Lewiston, where I'd grown up, was slowly receding. I pressed my face to the window as the car crawled up the hill in first gear. The smoke mouths kept repeating the same phrase in unison: It's all your fault. Each had a flap that continually flipped open, belching black smoke and then snapping shut, like the mouth of Ollie, the dragon handpuppet on the Kukla, Fran and Ollie television show. Two tall steel exhaust pipes rose in the air like minarets from both sides of the truck's cabin. We were following the orange Allied moving van, and I kept rereading the motto on the back door: leave the worrying to us. I sat in the front seat with my father while my mother sat in the back with Willie, the world's most stupid dog. The radio was playing the Ventures' hit "Walk Don't Run." As we crept up the narrow winding road that rimmed the Niagara Escarpment in our two-toned grey Plymouth Fury with its huge fins and new car smell, my father pressed the push-button gear, forcing the car to leap up the steep incline and out of our old life.
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