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test?”
    â€œWhich test?”
    As if he doesn’t know. She’d spent two hours helping him study for it last Monday night. “The one on literary devices.”
    â€œOh. That test. Nope.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œYep. So stop looking at me like a detective who thinks the witness is lying.” He flashes her a grin. “See? I know what a metaphor is. I bet I got an A-­plus on that test.”
    â€œI hate to break it to you, kiddo, but that’s not a metaphor. It’s a simile.”
    â€œThat’s what I meant.” Mick settles on a stool with the pile of mail, looking for something to leaf through while he eats, which will take all of two minutes.
    â€œWhat’s this?” He holds up the brown parcel addressed to Rowan.
    â€œProbably something I ordered for you for Christmas. Don’t open it.”
    â€œIs it the keys to my new car? Because don’t forget, I’m taking my road test in less than a month.”
    â€œIt is not”—­she plucks the package from his hand—­ “the keys to your new car because there will be no new car.”
    â€œThen what am I going to drive?”
    â€œYou can share the minivan with me. And you already have the keys to that, so you’re all set. Here—­” She gives him the red envelope. “You can open Aunt Noreen’s Christmas card.”
    â€œBet you anything they made Goliath wear those stupid reindeer antlers again.” Goliath is a German shepherd whose dignity is compromised, as far as Rowan’s kids are concerned, by a costume every Christmas and Halloween.
    â€œDon’t worry, Doofus,” Mick says, patting the dog, who lies on the hardwood floor at the base of his stool, hoping to catch a stray crumb with little effort. “We’d never do anything like that to you if we had a Christmas card picture.”
    â€œHe wouldn’t know he had a costume on if we zipped him into a horse suit and hitched him to a buggy,” Rowan points out. “Plus we do have a Christmas card picture. I mean, we have had one.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œBack in the old days.”
    â€œWhen?” Classic Mick, persisting to demonstrate that he, as the youngest kid in the family, has suffered some slight, real or imagined.
    It rarely works on Rowan, who as the lastborn of Kate and Jonathan Carmichael’s four children is all too familiar with that technique.
    â€œBack when we lived in Westchester,” she tells Mick. She distinctly remembers having to cancel a family portrait shoot repeatedly to accommodate Jake’s schedule. He was working in the city then, never home.
    â€œBefore I was born doesn’t count, Mom.”
    â€œWe had a few after you were born.”
    â€œWe did not.”
    â€œSure we did.” Did we?
    It’s a wonder they even found time to conceive Mick back then, let alone take a family photo.
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œMaybe not,” she concedes. “After we moved here, I probably didn’t send cards. But God knows we have plenty of family pictures. They’re just not portraits.” Her favorites—­and there are many—­are framed, cluttered on tabletops and hanging along the stairs in a hodgepodge gallery.
    â€œThat’s not the same thing.”
    â€œYou poor, poor neglected little working mom’s son.”
    â€œStop.” He squirms away from her exaggerated sympathetic hug.
    â€œBut I feel so sorry for you!”
    â€œYeah, right.”
    She shrugs. Her mother never wasted much time feeling guilty for being a working mom, and she tries not to, either.
    She used to be a stay-­at-­home mom. Giving it up hasn’t always been easy, but she’s never questioned that it was the right decision for her family, or her marriage.
    Mick was three when she resumed the teaching career she’d launched back when she and Jake were newlyweds. She could have