The drive to his estate takes forty minutes. I counted.
It is something I do when I need to stay inside my own head instead of the one that's spinning. One minute. Two. The city thins out gradually, buildings giving way to wider streets, wider streets giving way to the kind of neighborhoods that don't have corner stores or bus stops. Old money geography. The kind of quiet that costs a lot to maintain.
I have my mother's face in my head the whole drive.
Gloria Navarro. Five foot three, dark hair going silver by the time I was fifteen, laugh lines so deep they stayed even when she wasn't laughing. She worked the morning shift at a hotel laundry and the evening shift at a diner on Halsted for most of my childhood and she never once complained about either. She brought home other people's l
