When I thumbed a ride a few miles up at a crossroads heading south, I told the driver that I’d had a fight with my mother. The man passed me his thermos full of whiskey. I gulped it down, and cried some more.
“There, there,” he said, patting my thigh with his thick, cold-burnt hand.
I sank into the passenger seat and drank and looked out the fogged-up window. I watched that old world go by, away and away, gone gone gone, until, like me, it disappeared.