boy’s job for him. She had earned it. Melancholy seized her. She had worked there for years. Where would she work now? How could she possibly work anywhere else for the summer? Just about every summer of her life she had spent scooping in that pink shop.
    The bus continued past the area where she grew up, and she could picture her home, standing right next to the Red Barn Playhouse. Every morning she would wake to the sound of actors singing and rehearsing for plays such as The King and I , or Camelot . The house was so perfectly and acoustically situated next to the theater that she didn’t need a stereo. There was always music in the summer when the windows were open. It was a happy house, but now she pictured it weeping. Yes, she decided, houses could weep. She imagined yellow and green paint running down the shutters as the new owners desperately painted over it with the ugly white they chose. The house hated the face-lift. This she knew. She wanted to break into the warehouse where everything her family owned was stored away temporarily and tear open the boxes. She worried about the geographic scattering of the American family and the evaporation of hometowns. If only she could become a hermit crab, carrying her home with her, switching shells only as she grew and needed to switch shells.
    Eyeing ducks flying north through her window, she became caught up in the irony. Who heads south in the spring? Her trip south seemed like a defiance of nature, of everything seasonal. She closed her eyes. Her head slumped forward until it rested against the cold, misty-morning glass of the window. With each bump, her forehead banged against the pane. She liked the bumps. The repetitive thumping seemed to replace the pain of leaving everything comfortable behind.
    Gazing out the bus window, she didn’t want to leave. She felt like a potted plant turned upside down and getting hit. She wasn’t ready to be repotted. There was still room to grow right here. She’d rather sit outside the local bakery on Butler Street early in the morning and read the paper with the other locals. Then again, with the businesses sold and her parentsgone, she could no longer classify herself as a local.
    She watched Saugatuck, with its mammoth, rolling dunes to the west and the rich hues of the orchard country to the east grow smaller. She noticed her memories growing larger as she left behind the place where she grew up, the place she called home. Just a half a mile south, the bus entered the village of Douglas, and she caught a glimpse of the S.S. Keewatin , a passenger steamship that once sailed the Great Lakes, before it became a floating maritime museum. She longed to stay anchored there with the Keewatin.
    She didn’t want to leave the Great Lake State, the eleventh largest in the country. She loved Michigan. The Great Lakes formed most of its boundaries to the east, while Ohio and Indiana bordered the south and Wisconsin bound the west. She didn’t want to leave her hometown. It was like a mitten on the map. The mitten felt cozy and comfortable to her now. She didn’t feel like taking it off.
    Should she have stayed? Should she have talked longer with Rebecca’s mother? Would there be a funeral? Of course there would be, and she would miss it. She had no choice, like a dislodged plant. She had a flight to catch in Chicago. If she could have hopped into the ice cream freezer and numbed herself for a few hours, she would have.
    As she boarded the plane, she imagined the way her good-bye with Rebecca was supposed to have happened.
    “Hey, I want you to do something,” Rebecca would