Twenty minutes later, I’m still sitting in my car. The silence is making me crazy, but I don’t want to play the radio and drain the battery. I’ve already turned the car on twice to heat it up. I pull out my map, study the roads that look like worms tangled across the states and think about where I want to go next.

There’s a knock on the passenger window.

“What are you doing in my car?”

It’s Mrs. Ivory. She’s got a kid with her. A little girl with pigtails in a pink dress is twirling around on the sidewalk, watching her skirt spin out. One of Mrs. Ivory’s grandchildren. She has about fifty of them.

The passenger window doesn’t like to roll back up once I’ve rolled it down, so I haul myself out of the car and walk around to the sidewalk to talk to her.

“Mrs. Ivory,” I say. The girl is small and hides behind Mrs. Ivory’s skirt when I get close.

“Oh, Autumn!” Mrs. Ivory says, putting her hand over her heart. Her fingers are so thin that her old ruby ring hangs between her first and second knuckles. “It’s only you! I thought I was being carjacked.”

I don’t even know what to say. I don’t think it will help to explain things. She was barely on this side of sensible when I left. What do I care if she thinks I’m my mother? What does it matter anyway? I’ll be gone again momentarily.

“You have some nerve showing your face around here!” Mrs. Ivory says, her eyes scrunched up and mean.

“What—”

“Leaving your husband and this one.” She pulls the little girl’s hand.

The little girl looks like a picture I saw of me when I was that age, when I still had a mother to put me in pigtails and clean dresses.

“You broke his heart,” Mrs. Ivory says.

“He broke mine,” I tell her.

“Well, I don’t want to get into it,” Mrs. Ivory says. “You’ll have your day of reckoning.”

The little girl doesn’t even have a jacket on. I’m worried she’s cold.

“What are you doing out here?” I ask Mrs. Ivory.

“Well, this one needs a snack,” she says, pointing to the girl. “So I’m going to drive her to my house.”

The girl hangs on to two of Mrs. Ivory’s fingers and uses the toe of her patent leather shoe to poke at a crack in the sidewalk. She’s going to get scuff marks. I’m sure her mother will be mad.

“Do you have my keys?” Mrs. Ivory says. She shakes off the girl’s grip on her hand and walks around to the driver’s side.

“Mrs. Ivory, you can’t drive.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “What do you know?”