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cook. The image made a deep impression, fostering her lifelong devotion to frugality. When her father died in her nineteenth year, in 1952, my mother kept her inheritance invested in the stock market, never spending a penny, except to pay her college tuition. She enjoyed the trappings of wealth but, out of a deep-seated fear of ending up poor, chose to live modestly, often buying her evening dresses secondhand, driving inexpensive cars, and carrying purses until they literally fell apart.
    My mother graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1956 and met my father just one year later, in September, at my aunt Bettina Stroh’s engagement party. She’d driven her red Triumph convertible over from Chicago, where her sister Frances lived, to Grosse Pointe on a windy day with the top down, a yellow silk scarf trailing behind her, her rebellious red curls cropped short.
    “That your little red car parked outside?” my father asked when they were introduced.
    She told him it was.
    “I’ve got the Mark VI saloon parked near your car.”
    “Is that so?” said my mother with a flicker in her striking green eyes. Unable to stand bragging, she must have felt compelled to put the charming but arrogant Eric Stroh in his place. “You’d probably love the Rolls-Royce I’ve got back home in New Jersey.”
    Caught off guard by this entirely, my father turned and walked away.
    During the engagement-party weekend my mother went out with my uncle Peter, but when she returned for the wedding in December, my father was assigned to drive her to the rehearsal dinner, and by the end of the weekend, she found she preferred my father. “I liked that he was artistic,” she said. “And that we both had a love of photography.”
    They were married the following June.
    O llie sat brushing my hair after my bath. “You all are so lucky , Frances,” she declared suddenly, surprising me.
    “Why, Ollie?” I asked, expecting something really, really big, like Christmas coming early that year.
    “Why ? Because, you’s rich peoples. Thas why.”
    Rich? I imagined Rolls-Royces and white marble mansions, like the Beverly Hillbillies. People on TV were rich; my friends whose last names I saw on the backs of cars, they were rich, but we weren’t. Nobody else had ever told me we were, so how rich could we be? Besides, my father had said he couldn’t pay the ransom.
    Moments later, I confronted my mother. “Mom, are we rich ?”
    My mother’s profusion of freckles seemed to darken, her broad, beautiful face clouding over with something akin to anger, as if I had spoken a four-letter word. “We aren’t rich and we aren’t poor,” she said with firm conviction. “We’re in the middle.”
    This was reassuring to me. So we were normal after all, which felt safe; kidnappers only took children from rich parents, not normal ones.
    If only I could make Ollie understand. I traveled through the house following the sound of the vacuum cleaner and found her in a bedroom straightening a bedspread. “Mom says we aren’t rich and we aren’t poor,” I told her. “We’re normal.”
    Ollie gave me a searching look, then laughed and shook her head. She smoothed the bedspread until every crease was gone.
    Later that day, after she’d taken the chicken out of the oven and changed out of her crisp, white uniform into what she called “street clothes,” I watched Ollie walk down our driveway and up Grayton Road toward the bus stop. What she had said to me—that we were lucky because we were rich—was something that she would never have said to my parents, and I wondered if she saw my parents the way I saw the Beverly Hillbillies, not as real people at all.
    T he traffic on Grosse Pointe Boulevard was light on a Saturday. I did not feel the need to turn my head each time I heard a car approaching from behind, straining my neck, to check that my outstretched legs were safe.
    “Make sure to hold your legs out,” my mother had warned when I’d climbed onto