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upscale women’s clothing store in an area of the downtown called Historic Properties, and for years she’d been telling Jackie about the amount of money she was able to make, the clean, modern apartment she could afford, the almost-new car she was able to make payments on. Colleen had worked with Jackie for a brief time at Exception Elle in the new mall in New Glasgow, where Jackie still worked. She claimed all along that Jackie was much better at sales than she herself was and that any time she wanted to come to Halifax for a better job and a better life, Colleen would get her on at Gregor’s.
    She’d called Colleen a week ago, even before she’d kicked Arvel out of the house. Colleen had been as positive as ever.
    “You’ve finally come to your senses!” Colleen had said.
    “This is no joke, Colleen. I’m leaving … leaving Arvel,” she’d felt herself choke up just uttering the words, the words she’d formed in her mind already but had yet to speak. Arvel was at work, the kids were asleep, but she found herself crouching over the phone in a secretive manner and looking over her shoulder to see who might be there looking at her.
    “The way Arvel drinks. The way the two of us fight. This is not the kind of life I want for myself or for the girls. I told him I wanted to move to Halifax, but he’s on at the mine now and he thinks that’s the only thing he’s ever going to have to do. He refuses to see what this family really needs to better ourselves.”
    “So is Arvel just letting you go like that – Goodbye?”
    “Not on your life. He doesn’t know.”
    “You’re sneaking out?”
    “You don’t have to put it like that. I feel bad enough as it is. But this is the only way it will work.”
    “I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “If this is what you’re going to do, just come. You and the kids can stay with me until you get set up. Is this it? Is this the end, do you think?”
    Jackie paused. She looked around the tiny kitchen, lit only by the light from street lamps on Pleasant Street. “I don’t know. It feels like the end. I feel as though my whole life needs to be turned in a new direction.”
    She took the last drink of mint tea and looked at the kitchen. She wondered what she was headed for. It suddenly seemed unimaginable to her now, after more than six years of marriage: a life without Arvel, a life outside of Pictou County.
    Arvel had grown up in Albion Mines. Jackie had grown up in New Glasgow, a nearby town. She had no siblings, no aunts, uncles, or cousins. In the seven years since her parents passed away, her husband’s family had become her only link to a sense of rootedness or permanence. Her mother had a cousin in New Glasgow with whom Jackie was not on good terms. There were a few old friends from school, but most of the people she’d known then had gone off to university and either not come back, or come back changed and disconnected from her somehow. Colleen Chisolm had been her closest confidante after high-school graduation, and they had stayed in touch, but it had been years now since Colleen herself had moved to Halifax, and it was hard to stay close over that distance. Tomorrow she’d be living with Colleen and it would be Arvel who was a hundred miles distant.
    By looking around her, by examining the possessions they’d collected, she could trace a history of her life with Arvel. There was a pattern, as easily identifiable as the rings in the stump of a cut tree. Their bed, a ragged double mattress with no box spring and no frame, was from the meagre early period of their marriage. For a short time, a week, perhaps, it had been the only piece of furniture in their old apartment, a tiny one-bedroom on Bridge Avenue, bordering the Red Row. They had not conceived a child for the first time on this mattress. That had taken place before they were married, on a blanket at Melmerby Beach. But the first signs of the miscarriage which ended that pregnancy had started while she’d