This driver—I can tell he’s not one of us. He looks like us. Italian, with the last vestiges of a summer tan on olive skin. Dark hair peeking below the driver’s cap. A hard jaw with a dusting of angry scruff. Arched black eyebrows over blue eyes that betray a touch of the northern reaches but are dark enough to hide lifetimes of terrible stories.


He’s combustible, with an interior so much bigger than his body that it presses against the shell of his skin like an overfull balloon ready to explode.


In fact, he looks as if he wants to rip my father apart, and when he glances at me for a split second of eternity, I fear he may eat me alive just to spite my father.