Driver's Education by Grant Ginder

of my mother’s hair.
    â€œSo?” He raised both his palms upward, as if preparing to accept my praise.
    â€œI think I liked the Buick better.”

HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE
    Finn
    The road is relentless, but so are we. After we leave the garage on East Broadway, Randal and I press on valiantly, skidding out of New York and past New Jersey’s grey industrial fields, its bucket-sized lakes that pool at the base of its warehouses. There’s U.S. Route 22 and U.S. Route 9 and U.S. Route 1 and New Jersey Route 21 and exits 57 and 58 and 52 and the Garden State Parkway. There are sixteen-wheel semis that, despite their size, seem to spawn, then vanish, then be next to us again, running in herds like buffalo. Hay trucks that I think are driving faster than they should be—faster than we are, at least—that’ll disappear into the black space of the encroaching night.
    â€œMaybe she’s dead,” Randal says. Since hitting the road, Mrs. Dalloway has been corpse quiet. No scratching, no gasped meows. Just the gentle shifting of her loose skin and bones whenever we hit a bump.
    â€œStop that,” I tell him.
    â€œNew Jersey could kill anything.” He sets his ear against his pack, which is shoved between his feet. “No luck. She just hacked.”
    Next—Pennsylvania. We merge onto I-81 and the highway stretches in front of us, cutting through the land’s fat. Lucy’s headlights illuminate the sides of the road in wide arcs, projecting images of the uneven grass and the dead split trees and the truck bays that make up the state’s jumbled insides. There’s that airy sense you get when you’re driving that maybe you’re flying; that you’re floating on nothing toward a vanishingpoint, out where the road gets swallowed up by the sky, or maybe the sky funnels down to the road.
    Everything is black by the time we reach Blue Mountain. We’re beginning the slow, gradual climb through the foothills, barreling through the countless tunnels, when Randal asks, finally, what my granddad did in Pittsburgh.
    I say: “He saved this guy from getting crushed into a million bits.”
    â€œReally,” he said. “Really.”
    â€œTrue story.”
    My eyes are tired from staring at the same four colors that make up the western stretches of Pennsylvania. I stretch my arm out the window and I make a wing with my hand, diving it up and down into the wind, feeling the current push my palm skyward, then—with just a tiny shift—my knuckles down.
    A minute later: “How did he do that?”
    â€œYou’re not going to believe me. It’s the honest-to-God truth, but you’re not going to believe me.”
    â€œTry me.”
    So I tell him.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    The first time my granddad went to Pittsburgh, it was for the bridges.
    He designed them for a living, great reaching things that spanned rivers and abysses and all other species of bottomless chasms. You’ve seen his work, undoubtedly. You’ve driven across it, or strolled on its footpaths, or spit from its slick railings into the infinity below, and each time, the whole time, you’ve never known it’s his. No one’s known, probably, unless No One was the sort of person who researched these things. Because while my granddad was a great man, he was also greatly humble. He was always content to let other folks take the credit, to let them slap their names onto square bronze plaques while from a distance he observed his work, connecting two worlds for the first time.
    He told me that in 1963, when he and Lucy slipped into Allegheny County, Pittsburgh was laced with more than four hundred bridges, more than any city in the entire world. He’d been driving through thenight and when he entered the city, it was from the south. In the waning dark he slipped through Dormont and Green Tree and so many other sleepy, leafy suburbs. It was as he climbed