The summer I was seventeen, my grandpa announced that he had lung cancer and was going to die.  My sister wanted to know how he could get lung cancer when he had never smoked a day in his life.  Mom said that he had been a lifelong smoker but a tobacco-free grandpa.  "He wasn't allowed to smoke in front of you girls," she said, when Hannah and I looked at her in confusion.  Seven months later, Grandpa returned from the hopsital with a hole in his throat.  On Christmas Eve, he slept on the couch while we unwrapped gifts, his breath like wind roaring out of a deep cavern.  After gifts, Grandma decided he wouldn't want to be woken up and told me to lay a blanket over him.  I took my time tucking it around his tiny body, and the hole stared at me like the opening to a cave of secrets.   Before I could stop myself, I was reaching into it with my finger. Air rushed at the tip and I instantly staggered back.  I remember that the hole was surprisingly warm.  Last fall, he died.  Vestiges of the cancer staged an impressive revolt against the treatment and took hold before the doctors noticed that anything was wrong.  My grandpa left me his red truck in the will.  Hannah got his library.  I had never had a car before, and I took to the freedom with passion and abandon.  I drove hard and far.  I drove across the state, tearing through counties the way a marathon trainer whizzes by mile markers.  Sometimes I didn't get home until after midnight.  To save money, I was living with my parents.  They said I was abusing the privilege of owning my own transportation.  I said that I had a bachelor's degree and had earned the privilege to abuse my privileges.  "Still," Mom said.  "Less than .0001 percent of humans today have the ability to get up and take off on a whim, and you should appreciate it."  Within three weeks, I had quit my job at the music store and was gone.  My mind was set on venturing west, but on the road I realized that I didn't know anyone in that direction.   I was halfway to my sister's Boston apartment when the truck broke down.  It wasn't clear to me whether Grandpa knew he was passing me a senior so near her end.  When I called her from a payphone, Mom just laughed.  "He probably didn't think you would be trying to make a racehorse out of a carthorse."  I took a plane in Cleveland, and two hours later Hannah was picking me up at Logan Airport.  "I ruined the element of surprise," I said.  She hugged me and said, "You're always trying to suprise me.  You could never surprise me."  And that was the beginning of my unemployment.