Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush

were good friends; we talked on the phone for hours, and Mike's circle of close friends included nearly all of my own. And so it was unbelievable to me that it was his car in that almost always empty intersection. It was a small car, a Corvair Monza, Detroit's version of a compact, economy car designed to compete with the Volkswagen Beetle. It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed . He claimed the car was unstable and prone to rollover accidents. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went so far as to investigate the Corvair's handling, but it didn't reach the same grim conclusions. I was driving my dad's much larger and heavier Chevy Impala. But none of that would ever ease the night of November 6. Not for me, and never for the Douglases.
    So many lives were wrecked that night at that corner, which was known as a particularly dangerous place. Already that year, two other people had lost their lives in crashes where the loop met Big Spring Street. After Mike's death, the city did install a much bigger stop sign and posted warnings. But it was too late for us.
    A dangerous intersection, a less than safe car, and me. I don't see well, I didn't ever see well, and maybe that played a part. Or perhaps it was simply dark, Judy and I were talking, and I was an inexperienced driver who got to a corner before I expected it.
    I didn't have to tell anyone what happened. Every single person in Midland knew. Regan had been with Peggy at a school dance performance rehearsal, and then both had gone home to wait for their boyfriends. Regan was waiting for her boyfriend, John. Peggy was waiting for Mike. Regan's dad called her to say that I'd been in an accident, and Regan and John rushed to the hospital. By the time they arrived, I had already been sent home, so they drove to my house. They knew that Mike had died when they pulled up to our curb. My mother met them outside and told Regan that I didn't know Mike had been in the other car, so Regan and John sat with me as I lay in bed, with this horrible, unspoken truth hovering in the air. After they left, Mother and Daddy told me.
    Immediately afterward, Mother and Daddy's friends showed up, and I'm sure it was the same at the Douglases'. Betty Hackney, Johnny's wife, came over and stood at the sink and washed dishes because so many people came and everyone brought something to eat or stopped to eat something. People from our church came. Mary White was at our house almost every day. All of Mother and Daddy's best friends came. The next morning Mother and Daddy and Mary and Charlie drove over to see the Douglases. I never knew what they said, and they never told me. I only knew that they had gone.
    My friends were brokenhearted, but Regan and Jan, Candy, and a bunch of Mike's friends and my high school boyfriend, now a college freshman, came over to our house to sit with me. That is the amazing thing about Midland. So many people could be utterly devastated and could wish that this terrible thing had never happened, and they were and they did, but they still found it in their hearts to be supportive of me.
    I did not go to the funeral. It was held that Saturday, November 9, at St. Mark's Methodist Church. I wanted to go, and I told Mother and Daddy that I wanted to. But they wanted me to stay home. No doubt they were trying to protect me, thinking that it would be too hard on me, and on the Douglases, if I were to attend. Whatever their reasons, I did not have a chance to decide. The next morning, no one rapped on my door to awaken me. When I finally opened my eyes, the service had started, and it was too late. So I didn't go, and I never contacted the Douglases. Like everyone else around me, I thought that they wouldn't want to see me, that there wasn't one thing that I could say to them that they would want to hear.
    Pretty quickly no one mentioned the accident. My parents never brought it