MY LIFE IN CARS by Carol Ghiglieri
1964 Nash Rambler
The first was a red and white station wagon. There aren’t any pictures of it, and my sister Maggie insists it wasn’t red but brown. This was the car that ushered me home from the hospital, held by my mother in a tattered yellow blanket, my father at the wheel. No car seats back then, and the safety belts rarely used. This was the nineteen sixties.
I was the sixth to arrive, so the thrill must have been gone for my mother. Six babies in eight years, although only five pregnancies because she’d managed to get in a set of twins, much to her surprise because there were no ultrasounds back then either. After my mother pushed out Corinne, the doctor delivered this piece of news: There’s one more to go. I wonder what went through her mind, but there was no time to think. Sonia wasn’t far behind: seven minutes, according to the baby book, recorded in my mother’s perfect script beside a few dark wisps of Sonia’s hair. Not even my mother’s doctor had suspected twins, which makes me think she should have found another doctor, but my sisters were small, the two of them together only slightly heavier than I, born two years later at the hands of that same obstetrician.
You would think that after Corinne and Sonia my parents would have seen fit to stop. Five children. Four girls, one boy. A little lopsided but hardly a tragedy. But my parents were Catholic, my father devout, and family planning was relegated to the heavens. For their sixth they no doubt wanted a boy, but they got a daughter, the last baby to be carted home from the hospital in that Rambler.
The Rambler also took me to the hospital one time, a year before we got rid of it, blood gushing from my newly split forehead. My mother was at her best in an emergency, and she carried me to the car, pressing a kitchen towel to my forehead, and gunned it to Pill Hill. I was only five but already I’d beaten out all my siblings for the family’s bloodiest accident, requiring twenty-three stitches.
1968 Mercury Comet
My father drove a powder-blue Comet. It was his car, not ours, driven mainly to and from work, and we kids were rarely in it. Maybe for that reason, there was something sad about that car, an emblem of all his frustration and longing. “Your father’s not cut out for business,” my mother used to say. What exactly he was cut out for she never told us. He was a loan officer in a bank downtown, and he brought his tunafish sandwiches in a blue lunchbox and ate alongside a shallow creek. He made loans to local businesses, and he hated to turn anyone down, choosing to believe that everyone who sat at his desk was a pretty good risk.
Whenever I think of the Comet I picture it moving up Telegraph Avenue on a sunny afternoon, my father steering with me at his side. The year was 1972 or 3, and in those days the northern end of Telegraph was a magnet for hippies: girls flashing peace signs in hip-hugger jeans, long-haired boys in tie-dyed shirts saying Fuck you to the establishment. My father, nearing 40, was dressed in khakis and a cardigan sweater, with a bank job and six kids, establishment all the way.
“Look at them,” he said as the Comet’s engine thrummed at a stoplight. I didn’t know what he wanted me to see. Was he making fun of the hippies, or did he wish he could get out and join them?
1974 Chevy Impala Station Wagon
We bought the station wagon new, a stretch on my father’s salary, but his brother-in‑law, my uncle Stan, owned a Chevrolet dealership and he cut my dad a good deal. In its early years the car was shiny, a bright, optimistic blue, like a June sky unmarred by clouds, our home away from home, all eight of us. Later the paint oxidized in patches on the hood, its luster slowly worn away.
The Chevy transported us to school, to Sunday Mass, to Stinson Beach on warm summer weekends, and further afield when we went on vacation – to Tahoe and Santa Cruz and once to Yosemite where we saw Half Dome and stayed in a cheap motel. The Chevy was the vehicle of our best days. When it was full, the seating arrangement was thus: I sat in front between my mother and father. Tibby, Sonia, Corinne, and Maggie were sandwiched in the backseat, and Michael, the oldest, claimed sovereignty in the way back, as far away from the rest of us as possible.
It was on one of these car trips, winding through the Sierras, that our mother told us about her life, the brief one she’d had before she met our father, in which she seemed to be an entirely different person from the woman who lived in our house cutting out coupons and ironing pillowcases, besieged by headaches and backaches and tired legs, always tired legs, although she hardly ever left the house.
What none of us had known was that she’d been engaged to marry someone named Marshall Shepard before she married our father. Marshall Shepard. She practically sang his name.
“How old were you?” asked Tibby.
