Read Drives Like a Dream for Free Online

magnificence and ruin, gentrification and blight—a miniature history of the automobile and its effect on the landscape.
    Crossing Eight Mile Road from Ferndale, Lydia entered Detroit.
Better bring your guns,
read the graffiti on a bridge south of Palmer Park. She drove past auto body shops, adult video stores, empty lots overrun by weeds, an employment office with knocked-out windows, then the long-abandoned Highland Park Plant where Henry Ford had pioneered the assembly line. Beyond billboards offering "Free Pregnancy Tests" and "Cash in a Flash" came Renaissance Liquors, La Renaissance Motel, and the Renaissance Beauty Supply shop. Then Northern High School and a stretch of renovated housing, the Hecker Mansion, divided now into lawyers' offices, and the blue and gold banners hanging from streetlights around the cultural district.
    She pulled up in front of the library, then decided she was too restless to work. She thought of crossing the street to the Detroit Institute of Arts or driving out to St. Clair Shores or down to Hart Plaza to watch the freighters—anything to stay in motion, to keep her mind off of Cy's wedding.
    Had she been a different person, she supposed, she might have invited someone to lunch. But her friendships tended to work in one direction: she safeguarded people's secrets but rarely shared her own. When she and Cy had first separated, her friends called or stopped by, but to Lydia the attention seemed peculiar, a kind of care that she did not believe she needed. They stood in her foyer with faces of concern, trying to make sure she was all right. When they asked "What happened?" she didn't know how to respond. She shrugged, tried to smile. Her sentences began and ended with, "Oh, I'll be fine." At first she had turned to Jessica for support, but she was stunned to discover that her daughter blamed
her
for breaking up the family. "You gave up on him, Mother. Of course he left," she said after Cy moved out. "What choice did he have?" Now, more than four years later, Jessica still seemed to hold her accountable, though in a low-radiation kind of way.
    So, like her ex-husband, she too had retreated—not to the big box suburbs, but further into herself. She began screening calls with the answering machine. Her long daily walks-through Huntington Woods, around the zoo, or across Woodward to the busy sidewalks of Royal Oak, which was a denser, more eclectic suburb that she sometimes thought would be a nice place to live—had become shorter and much less frequent. Mostly, when she was not at the library, she would leave the house only to go to the Kroger, the post office, or sometimes the art museum. There, in the skylit garden court surrounded on all sides by the Detroit Industry murals, Diego Rivera's sweeping tribute to the automobile assembly line, Lydia would sit and read or take notes. It was her private sanctuary, a room full of color and energy in the heart of dreary Detroit.
    But today demanded something different. Enough of hiding away indoors. Instead, she drove farther into the city, past the Resurrection Promise Church and the corner of Woodward and Forest, where her parents had lived briefly after they were married. Their apartment building, once one of the finest in the city, had been demolished years ago, replaced now by a Church's Chicken. Lydia passed more vacant lots, then the optimistic one-block stretch of condominiums that had gone up near the new Tiger Stadium.
    She figured Cy and Ellen would be getting ready for their wedding now. Ellen's hair would be done up, the veil secured in place. She'd be wearing a voluminous dress, surrounded by her bridesmaids. Lydia was glad that Jessica was not a bridesmaid, but she still pictured her floating nearby, bending down to straighten Ellen's train. Ellen wasn't just marrying Cy, after all; she was becoming the children's
stepmother.
    Turning from Woodward onto the Fisher Freeway, then west on I-94, Lydia imagined a funnel cloud