It started—as so many things do—with The Golden Girls. When I was three, my parents were driving on the Massachusetts Pike, on their way from their house in Framingham to dinner with friends in Worcester, when their station wagon hit a patch of black ice. The car skidded over the guardrail, flipped over twice, and then burst into flames. My mom and dad died, and my car seat broke free of its straps and went flying through the windshield. I broke the arm and leg and most of my ribs on the right side of my body—the side I’d landed on—but most of the damage had been caused by going face-first through all that glass. My mother’s mother, Rae, had spent her life in Boston but was living in Coral Gables when the accident happened. She came north for the funeral and never left, arranging the sale of her condominium over the phone, having her furniture and clothes and dishes shipped up, moving into my parents’ house, and taking over the business of raising her granddaughter. I’d spent chunks of my childhood in hospitals, undergoing and then recovering from various surgeries intended to repair the damage the accident had done.