“Oh, really young. Eighteen, nineteen. What a character he was. He was a master of impressions. He could do everybody. And he was fearless. He’d do an impersonation of the principal right to his face.” She laughed hard, our mother who was always so sullen.
“What did he look like?” asked Corinne.
She offered a few vague descriptions: dark wavy hair and pretty good looking.
“Why didn’t you marry him?” I wanted to know.
“Things just didn’t work out. That happens sometimes.” She said that he went on to live a ”very different kind of life.”
“Different how?”
“He wasn’t Catholic, for one thing.”
“He’s a movie director,” my father said. “In Hollywood.”
“Is he famous?” This came from Michael all the way in the back.
My mother was staring out her window and I didn’t think she’d heard him, but then she finally answered: “A little.”
In the fall of 1978 Michael moved even farther away from us, to Oregon for college. One day that December, right before Christmas vacation, my mother came to pick my sisters and me up from school. Normally we walked home, all except Tibby, who went to high school and took the bus. But that day it was raining and the agreement was that when it rained our mother would come collect us.
We didn’t go home but instead drove to Dr. Bertino’s office. She parked on a side street, fed the meter, and left the four of us there to entertain ourselves – that was her phrase. When Maggie whined, “What are we supposed to do?” she snapped, “Get your homework done.”
When she came back an hour later she had nothing to say, just got in and started driving, accompanied by the metronomic slap of the windshield wipers. Maggie was in front, her wavy-soled shoes pressed against the glove compartment, the kind of thing our mother normally wouldn’t tolerate. But now she didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s for dinner?” Maggie asked.
This elicited no answer. We knew our mother’s silent treatment, but what had we done to deserve it?
“Why’d you go see the doctor?” Maggie asked.
My mother changed lanes, ignoring Maggie.
“Are you sick? Why won’t you say anything? Are you mad at us?” Maggie kept lobbing questions. The rest of us could see it was pointless, but that was Maggie. Persistent.
When we got home, our mother didn’t get out of the car. Tibby was there and she let us all in. “Where’s Mom?” she asked.
“In the car,” I said.
“What’s she doing out there?”
“Just sitting.”
This fact didn’t seem to trouble Tibby, who was sixteen with a boyfriend, her curiosity now reserved for matters beyond our family. But it troubled me. My mother sat for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, eerily still, like a store mannequin. I went outside and stood by her door, the window rolled up because it was still raining.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“Go back inside.”
“Who’s going to make dinner?”
“Your father can order pizza when he gets home. Now go back inside.”
When my father did get home a short while later, he knocked on her window, but she acted like she didn’t hear him.
“How long has she been out there?” he asked when he came in.
“A long time,” I said.
My mother shook off her troubles and rallied for Christmas. Michael was home. The tree in the living room glimmered with tinsel and lights, there were presents on Christmas morning, and my favorite aunt and uncle came down from Sonoma. Everything was your standard boilerplate Fitzgerald Christmas. All except the moment after dinner when my mother and my aunt Paulette huddled out on the back porch steps smoking. My mother was crying. Their voices were low and I listened as hard as I could to pick out pieces of their conversation, but the only thing I got, because my mother said it three or four times was: “I don’t know how it happened.” And then my aunt: “You must be a sound sleeper.”
It was several years before I realized they were talking about Christopher, who was born the following July, James and Stella Fitzgerald’s seventh and final child.
1980 Cadillac Fleetwood
The only time I’ve ever been inside a limo was April 10, 1980, the day of my father’s funeral. All that luxury gone to waste because we were too stunned to notice or care. Nine days we’d had from the hour of his diagnosis to the moment he gave his last gasp. Lung cancer. Except for my mother and Tibby, none of us had anything black to wear. Michael wore a navy-blue blazer. The rest of us wore dark-colored coats and kept them on over our outfits. My mother held Christopher on her lap, and he cried all the way to the church as if he knew where we were going and why, but he wasn’t even a year old yet.
1977 Chevy Vega
The summer after he finished college Michael moved back home, which stunned me because I’d assumed that once somebody left they’d have the good sense to stay gone. That was what I intended to do. He’d had a girlfriend in Oregon, according to Maggie who’d taken a bus up to visit him over Easter vacation. Her report on the girlfriend was barbed and concise: flat boobs, no great shakes, Michael could do better. Maybe Michael thought so too, although Sonia speculated something else had come between them, some weird sense Michael had that he was now the man of the family and ought to move back home.
