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The SUV to the airport pulls up across the street, and we hustle my mother and father through traffic while the driver folds up my mother’s walker and tosses the luggage in the back. She clambers up into the back seat, and my hand on her back feels huge next to the light, bird-like bones of her back.

“We had such a good time,” she says, after giving me a kiss, and my father, from the other side of the seat, reaches over her back to bump fists before I shut the door.

I back away from the vehicle with an apologetic wave to the truck that’s been idling behind us while we say our goodbyes, and the driver of the truck shrugs while the SUV pulls away, headed toward the airport, and traffic slowly resumes its usual pace, a constantly flowing river of steel that washes away all traces my family was ever even here.