A yellow plastic lawn chair lay upside down on my father’s roof, jammed against the red brick chimney where a November wind had thrown it six weeks earlier.

I yanked up the emergency brake in the driveway until it clicked four times, then turned off the engine.

In the passenger seat beside me, my eleven-year-old daughter Sage reached deep into the front pocket of her dark green hoodie.

Her small fingers closed tightly around the smooth wooden head of her ivory chess queen.

“Is Aunt Tessa going to ask why I quit the middle school band?” Sage asked.

“She might,” I said.

“Just tell her you’re concentrating on your tournament practice for January.”

“What about Uncle Craig?”

“Uncle Craig will be out on the porch watching the football game,” I told her.

“We’ll eat dinner and be back on the highway by seven.”

She nodded once and rolled the heavy chess piece over her knuckle, her thumb running over the rounded crown.

I’d put in eighty hours of mandatory overtime at the air traffic control tower to pay for the dark gray gaming laptop lying on the floor of the back seat, a thirty-four-hundred-dollar machine built to run grandmaster analysis engines without overheating.

Hugh’s front door swung open before we reached the bottom of the porch steps.

My father stood in the screened entry in a faded brown flannel shirt missing two buttons, holding a plastic tumbler of sweet tea.

“You missed the turkey,” Hugh said through the screen.

“Tessa carved the breast an hour ago.”

“The air traffic roster was two controllers short on the morning shift, Dad,” I said.

“I texted you from the airport parking lot at three.”