The chicken was still on my plate when my son told a table of children that my job was to raise his while he enjoyed his life, and that if I had a problem the door was right there. His wife studied her salad. The twins held their forks in the air. Juno, seventeen, looked straight at me and something in her face was almost proud. So I stood, told him I was leaving and that they could start paying their own bills, folded my napkin, and walked to the room at the end of the hall that everyone politely called my bedroom. Christmas boxes on one side of the closet. Old electronics under the window. A twin bed wedged between things Whitney no longer wanted.

Four months earlier I had a cream coloured house near Bellefonte with basil behind the kitchen and the chair where I drank my coffee after my husband died. Bradley called and said he needed me, and I sold it under value because he said the money would help us organise. Then came Pittsburgh, and Charleston, and hotel tags that never matched the cities they named.