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Cass showed up last spring and told Liz he needed a cheap place to stay. Except for the purple welt on his cheek he looked like the same old Cass: tall, easy-boned, a slow and lazy grin.

"What about that dancer you been living with, Cass?"

"Done," he said. Something about her biker boyfriend. You never can get the whole story from Cass.

Liz told him to just pay her what he could. "You can help out around the place, keep the yard nice." Turns out, Cass isn't much on yard work.

Cass isn't Liz's boy. He's Elgin's and Elgin is Liz's ex. Now Elgin's in Grand Bend, shacking up in a summer cottage with a girl from the post-office and Liz has Cass thumping around upstairs in her house; a sorry, tapped-out duplex and Elgin's parting gift. That and the '56 Ford that squats under a tarp in the garage.

Today, Cass comes down wearing a clean pair of jeans and a white t-shirt, his sweet face still blank with sleep. He eases in behind the table, stretches his long legs out across the kitchen floor. Liz's dog Sil jumps up on him and paws at his chest.

"You got plans, next couple a weeks, Cass?"

Cass rubs at his eyes, then slides his hands over the backs of Sil's raggedy ears.

"Cass?" Liz lets out a sigh, spears him with a look. Cass smiles over at her like they are both in some kind of dream.

"Don't think I do," he says.

Liz stirs milk into her coffee and then pours some into Cass's mug. She drops a couple of sugar cubes in for him and hands him a spoon.

"That's good, that you'll be around Cass, 'cause I'm going into hospital for ten days." Liz taps her chest by way of explanation. "Sil's going to need you to look after him. Then there's groceries, things like that."

Cass lifts off his peaked cap and rubs his fingers through streaky blond hair. His eyes are brown, like Elgin's. "You that sick, Liz?"

Cass is sort of fool-headed sometimes. Can't put two and two together. Just like he couldn't see the trouble he was buying when he asked that dancer to stay. Cass was tending bar and she must of boo-hooed about how mean her boyfriend was. There she was, setting up house with Cass when the biker came to the door and swung one right in Cass's face. Crazy thing was, she must have given him her address.

"Why'd she do a dumb thing like that, Cass?" Liz had asked.

"Must have changed her mind about the guy I guess ... "

Either Cass is a little soft or maybe he's just true-blue. She thinks about the messes she bailed him out of, how he always told her thanks. And he was loyal to her in that mess with Elgin. "Dad's just an ass, Liz" he told her. She felt good when he said that. Especially since all she got out of those years with Elgin was this crummy cracked-up duplex and that old Ford of his that won't run ...

Cass goes out to the garage and Liz thinks about being sick. Recovery might take a long time they told her, depending on what they find in that chest of hers. And maybe more surgeries, or treatments up ahead. Patience isn't Liz's finest virtue. Elgin used to tell her that. And just what were his virtues, she'd like to know.

She sniffs thinking how it hadn't taken her long to sort things out after Elgin left. She'd burned his car magazines in the oil drum behind the garage, then she collected up the ashes and poured them into baggies, put the whole lot into his old lunch pail. When he'd come back for them, Elgin had rolled his frog-eyes: "What you go and do that for, Lizzie?"

Liz starts cleaning up the breakfast things, then gets ambushed by a spell, sinks down, sweaty and huffing, into the hard wooden chair. "Gawl" she says under breath. Sometimes it feels like her chest is on fire. She slides a piece of the Sunday paper over the morning's toast crumbs, thinks about how Elgin used to like to fix breakfast for her. Hot buttered pancakes with a heap of glistening sausage. "Tuck in, Lizzie." That grin of his. She sees it still, in Cass.

"Late Summer Sizzler Persists," the headline reads. The beach at Grand Bend will be busy, she thinks. Elgin will have the top down on that old convertible he drives, her sitting next to him with her frosted pink lipstick and her beach- strip sunglasses. What does a girl like that want with an old string bean like Elgin?

