Cover

Dedication

for

my mother

1

The night we left Ellen on the road, we were driving north up 252 near where it meets 202 and then crosses the Pennsylvania Turnpike. To the west were open fields, stretches of golden prairie grass and butterfly weed, the final line of sun splintering light through them; to the east, King of Prussia—gray industrial sites cast in dusk, cement trucks, cranes, and a maze of highways and expressways. The Blue Route was somewhere over there, too, like an amputated limb, started in 1967 but fourteen years later still unfinished, the pavement ending at a line of overgrown grass and trees where the money had run out. Teenagers learned to drive on it or partied there late at night. The road to nowhere, we called it. We drove. Cars switched on their headlights and straight ahead the hills of Valley Forge had become shadows, the trees already dark silhouettes.

The six of us were in the car, Marie up front in the passenger seat, Ellen between me and Thomas in the back, and Beatrice lying in the wayback, with all our school bags and work folders from the year spread around her. It was the last day of school, and we were officially on summer vacation. My mother was driving. Erratically. She hit the brakes, accelerated, revving high in first gear before shifting. She was angry. I could feel it in the car’s sickening motion, and from the seat behind I could see it in glimpses of her jawline, how it moved and twitched under the skin, even when she wasn’t speaking. She and Ellen had been arguing, Ellen pestering her about going to an art camp that summer.

“I told you no. That’s enough.” She called it promotional blackmail, sending home brochures in school bags, and it infuriated her. “I have enough to handle as it is.”

I was dreading the coming summer.