The morning of my departure my father drove me to the depot. He had dressed, though it was a work day, in his after-work clothes, a loose summer shirt, old suit pants, his good shoes, the two of us alone again as in our old Sunday rides to church in the car’s intimate closeness.
“Does this bus from here going to take you all the way up to Ottawa?”
“I have to switch in Toronto.”
“Ah.”
He had a habit of leaning into the steering wheel as he drove to cradle it like a child, with the gesture now the sleeve of his shirt hiking up to reveal the flesh of his biceps, pale against the tauter bronze of his forearms, vulnerable and unformed like a teenager’s. I had the sense suddenly that in all the years I’d known him I’d never once dared to look at him squarely, to hold him whole in my sight, even now feeling merely this impression he was beside me, this peripheral blur, his arm on the wheel, his weight pressing down the cushioned velour of the seat.
“Do you have some kind of address or something if we have to write to you?”
“I don’t really know exactly where I’ll be yet. I left a phone number for the people in Ottawa with Aunt Teresa – they’ll know how to find me if you need to.”
A pause, the small tensing of resentment in him.
“It seems funny to me, you don’t even know where you’re going.”
“It’s not that, it’s just I don’t have the exact address yet. Anyway I’ll send it to you as soon as I have it.”
But I hadn’t imagined writing to him, had thought of this departure as somehow complete, no lines leading back.
At the bus stop there were a half dozen others waiting on the sidewalk, a few teenagers, a young man with a crew cut in a university jacket, two women in the stiff skirts and high-collared blouses of Mexican Mennonites, their baggage two bundles wrapped in blankets and twine. My father helped me lift my bags from the trunk, a duffel bag, an overstuffed backpack, what I’d whittled myself down to.
“You don’t have to write only every six months,” my father said. “My English isn’t that good to write, you know that, but I can manage all right to read it. Maybe your aunt can write in English.”
“You can write in Italian, I’ll understand it.”
We stood a few minutes in silence. My father looked at his watch.
“Looks like it’s late,” he said.
But a minute later the bus rolled around the corner. My father, wallet in hand, went up to the driver as he stepped down.
“Hold your horses, buddy,” the driver said, moving past him. “Let me get these bags on first.”
His insolence stung me but my father seemed oblivious. When the driver returned my father peeled off a few bills for my ticket and then handed a sheaf of wrinkled fifties and hundreds to me.
“Something for the trip.”
I wadded the money awkwardly into a pocket.
“Thanks.”
I was the last to board. I wanted only to be gone but sensed the emotion welling in my father, the need for a gesture. I had only to embrace him, to brush my cheeks against his, the usual ritual of parting; and yet I had never done such a thing, couldn’t bring myself to do it now though my whole body felt impelled to.
“So I guess I’ll see you in a couple of years,” I said.
“Yep.”
And then I was already on the bus, without so much as a handshake, a touch. As the bus pulled away I had a last glimpse of him lingering there on the sidewalk, a lonely figure I’d never known, seeming still the sad stranger I’d sat beside years before on a Halifax train.