The problem with Elgin is that he keeps popping up. First there was the schmaltzy card from him on their anniversary: "Missing You ..." it said. Then there was a late night phone call just a month ago from Grand Bend. "She's out at the bar," he said.

Liz told him not to bother calling anymore. She felt no obligation, she said, to listen to his soppy stories. "After all, we aren't together now," she reminded him. "We're divorced."

She's still reading the paper when she hears the throaty growl of an engine in the drive. In the late afternoon glare, the shiny motorcycle looks like the only live thing in a sea of burned-out brown. A man sits slack and heavy on the seat, one boot tip high on the leg rest, the other balancing the bike on the uneven gravel. A thin-boned girl with brassy hair is wrapped around the rise of his stomach, her crotch deep in the man's back. The man yells out something and looks in the direction of the garage.

Cass emerges from under the slant of the garage's side door. He has been working on his truck and wipes the grease from his hands with a red rag. He wipes his hands slowly back and front and then slides the rag into the back pocket of his jeans. The man revs the motor of the bike once, swings a boot over the long seat, kicks out the stand and plants himself, facing Cass. The girl, small and sullen, stays perched on the seat, her eyes hidden behind oversized sunglasses that make her face seem bug-small.

Cass is kicking a stone away from the drive, his hands in his pockets, one leg looped easily in front of the other. He is saying something, but before he finishes, the man has one gorilla hand on Cass's throat and the other between his legs. He pushes Cass up against the side of the garage and Cass hangs there for a few seconds.

The girl is squealing something just as the man drives a fist hard into Cass's stomach and Cass sinks down to the ground. The man turns his head and spits with a great shaggy jab of his head. At the same time, when the man can't see, the girl balls up a piece of yellow paper and throws it so that it bounces off the corner of the garage and lands in the brown stubbled grass.

Liz bangs on the window, and the man jumps back onto the bike and gives her the finger. When she gets to Cass, he is just getting his wind back. He shakes his head and says that he's okay. Liz puts her hands on her hips for a moment then eyes the ball of paper the girl has thrown: when she picks it up, it's an address in girlie-round writing.

"This is Toronto," she says to Cass, who is dusting off the seat of his jeans.

"Yuh, I guess," he says.

Liz is peering at Cass now, beginning to comprehend.

"That dancer girl and her boyfriend, Cass?"

"Yuh. But let it go, Liz." he says.

"What they want?"

"Dunno," says Cass.

Cass goes upstairs and when he comes down he's carrying a blue and gold gym bag and looking clean the way Cass does, even after sprawling in the dirt on his behind. Liz doesn't ask him where he is going because she has memorized the address from the yellow piece of paper. He grins at her from beside the truck in the lane.

Liz wants to yank him back by the shirt collar and tell him to wisen up. People like that, Cass, she wants to say. What do you think you are you doing ... A feeling of dread is rising up, cutting off her air. She clutches the counter, looking wild-eyed around the kitchen: the harvest-gold range, the rattling fridge. Nothing is any different, she tells herself. Cass has pulled stupid stunts before. And she's always been there, she assures herself. Always been there to put things right when he's messed up. A snare of pain tightens around her chest and she leans over the kitchen sink,cupping cold water on her face. How is this different? How is it that all she can picture is Cass driving away on a black-topped highway, disappearing into the spray of light at the city's edge? And Liz left here clutching at her chest, slack-jawed and suddenly old.

Then her eyes find the garage, sealed up and quiet.

The old Ford is out there, she remembers. Covered with a dusty gray tarp, paint cans resting on the corners. The spell's beginning to drain a little from her chest now. Breathe, she tells herself. That's it. Keys: in Elgin's tobacco tin at the bottom of a kitchen drawer.

