So we wandered around. Inside, the floors were gleaming. There was a cavernous music and activities room where residents enjoyed joyful sing-alongs and studious yet leisurely craft-making. There was an atrium with a pool where swimming and movement classes presumably took place, and the less active and less verbal of the residents could just cozy up and enjoy the humid, chlorine-scented sunshine. And speaking of sunshine, there was the unadulterated kind out in back, which residents soaked up as they strolled and lolled around the endless, impeccably manicured grounds.

There was no need to be annoyed at not being able to speak to an administrator or any of the employees, because there was no need to ask any questions. This was not something my dearly departed mother and I could afford in our wildest dreams.

“I just thought you’d like to see it,” said Trevor once the three of us were re-stuffed into his pickup, and plunging back into the green darkness of the dirt road, toward the highway.

“It was something,” I said. I hadn’t said much else during our self-directed tour.

“I know it would’ve been better to have an appointment so you could talk to someone in charge,” admitted Trevor. “It’s just that there’s a waiting list. It takes forever. I figured, why wait when we’ve got an in with Finny?”

Finny was the name, first or last I didn’t know, of Trevor’s buddy in food service. He hadn’t been much of an in, and he hadn’t seemed like much of a buddy, for that matter. All he did was meet up with us at the front entrance and give us his grimacing, almost begrudging, warning not to talk to anyone.

“I just thought you should see what’s out there,” said Trevor a little defensively, even though I hadn’t said anything. “There’s a range of options I figured you might not even know about.”

“It was gorgeous,” I said, trying for some reason to mollify him. “But Barnbarroch” — I laughed lightly, deliberately — “isn’t exactly a realistic option for us.”

Trevor drove in silence for a while. His jaw flexed.

“Knee,” mentioned Kelli.

“Just a couple more stops, Bean-o.”

Kelli refused to get out of the truck. Her knee ached and walking might’ve helped, but she wasn’t used to doing so much walking, let alone visiting so many strange and stimulating places, in the course of a single afternoon. After the godawful Fenwick Centre downtown, where a hunched and overly familiar male resident tried to take hold of my sister’s spare tire (and, when Kelli yelped in protest, shrieked rage into her face), Kelli decided she was officially done.

“Coming, Beaner?”

“Not coming,” said Kelli. “Kelli’s supper.”

I looked at my phone. It was closing in on four o’clock. Not suppertime, but to Kelli’s mind, I knew, supper meant going home. I was with her.

“She’s getting hungry,” I told Trevor across the hood of his pickup truck. We were in the parking lot of a place called Gorsebrook Residential Home. It didn’t look bad — several steps up from the grimy bedlam that was Fenwick, and even a step or two up from Seaside. Seaside was brightly painted and spacious enough inside, but its industrial concrete exterior was the opposite of inviting. Gorsebrook was not as big, but it was a newer building with a light, welcoming exterior and large windows to let in sun. And I could see there was a pool.