Learning to say no remains a struggle for seniors who find their schedules hijacked by organizations that assume their time is free. Discovering how to establish boundaries provides the essential path toward reclaiming your own late-life peace.
The calendar had a rooster on the cover, fat and red, the kind her mother used to hang.
She set the second pen down on the dish towel and wrote nothing for a long time.
The exit signs came green and then gone - one after another, and her left knee ached where the heat wasn't. Bev's mouth had gone slack against the window, her good travel scarf bunched under her cheek. Norma's coffee had a skin on it by Exit 14. She drove with both hands at ten and two, the way her father had taught her, in a car that wasn't hers to complain about.
The price-tag gun was still warm from the last woman's hand when her daughter said and Saturday too - if that's okay.
Norma's thumb found the button on the coat, small and brown, one thread loose.
The fluorescent light above the wool table buzzed once and held.
She turned the price-tag gun over and read the brand name on the back, Monarch, in small raised letters - the way you read something when you already know what you're going to say.
She set the Monarch gun down where the folded charcoals were and her daughter's voice came through the phone small and even, the way the refrigerator ran in the background of it. The cord of the price-tag gun had left a faint red mark across her palm. She looked at it a moment, then turned her hand over.
Her daughter said her name once, the full version, the one she only used when she was twelve and caught.
Norma looked at the loose thread on the brown button and didn't pull it.
The church marquee said ADVENT BEGINS SUNDAY in black plastic letters - one A missing, and she read it twice without meaning to. Her hands were in her lap, palms up, the way they fell when she was finally done carrying something. A receipt from the thrift store was still folded in her coat pocket, and she pressed it flat against her leg through the wool without taking it out. The heater ticked and the parking lot emptied and she sat there until the last car's taillights went small and red at the far end of Oak Street.
She poured the cold coffee down the sink and rinsed the mug once - set it upside down on the dish towel next to the second pen.
The calendar lay open to Friday, and the square was white and had a small crease in the upper corner from where she'd folded a page back once, long ago, to hold her place.
She stood at the counter with her hand flat on the rooster cover for a moment, then she closed it without writing anything - the pen still dry.
The light above the stove was the only one she'd left on, and she turned it off on her way to the hall, and the kitchen went dark behind her the way a room does when no one is left to need it.
The phone screen lit again on the nightstand, Carol's name white against the dark, and Norma watched it finish without picking up.
She pulled the chain on the lamp and in the dark found the edge of the mattress with her shin the way she always did - and sat.
The window held a strip of light from the Hendersons' porch next door, and she watched it lie across the floor until her eyes adjusted and she could see the grain of the oak boards, the one nail that had worked loose years ago and never been fixed.
She lay down in her clothes and didn't set the alarm.
The robe hung on the back of the door where it always had, and in the morning she put it on instead of getting dressed.
The coffee she made was one cup, not two - and she stood at the window in the robe and drank it while the Hendersons' car backed out and the exhaust hung white in the cold air above the driveway.
The rooster calendar was still closed where she'd left it, and she moved it to the drawer with the rubber bands without opening it again.
The phone rang again after lunch, a different number, and she let it go to the machine and stood at the sink listening to her own voice ask whoever it was to please leave a message.
The message was Bev, wanting to know if she'd drive Saturday - and Norma stood there with the dish towel over her shoulder until the little red light on the machine blinked once and stopped.
She went to the window and looked at the Hendersons' driveway, empty now, and then at her own hands on the sill, the faint mark from the price-tag gun finally gone.
She found a notepad in the junk drawer, the kind with a magnet on the back and a chicken on the top - and she wrote Bev's name on the first line and then set the pen down beside it.
The pad stayed on the counter through the afternoon, the chicken looking up at the light fixture, Bev's name in blue ink getting no larger.
She made a second cup of coffee after all, and when she carried it to the table she walked past the notepad without stopping, and the chicken and the name and the white space below it stayed exactly where she'd left them.
The library book on the nightstand was three weeks overdue - a fat one about the tulip trade she'd never gotten past page forty, and she put on her coat and drove it back herself, no one asked her to.
The librarian stamped the return slip without looking up, and Norma dropped the coins for the fine into the small bowl on the counter, four quarters and a dime - and heard them land.
She walked back through the stacks to the large-print section and stood there with her fingers on the spines until she found one she wanted, a thin one, and carried it to a chair by the window that got the afternoon light, and sat down in it, and opened to page one.
The woman at the next chair had a tote bag that said GRAND CANYON 2019 and was working through a crossword with a golf pencil - and when she leaned over and said excuse me, do you know a seven-letter word for obligation, Norma looked up from her thin book and said she didn't, and looked back down.
The afternoon light moved across the carpet the way it does in winter, slow and then gone - and she turned one page and then another, her reading glasses warm against the bridge of her nose.
When the librarian clicked off the far lights at four-thirty, Norma dog-eared her place with the return slip, the one with the fine already paid, and tucked the thin book under her arm and carried it out through the glass doors into the cold.
