A racket passes through, volcanic and backwards, in this little room where the senior home dessert cart is assembled: glistening pudding dishes, slick Jell-O bowls, all spaced just so, to allow maximum capacity with minimal slippage. It is a kind of hymn, the squeak of the cart’s wheels down the polished hallway: It is pudding time now, or Jell-O, or fruit cup, it is pudding time now, to hold you in love. Elsie swivels in her E-Z chair, ever hopeful for an actual cake, an actual piece of something to press her lips into, onto, to cut with her teeth, but the quivering dishes rattle by.

She turns back to the endless checkers game, this passing of time with no one when she’s not in the parking lot in her bright red blouse, shouting down the schoolteachers as they hand off sweaty first-graders. “We need a passageway here! What if I needed an ambulance? And I’m sure the parents would agree!” Along the gutters, morning doves, too tired now to coo, flit from foot to foot, looking down at the row of station wagons, the pairs circling the garden.

What happens just before sleep is Elsie trying to remember her life before this, this admission of not being in charge of her life anymore, but she can’t evoke much more than the feeling of her own hand on her own toaster oven dial, setting it to golden, the kettle whistling to her right, and the sense that she was still in charge of her own hunger, her own urge to pee, to walk, to rest, even if these rhythms didn’t match anyone else’s.

She recalls her grandson scowling at the breakfast table as his mother—Elsie’s youngest daughter—sighed heavily and huffed about, determined to get some protein in her child, lamenting his balled up napkin, his fidgety knees, the sleepy dust crusted in the corners of his eyes. But Elsie secretly reveled in this quiet showdown—finally someone with a common enemy—she and her grandson almost delighting in the palpable discomfort of this woman in both of their ways, this keeper of schedules and nutrition so put upon by any request from either of them.

He’d come to visit her twice but it wasn’t the same, even as they made hot cider from powder packets in Styrofoam cups and watched the Dukes of Hazard together. Her daughter waited outside to let them have their “own time” and Elsie wondered if this was just an excuse to stay away. It was true that seeing the small form of a young boy amidst all the hunched spines and crumpled faces was a breath of fresh air—startling, almost, his voice in the silent game room, his mumblings about crackerjacks and basketball. She wished he would ask her a question about the owl they had seen the previous summer, the violin she had forgotten how to play. But he had become morose, rolling down his tube socks in a careful trance, wondering why no one was doing anything specifically for him.

On exam days, Elsie would sweat the pale, rank sweat of unacceptable fear, lying on the cold table through endless tests, but she never let on to the others in the evening. She had designated herself a kind of keeper of in here and out there and the difference between the two. Without that, what was the sense in having an opinion about life itself? At least the windows could open and the outside air—whether fresh and salty on the west side, or the stale, vented fryer air on the east—was a reminder of an outside, the place and life and dimension of everything before, even if not ever again. Out-to-in, in-to-out. She watched the shade cord flutter, its handle slapping against the window frame, and thought: now there’s a sign of life, a sign of something other.