“If Michael still believes in that sort of patriarchal bullshit, he deserves whatever sad life he gets,” Maggie said.
In the fall he took a job teaching history to high school kids who had to call him Mr. Fitzgerald. I was the only sister still living at home – the others were away at college: Tibby in her fifth year at San Diego State, Maggie and Corinne both at Cal Poly, and Sonia, with the best brains, at UCLA.
But what good was college, I wondered, if all it did was land you right back where you started? Michael and his diploma were now up in his old room living down the hall from the brother he’d always wanted, except that brother, Christopher, was young enough to be his son.
My uncle sold Michael a silver and black Chevrolet Vega with 35,000 miles, and it was in that car that I learned to drive. It had a five-speed manual transmission which made maneuvering about five times harder. “Once you get the hang of it you’ll never want to drive anything else,” Michael assured me. He gave me lessons in the parking lot behind Golden Gate Fields, which was where our father had taught him.
I was the first of my friends to get my license and I borrowed the Vega from Michael as often as he’d let me. “No drinking,” he made me promise, and I said yes, no drinking, because at that point my drinking days were still ahead of me. That winter the night was new, and simply being out in it, under my own power, was intoxicating enough anyway. My friends and I would get slices of pizza or drive around aimlessly, just happy to be out of the house, listening to the tape deck or the sound of the tires passing over slick streets after a heavy rain.
We were Catholic-school girls. We’d all been baptized and made our first communion, went to church on Sunday mornings. Did my friends believe Jesus had risen from the dead, or that Mary, his mother, gave birth without having sex? We never discussed these things. For my friends and me religion was like the sky or the Bay Bridge – ever present, but we didn’t think much about it.
At least I didn’t. But apparently Hilary did. Her family and their neighbors had gone camping in Tuolumne Meadows for Memorial Day and a massive 60‑foot oak tree came violently uprooted and crashed down on top of their tents. The other father was killed, and the son, who was just eleven, would likely end up a vegetable.
She told me all this on the phone, and I relished the grim horror of it as I passed the news along to Dana and Kristi, lingering over that word vegetable, without grasping what it really meant.
That Friday night I picked up my friends. Hilary was fresh from the funeral, her mood dark and solemn, so we drove up to Grizzly Peak and stared soberly at the bay.
Hilary recounted again the story of the falling tree, using the words “freak accident,” which is what the newspaper had called it. The fact of it and its details were shocking, but this above all is what she wanted us to know: “Just two minutes earlier, I was inside the tent. Two minutes. Two minutes later and I would have been dead.”
We were silent. Dusk was receding and the lights of Oakland and Berkeley began to blink on beneath us.
“It makes you think about God,” she said. “How he’s up there, looking out for you.”
Dana and Kristi seemed to agree with this version of things. We were sixteen, best friends, and our friendship was founded on likeness and agreement, on seeing ourselves mirrored back in one another. But I knew right then that I didn’t have their faith. I didn’t believe God was looking out for Hilary, or me, or anyone. I believed that if I was going to get anything in life, I would have to do it all myself.
1984 Chevrolet Monte Carlo
During my junior year of high school my mother finally unloaded the station wagon and bought a blue two-toned Monte Carlo. It was used but not very, and my uncle, who had continued to prosper, expanding his auto empire so that he now had multiple dealerships, surely looked on our family with a sense of obligation if not outright pity, and he gave her the car for next to nothing. He and my aunt Maureen lived in a Piedmont mansion with a garden the size of a small park and a sensible number of children: two.
When my father died, my mother immediately got rid of the Comet. She got rid of all his things, which at the time I assumed she’d done out of grief. But now this purge strikes me as an act of rage. Rage that he’d trapped her at home with six children, and then slipped in a seventh without even asking, and then didn’t bother to stick around to see that last one through. And maybe even rage she’d married him in the first place when she might have been the wife of a Hollywood director who made lots of money and believed in birth control.