She's glad of the darkness, uses it to hide the shame she feels for needing Elgin's old car, even though she swore she'd never sit in it again. It's the car they rode in together, the windows down so that Elgin could plant his bony elbow out, one hand on the wheel the other on Liz, her head back, warm air badgering at her throat, a sideways look at Elgin ... When she pulls off the tarp she sees that the paint cans holding it down are full of hand-rolled dope butts. The car is surprisingly clean, though the front seat has broken open and white cushioning spills over the black vinyl. There are more butts in the ashtray and a wrench sits innocently on the high dark dash. She turns the engine over three of four times, but the car starts easier than she thought it would. The car sputters and dies two miles outside of town. She turns the key, but nothing happens. When she steps out, the night is full with the sound of crickets and the occasional car drifts by, the car lights swinging over the hulk of the Ford. Nobody stops to see if she needs a hand.

Her breath comes in terse little gasps and the pain is radiating around her chest again like a rubber band. She looks down at Elgin's keys in her hand. She's standing beside his old junker without a tool box or a phone. It's stunning, how he got the best of her: all his philandering and his moist-eyed regrets.

"No damn-good car," she swears, kicking at the tire. "Good for nothing - "

She feels fierce when she says it, but there is something else, too. A fatigue so heavy it's pushing up tears.

When the insurance man from town stops three-quarters of an hour later, he regards her with something between concern and professional interest.

"You alright?" he asks.

Sure. Sure she is. It's Cass she needs to think about. By now, Cass is likely spread- eagled in a quiet pool of blood, the girl shrieking, witless as a chicken and the biker hovering with his fists still balled-up ...

The next day she waits for Cass, forgetting to eat and going to the window whenever she hears a car go by. She thinks about calling up Elgin and asking for his help. "What do you want me to do Lizzie?" She could hear him say it now. "No law against going to see a girl."

She hates the waiting. Hates the foolish way it makes her pin her hair over and over. She starts to pace the hall and Sil runs around her in frantic circles. And to relieve the worry she fumes: "Never learns ... and with that girl ... how could he? ... at a time like this ... "

She thinks about how people surprise you, even the ones you feel you know best in the world. Like Elgin the night he told her about "being in love" with post-it girl, his eyes brimming with tears. "I just can't help it, Lizzie," he said.

It's past midnight when Cass pulls up. When she hears him thud up the stairs, she wraps her housecoat around herself and goes into the shadowed hallway.

"You okay?" Her voice comes out in a raspy burst.

"Yup." He looks down from the top of the stairs, the light resting on the side of his face from his open door. She expected that when she saw him all in one piece, tired but unsullied, she would feel like scolding him, but she has no air left to form the words. Instead, she's thinking about how things would be if Cass hadn't come back. How it would be for her in this big empty house alone, after surgery. She would have to find someone for Sil, and ask a neighbour to pick up groceries for her, though she would hate the asking. There isn't anyone but Cass she'd want to ask at a time like this.

The next day, Cass goes to work like always, but when he comes home she watches him water the bushes at the back of the yard. He uses a slow single stream of water and she wants to tell him to get the hose attachment out of the garage. It'll be a lot easier, she wants to say. But she doesn't say anything about the watering. She's still feeling the relief of him just being there, flesh and blood, standing with his back to her and waving the hose in a lovely swirling arch over the thirsty greenery.

"Cass?"

"Yup"

"Check-in time's 6:30 A.M. Tomorrow, County General. You gonna take me?"

"Yup."

She knows he's as good as his word. He's a good kid, Cass. Doesn't matter if he's Elgin's boy. She guesses it never did.

As she watches, the sun splashes over Cass, turns the stream of water from the hose into a pretty line of silver. "I done alright," she thinks, her chest filling with all that brightness.

"Cass?" she says. "Do somethin' for me?"

"Emm," says Cass, turning his easy brown eyes to her.

"You go out on the highway, tow in the Ford. Maybe you get a chance, you can get it running good again. Get it running like it used to."

"Yuh" says Cass.

She keeps her eyes steady on him:

"Turns out maybe we got somethin' here after all."