I smoothed the front of my skirt and folded the yellow sundress into Emma’s canvas bag.

It had little white flowers across the bodice, and I’d paid eighteen dollars for it at Target on Tuesday.

Emma was sitting at the round kitchen table, pressing a dark purple crayon into a sheet of white construction paper.

Her fingers were tiny and smudged with green wax from earlier.

“Do I have to go to Grandma’s today?” she asked.

She didn’t look up from her paper.

She kept her eyes on the crooked circle she was drawing near the bottom corner.

“It’s Saturday family breakfast,” I said, keeping my voice light and even, the way I did with my third graders.

“Grandma Patricia made buttermilk batter, and Aunt Vanessa’s bringing Olivia.”

Emma stopped coloring. The waxy tip stayed pressed to the paper, leaving a heavy purple dot.

“I don’t want pancakes,” she mumbled. I zipped up the canvas bag and glanced at my watch.

It was eight fifteen, which gave us twenty minutes before traffic on Rochester Road started backing up by the highway interchange.

“We’ll only stay two hours,” I said. “After that we can go to the library.” Emma picked Barnaby up by his left ear.

The purple stuffed rabbit had lost his glass eye on a trip to the park last fall, but she took him everywhere by that same worn cloth ear.