My daughter-in-law handed me a two-dollar scratch-off card for my seventy-third birthday and laughed while I scratched it. Ten months later, my own son placed a glossy brochure in front of me for a senior living facility he and his wife had already selected for me, as though my life were a piece of furniture they could simply remove from the house whenever it became inconvenient.
The scratch-off was the only gift I received that birthday. The store price tag was still stuck to the back.
“Let’s see if you win enough for bus fare, Margaret,” Jessica joked.
Colin, my son, immediately burst into laughter. My grandchildren laughed too—mostly because their parents were laughing, not because they understood the joke.
I sat in the kitchen of the home we shared in Austin, Texas. I had baked my own birthday cake. As Jessica cut herself a slice and complained that the vanilla frosting was far too sweet, I dragged my fingernail across the ticket’s silver coating.
