Lorraine sat in the passenger seat of the Buick with four flat tires, applying her usual shade of lipstick. The fact that the tires were flat was no bother; the car hadn’t moved since her mother died twenty years before. Even if Lorraine could afford to get it running again, it wouldn’t make any difference. She didn’t know how to drive.

Doing her face in the Buick had been the routine going back to when mom would give her a lift to her job and she saw no reason to stop just because mom was dead. So, every morning at seven forty-five, she emerged from the senior living studio condominium that had been Mom’s and was now hers, walked the fifteen steps to the petrified sedan, and eased herself into the passenger seat. Mom had been gone since Lorraine was forty-six, but their relationship remained complicated.

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