Let me tell you how it happened, and then let me tell you what my ten-year-old daughter did at her cousin’s wedding, because if you only remember one thing about my Mia, I want it to be that. Not the accident. The wedding.
But you have to understand the first part to understand the second.
It was a Thursday in February. The roads were bad — that thin, mean layer of ice that hides under a dusting of snow so you can’t even see it. I’d picked Mia up from her friend Hannah’s house, and she was in the back seat behind me, buckled in, telling me some long complicated story about a game they’d been playing.
I remember she was in the middle of a sentence.
I remember I said, “And then what happened?”
I never heard the end of that story.
A truck came through the intersection. The driver said later he’d tapped his brakes and just kept sliding, that there was nothing under his tires to grab. I believe him. I’ve never blamed him. The ice didn’t care whose fault it was.
