“What’s that?”

　“Look it up. It was built like a tank. It had fins. My parents loved it— it had a lot of history for them.

　“So we got in the car. I sat in the front passenger seat, we both wore our seatbelts. And we drove. The weather was absolutely awful. It was hard to see, and the defrost in that car wasn’t the greatest. We went through this maze of residential streets, and then we got on the expressway. It was after rush hour, but traffic was a mess because of the weather and the holiday So we were moving maybe fifteen, twenty miles an hour. My mother stayed in the right-hand lane, probably because she didn’t want to change lanes without being able to see very well and because we weren’t going to be on the expressway very long before we exited for the airport.

　“We were behind a truck, well behind it, giving it plenty of room up there. As we passed an entrance a small car, a red Corvette, actually, got on behind us. The Corvette, which was being driven by a dentist who was only slightly inebriated, at 10:30 a.m., got on just a bit too quickly, and was unable to slow down soon enough because of the ice on the road, and hit our car. And in ordinary weather conditions, the Corvette would have been mangled and the indestructible Ford Fairlane would have had a bent fender and it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.

　“But the weather was bad, the roads were slick, so the shove from the Corvette sent our car accelerating forward just as traffic slowed down. The truck ahead of us was barely moving. My mother was pumping the brakes but nothing was happening.

　“We hit the truck practically in slow motion, or so it seemed to me. In actuality we were going about forty. The truck was an open pickup truck full of scrap metal. When we hit it, a large sheet of steel flew off the back of the truck, came through our windshield, and decapitated my mother.”

　Clare has her eyes closed. “No.”

　“It’s true.”

　“But you were right there—you were too short!”

　“No, that wasn’t it, the steel embedded in my seat right where my forehead should have been.