Free The Way Life Should Be by Christina Baker Kline

father says, patting the hood. “You know this car is seventeen years old. And what’s it got—a hundred and fifty thousand miles?”
    I look at the mileage. “A hundred and fifty-eight.”
    “We’ll cross our fingers,” Sharon says.
    “Just remember, the earth is flat,” my father tells me, reprising a running joke from my childhood. He said it whenever I set off anywhere new.
    “It’s round and I’ll prove it,” I say, sticking to our script.
    He puts one arm around my shoulder, a partial hug. “I just don’t want you to fall off the edge.”
    “It’s round. There is no edge.”
    “Oh, there’s an edge,” he says. “There’s always an edge. Promise me you’ll keep your eyes open for it.”
    My dad tends to communicate emotion through metaphor. All you can do is play along.
    “I promise,” I say.
    Sharon has that frozen look she gets when she thinks she’s being left out of a joke. “I missed something.”
    “Never mind,” my father says. He smiles at me tenderly. “I think you’re making a mistake.”
    “I know, Dad.”
    “I just wanted to say it one last time. For the record.”
    Nonna is standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. When she sees me looking over at her, she holds her arms up and moves her fingers like a crab flexing its pincers. “Come here, mia figlia, ” my child, she says.
    When she squeezes me I smell powder and yeast and the oil from her scalp. She holds me out at arms’ length, clutching my shoulders, and says, “Do you have a warm coat?”

    I nod yes.
    “Maybe you need my rabbit fur. The one made in Italy.”
    Nonna’s black rabbit fur coat is part of our family story. My grandfather gave it to her several years after they came to America, proof of what his new money could buy—a coat he never could have afforded back in the country where it was made. In old photos Nonna wears it over an evening dress, in the backseat of a slope-nosed motor car, posing with my grandfather on a snowy street. “I could never,” I say. “But you will wear it when you visit me.”
    “Va bene.” All right, then, she says to be polite.
    “I’m expecting you, Nonna,” I say insistently, and she says, “Tutto il a destra,” all right, “we’ll see.”
    When I pull away, the three of them are standing in the driveway. I watch them in my rearview mirror: my father waving, Nonna clasping the dish towel to her bosom, Sharon turning to go back inside.
     
    There’s an accident up ahead on the Mass Pike, and for the first time since leaving New Jersey, I’m stuck in traffic. I open my window and breathe. It’s a warm early October morning; the sky is cloudless. Orange trees explode against a blue sky, as vivid as Technicolor.
    One evening last week my father went to Radio Shack and surprised me with a CD player for my old car, then spent another evening installing it.
    “You are a lucky girl to have a father like that,” Sharon said. We were watching him out the living room window as he lay on his back fiddling with the controls, his legs sticking out the driver’s side. I could tell she disapproved of his indulging me.
    “You’re a lucky girl to have a husband like that,” I said.
    “You’re both lucky girls. And you can thank me for raisinghim,” Nonna called from the kitchen. Sharon looked over at me and rolled her eyes.
    Now, sitting in traffic, I rummage around in a box of CDs on the passenger seat, find a Van Morrison and slip it in. Van is singing in his velvet voice and the trees whisper as I pass, and I am halfway between two worlds, the known and the unknown. I feel as transparent as the wind, as if my spirit is hovering in the sky, waiting to land. I am driving toward a future I can’t see, leaving behind a past that already feels distant. Nothing is clear—and yet the trees are sharp against the sky; I can see the hard outlines of everything. The highway signs, the center line, the eighteen-wheeler in front of me.
     
    A faded green bridge