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Seven a.m. I let myself in.
Mrs. Alderman is already up. She's 74. This morning she did an hour on the rower, then asked me to move her tennis lesson to noon.
I'm 59. My knees sound like a gravel driveway.
I've looked after the Aldermans for eleven years. I cook, I clean, I drive. And once a month, I drive her up to the clinic on Skyline for her protocol.
That's what they call it. The protocol.
She sits in a chair for two hours while a machine rewinds her cells. Partial reprogramming, the brochure says. In other words… they turn the clock back inside her. Not a figure of speech. Her age markers read younger every single year.
It costs more than my house.
So I keep her young. Then I drive home to Ray, and my gravel knees, and the long slow ordinary business of getting old.
Here's the thing. I'm not bitter about it. Mostly.
Because my generation got the cheap miracles. And they were something.
Ray was headed for a bad heart at 50. Diabetes, the whole map of it. Then the weekly shot came along… pennies now, covered for everyone. He lost the weight. His numbers came home. He's still here, snoring beside me. I'll take it.
And his sister? Born with the blood disease that killed cousins on our mother's side, young. They fixed it. One treatment. When I was a girl that was a death sentence… now it's a Tuesday.
So I'm not ungrateful. The floor came up for all of us. We live longer, and healthier, than my parents ever dreamed.
But the ceiling ran away.
The Aldermans don't just get a few extra years now. They live on a different clock. Mrs. Alderman will likely see 110. Ray and I are hoping for good 80s.
Twenty years. That's the gap between the chair on Skyline and the rest of us.
I used to think everyone aged together. The whole street going gray at once. You could see it on the porches.
Not anymore.
I don't want her decades. I don't think I do. I just wonder what it does to a country when some folks get a second life… and some get one.
Anyway. She's calling. Tennis is back on.
I'll drive.
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