I hated the Monte Carlo. But for the next two years it got me where I was going. I was seldom in my right mind in that car. I was a junior now, and while I still ate lunch with my old friends, I’d also forged new alliances with the popular crowd, which meant that I was invited to the parties that took place every weekend, usually at Dan Wixon’s house because his parents were either out or simply didn’t care what Dan and forty of his friends were doing downstairs in the basement – which was, for the most part, getting hammered. We single-mindedly drank liquor and smoked bowls of weed, flooding our systems with vodka and chemicals, dampening the circuits of our adolescent brains. At half past midnight I’d get into the Monte Carlo and magically end up at home.
A lot of people drank beer at those parties, but my friend Annie and I hated the taste of it, so we would drive to a liquor store in a dicey part of town and ask some guy to buy us a pint of vodka or rum, and nine times out of ten he’d do it. Once, a guy tried to force his way into the Monte Carlo. “Where’s the party?” he asked us. Annie hurled the bottle of rum he’d just handed over so that it smashed against the parking lot pavement, and the guy asked her if she was crazy. I pulled the door shut and started the ignition, leaving him on the curb staring after us. We were chastened by this episode, but only for a few weeks.
Another time Annie and I had some trouble up near the Claremont Hotel. We’d purchased a bottle of rum in the usual fashion and mixed it with Pepsi in clear plastic cups, killing time before a party in the Berkeley hills that wouldn’t get rolling until eleven. It was April. We were seniors. Graduation was only a couple months off. In the fall Annie would enroll at Chico State, and I would begin at Cal State Hayward, a commuter school fifteen miles from my house. I’d been planning to move away for college but my mother informed me there was no money for that. What little she’d set aside was gone.
It was a warm night and the Monte Carlo’s windows were down and we were sipping our drinks when two guys showed up, one on each side of the car. They had guns, which they proudly displayed next to our faces, although we were just a couple of high school girls and they could easily have robbed us without this show of force. The one on my side reached in and yanked my purse, which was slung across my body, and something similar happened to Annie in the passenger seat. The whole episode lasted 90 seconds, and maybe it was the rum, but I wasn’t afraid. I thought the gun looked fake, although I’d never seen a real gun so I had no way of knowing.
I did know that my keys were in the ignition and my wallet had fallen to the floor, so the guy on my side got nothing but a tube of lip gloss and a pack of spearmint gum. Annie’s robber fared a bit better, getting her wallet, which contained thirteen dollars and her driver’s license. But he also got her keys, which meant that he would be able to let himself into her house when no one was home and steal everything.
I took Annie home and was back at my house by ten-thirty. My mother was already in bed, and I didn’t wake her. In the morning I thought briefly about telling her what had happened, but over the years I’d rarely gotten what I needed from her, and it seemed more sensible not to try.
1984 Subaru Hatchback
The week after Annie and I were robbed, Brian Finch asked me out. I didn’t know Brian, although I knew who he was. For a long time he’d had a girlfriend who went to another school, so he rarely showed up at our parties. But everyone knew Brian. He was a swimmer, and he managed to be both brainy and cool, the kind of synthesis that usually took decades to master. A group of us were sitting in Dan Wixon’s driveway when Brian asked if I wanted go with him to see his brother’s band. Up to now, I hadn’t had much luck with boys, and I tried to hide my amazement at his invitation.
On our second date we made out in his car, and on our fourth date, in seats that fully reclined, we had sex. Before he unzipped my jeans he sought my permission, which I granted. My desire wasn’t equal to his – I had yet to experience the genuine wallop of lust – but I liked him, it was the end of senior year, and things were about to change.
Sex wasn’t new to him, but even so he wasn’t very good at it, something even I could tell. He climbed over the gear shift and squirmed on top of me, his body heavy and awkward, his large hands hasty and all over the place. He was eighteen, driven by imperatives I didn’t understand, and I felt somewhat beside the point.
In the days afterward I was terrified I might be pregnant and thought about how I’d get rid of it if I was. I avoided Brian at school. He wanted to go out again, but I made up excuses that were partly true. We were graduating. I was busy. I wanted to be out with my friends. And anyway he’d gotten into Princeton and would be moving away in a couple of months. Moving away. How I loved the sound of that.
1983 Honda Civic
A four-year-old Honda Civic with 28,000 miles, yellow as a goldfinch, a graduation gift from my uncle, scooped up from one of his used lots. For years the Honda got me to and from school, where I majored in English because one of my high school teachers told me in passing I had a nice way with words. I waitressed at a restaurant called the Happy Sombrero, a Mexican place that also served prime rib, cobb salad, and all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch.
