“Don’t call them,” she said, as I pulled out of the parking lot.

I looked over at her.

“I’ll tell you where to drive.”

“Where?”

“First,” she said, looking straight ahead through the windshield, “the county courthouse.”

That got my full attention.

A woman who has just been abandoned at a nursing home does not, ordinarily, ask to be taken to a courthouse.

She asks to be taken home, or to be fed, or to a phone to call the people who wronged her and demand an explanation.