I'm always driving 16 to I-5 after midnight. Uncountable times, I've driven this way home, to a boyfriend, to school, to family, to a lover, and home.

I can hear G-ma saying that she wished I wouldn't start out so late and beckoning me to stay with her. But I never would. I was always running away, and I was undeterred by things she believed happened in the darkness that were worse than what could happen during the day.

Nothing like what she feared has ever happened.

Well, once I did get a flat tire on 16 in the middle of the night. This was before cell phones. I waited in the car awhile, weighing my options, in terror. Then I decided to walk for the nearest exit. As I was gathering my gear, a car stopped. A man got out and stood across from me, and we stood frozen together like that, apart, at ten paces, like a duel. I didn't know what I'd do to him if I had to do anything, and I never had to find that out. He was young, like me, and helpful, besides being good-looking.

Another time along 16, I fell asleep at the wheel (in the daytime). I woke when the left wheel tore into the gravel on the shoulder. I overcorrected, reflexively. The car went into 360s and stopped, facing the wrong way at the bottom of the valley of the median. People pulled over. They came running at me from their cars, eyes round and arms reaching wide, like they were clinging to glass. Out of sopor, in embarrassment—the embarrassment of a 16-year-old—I shouted that I was fine, shouted it again and again, and then punched it out of there, leaving them wide-eyed and holding nothing. I never told anybody in my family about that one.

Tonight I am driving home, from family.

It's almost the anniversary of g-ma's death, and I wanted to do something in memoriam, something that she would've have liked with us: playing cards or board games. But I have been busy, tunnel-trapped, and I did not get out the message in time. My cousin Bob was up for it on short notice, though, and so I drove all the way out there with The Farming Game. We ate and talked and he kicked my ass, farming like a pro. I laughed hard and felt the bliss of play, and ruminated on it fleetingly, knowing that it was exactly what I needed to connect with her. Hearing her laughter on some of those nights when the generation above mine was my age and I was a child and we all stayed up late in fierce competition and horseplay.

Those were the times when we were together, and I remember them, grandma.