In my last year of college, I got a job at a better restaurant, I moved into my own apartment, and I fell in love. I once heard my mother tell Maggie that in every relationship one person loves more. She said this the way she said so many things, with a mix of bitterness and resignation. But why couldn’t you find someone to love equally, I wondered. And yet with Joel, there was no doubt I was the one who loved more. I loved him desperately, with a love that was like eating shards of glass.
The summer after I graduated, I sent off a few applications to graduate schools at the suggestion of one of my professors. I don’t know why I did it because I already felt some portal had closed, that I’d missed my last chance for escape. By the time she was my age, my mother had Michael and was pregnant with Tibby, her life completely sewn up.
By that summer, Michael and all my sisters were married. Boom, boom, boom, wedding after wedding after wedding, all coupled off by the age of 23, all living within twenty miles of the house we grew up in – even Sonia, the family prodigy, who’d studied physics in college and looked like she might actually go out and do something with her life beyond our limited imaginings. But she met a cute guy in a bar and she threw it all over. They settled into an apartment complex in Pleasant Hill, and in a matter of weeks she was pregnant. Everybody was pregnant already, once or twice over, a fact that appalled me. What was the rush? Hadn’t they learned anything from our mother?
And yet I was halfway making plans to get married and move to the suburbs myself. Joel and I hadn’t talked about marriage, and part of me knew he would never commit to me, but we made each other laugh, and our sex was electric. Most of my siblings had forged marriages of flimsier stuff. And what were my other options?
In March I got a letter from the University of Chicago, a place I’d chosen only because it was where one of my professors had gone. I read and reread the letter, looking for a catch. They’d included some money, but even so I knew I wouldn’t go. We Fitzgeralds didn’t. We stayed put, aimed low and made do. I did not believe in God but I believed in fate and DNA. I didn’t even tell Joel about the acceptance. I knew he would never consider going with me and I didn’t want to hear him say it.
A few nights after the letter arrived I was meeting him and his friends at a restaurant in North Berkeley. I decided to take the freeway, and almost as soon as the Honda got up to speed I heard a loud pop and lost control of the car. This stretch of freeway was eight lanes across with a divider down the middle, and I began fishtailing wildly across the northbound lanes. I tried to steer and jam the brakes, all the while thinking: I am going to die now. The Honda whipped around and finally came to a stop on the median facing the opposite direction. I’d blown a tire at 60 miles an hour, according to the highway patrolman who pulled up a few minutes later.
A tow truck arrived and I rode in the cab with the driver as he hauled the Honda to a nearby garage. I sweet-talked him into taking me to Berkeley, and as I got out of the truck he handed me his number, written inside an orange matchbook that said Always on Our Tows.
Joel and his friends were already eating pasta and drinking red wine out of mason jars when I got to the restaurant. I hardly knew Angus or his girlfriend, Kate, and Joel greeted me casually as if he hadn’t noticed I was an hour and twenty minutes late. He didn’t seem curious about where I’d been or worried that something terrible might have happened to me. For a brief moment in that noisy trattoria I saw the bare truth of my life.
“I had an accident,” I said to the table. “I had a blowout on the freeway.” They all looked at me.
“Really?” said the girlfriend. “That sounds dangerous.”
Joel put his arm around me and said, “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. Angus told a story about having to change a tire in Death Valley when it was 105 degrees, and the conversation turned to feats of endurance – 22‑hour drives without sleep, that kind of thing. Angus and his girlfriend had a bunch of them.
When Joel tried to undress me that night I pushed him off. I was too upset to let him touch me. For the next few weeks I carried Chicago around with me, like a hot coal burning in the palm of my hand. I thought about tearing up the letter and sprinkling it out my apartment window like confetti. Then one day while we were driving around in the Civic I told Joel about it while we idled at a stoplight. He waited until we got where we were going and then said exactly what I’d expected him to: You should go.
“What about Joel?” my mother said accusingly when I told her, as if I were about to run off with the milkman. She didn’t even like Joel, but now she used him against me. It took me a few years to understand what a favor my crummy boyfriend had done me. If he’d loved me just a little bit more I would have assumed I’d gotten my due.
2012 Lexus LS
You don’t need a car in Chicago. Or in New York, or Rome. Driving is a habit and once you break it you remember all the other ways there are to get around.
