Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she has ever seen. He gives her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay, and gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt. She decides she was right all along -- her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

Her “good life” continues for a year or so. The man with the big car, whom she calls “Boss,” teaches her what men will pay for. She lives in a penthouse and orders from room service whenever she wants. She rarely thinks of her family back home.

After the first year some signs of disease appear and her boss turns mean. He kicks her out on the street without a penny. She tries to do the same things on the street to make money to support her habit, but it doesn’t pay as much. As winter comes she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. Dark bands circle her eyes and her cough worsens.

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She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl lost and frightened in a big city. She starts to cry and whimper. For just a moment she has a memory of May in Traverse City when a million cherry trees blossom at once and her golden retriever dashes along chasing a tennis ball. She wonders why she left home and thinks to herself, “My dog back home eats better than I do now.” She thinks that more than anything else she wants to go home.

She finds a phone booth and makes three straight phone calls to an answering machine. She hangs up the first two times, but leaves a message the third time saying, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes seven hours on the bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City. She wonders if they got the message. She goes over what she will say to them: “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s mine. Dad, can you forgive me?”

The bus finally rolls into the station with air brakes hissing. The driver says, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” She thinks to herself: fifteen minutes to decide my life.

As she walks into the terminal, the scene is not one of the many she had thought about as she was riding on the bus. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs terminal stands a group of forty -- brothers, sisters, great aunts, uncles, cousins, a grandmother and a great grandmother to boot. They are all wearing goofy party hats and are blowing noise makers. Taped across the wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner which says, “Welcome home.”

Out of the crowd comes her dad. Through the tears she begins her speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know . .  .”  But then he interrupts her and says, “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet is waiting for you at home.”