We went out to the driveway, where my white Buick LeSabre sat idling.

The odometer had rolled past a hundred ninety thousand miles three days earlier, and the power steering whined any time I cranked the wheel too far left.

I buckled Emma into her car seat in the back.

She hugged Barnaby up under her chin and stared out the side window as I turned onto Rochester Road.

“Can I just stay right next to you the whole time, Mommy?” she asked from the back seat.

“You usually sit at the little table in the sunroom with Olivia,” I said, watching her eyes in the rearview mirror.

“I want to sit in a big-person chair,” she said.

“Right beside your chair.”

“We’ll ask Grandma when we get there,” I said.

The drive across Rochester Hills took twenty minutes.

The oaks along the avenue were deep green with mid-June leaves, shading the wide suburban driveways and the big two-story brick houses set back behind trimmed lawns.

My parents had bought their house forty years earlier, when the neighborhood was still mostly orchards.

They paid off the mortgage early, just before my mother ordered an eighty-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel that put dark granite counters where the original oak cabinets had been.

I parked the LeSabre behind my sister Vanessa’s white SUV in the long paved driveway.