During my first year in Chicago it became clear that academia and I were not a good match. I lasted the year and then dropped out of the program and moved to New York, where I got a job at an arts nonprofit and fell in love with a puppeteer (oh, how my sisters howled at that). The puppeteer and I moved to Rome where we had five good years, and one more bad one before we finally called it quits. I never talked to my mother about any of this, but if I had I would have told her that Ethan and I loved each other equally, although not always at the same time. In Rome I also found out I loved writing: it hardly mattered what. I started out writing reviews and articles for an English-language newspaper, then graduated to profiles and feature-length pieces, frivolous and serious, I took whatever I could get. Some of my better articles appeared in glossy American magazines, but as far as I knew no one in my family had ever read them.
In the years after I left home I made infrequent trips back to Oakland. The visits were always fraught, my grown‑up self abandoning my body at some point over the Iowa cornfields, so that by the time I arrived in the Bay Area I had regressed to some lesser version of myself. I reminded my family that airplanes flew in both directions, that neither New York nor Rome were such bad places to visit, but the fact was that if we were ever going to see one another I was the one who would have to get on a plane.
In the summer of 2013 Maggie called to tell me that our mother’s health, which hadn’t been great, had further declined, and she had likely arrived at the end. She was 72, with congestive heart failure, worsened by her own stubborn negligence. She refused to take her medications and continued to indulge in her thrice-daily cigarette habit. I flew home in time to sit with her at her hospital bed. It had been three years since I’d seen her, and at rest, with her eyes closed, she looked both old and young, her face and body a breathing repository for the whole of my life. Mostly she slept, floating in some indefinite territory, alive but not quite living. At one point she opened her eyes and looked at me squarely with a thin, dry smile and said, “Good.”
That was it. Two days later she died.
I went through the house, looking for something of hers to take back home. My sisters tried to foist various objects on me. “Take her wedding silver,” Tibby said. “Do you even have silver?”
I stayed for two weeks and drove around in my mother’s plush dark-gray Lexus. A Lexus! It was the first car she’d ever bought without my uncle’s help. In the late ’90s she started investing in real estate, and she’d made herself a chunk of money. She remodeled the kitchen, bought herself a luxury sedan. What a shame she had so little time to enjoy them.
It had been nearly fifteen years since I’d driven the streets and highways that at one time were the sole arteries of my life. Now I kept taking wrong turns. One minute I was sure I knew where I was going, only to become completely disoriented. The overly familiar had become subtly strange.
“It’s different here,” I said to Maggie as she chauffeured me to the airport in the Lexus.
“Is it?” she said with a scowl. “It all looks the same to me.”
I fiddled with my climate-controlled seat, which offered lumbar massage. I struggled to picture our mother in such a sumptuous machine.
“Did you know Mom had an affair a few years ago?” Maggie said.
I gaped at the side of her head. “You wait until I’m practically on the plane to tell me that? When? With who?”
“I guess it was five or six years ago now.”
“And why do you call it ‘an affair’?”
“Because he was married. It was a guy she knew through some real estate deal. He was at the funeral. The tall, white-haired guy, near the back. He’s kind of a local mucky-muck.”
“And she told you about it? Did everybody know?”
“I think we all knew, but she didn’t know we knew. I only found out because she took a trip to Bermuda and I began to pry. But then her health went south, and I think he wanted out.”
“Gee, what a prince. So she could take a trip to Bermuda but she couldn’t get on a plane and go visit her own daughter.”
Maggie didn’t have much to say on this score since she’d never been to visit me either.
“Do you think Mom ever forgave me for leaving?” This was something I’d long wondered. Was she mad at me? Did she view me as a traitor? Was she jealous?
“I think she was always glad you left. Glad that at least one of us escaped our suffocating orbit.”
“Did she say that?”
“Directly?” We both laughed. Our mother never said anything directly.
Maggie pulled up to the curb to let me out at the terminal. “Who’s going to take the Lexus?” I asked. “It sure is a beauty.”
“Should we keep it for you?”
The thought had briefly crossed my mind. I missed cars, little living rooms on wheels, and their secret promise that you could strap yourself in, step on the gas, and end up far from where you’d started. But now that I really had gotten away, I no longer believed escape was really possible.
Carol Ghiglieri’s stories have appeared in Boulevard, The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, The Literary Review, and The Pinch.