The swelling in my ankles had gone on for months. My doctor said it was just my age and to keep my feet up. I am seventy-six years old, and you tend to believe people in white coats when they tell you that gravity simply forgets how to pull things down after a certain decade. You buy wider shoes with soft Velcro straps. You stop wearing your good leather boots because the zipper bites into the skin above your heel like a dull knife.

You adjust. That is what people my age do, we adjust until the world shrinks down to the size of whatever chair is closest to the radiator.

I live alone in a small apartment on the third floor of a brick building where the elevator smells faintly of damp wool and wet dogs. My husband Arthur has been gone five winters now, and the silence in the rooms has a way of settling into your bones if you let it. I have my routines. I walk down to the corner bakery on Tuesdays for a small loaf of rye bread and a single cinnamon roll, though lately the walk back up the steps required a little pause at the landing between the second and third floors. I just told myself I was getting out of shape. The winter had been long, the kind of heavy, gray season that makes your joints ache before you even throw off the heavy wool blankets in the dark.

The senior center ran a free foot-care clinic in May, five dollars for a trim, so I signed up mostly because my toenails had gotten thick and stubborn and bending down had become an exercise in quiet humiliation. The basement hall of the center always smelled of floor wax and stale coffee, a comforting, institutional smell that reminded me of my years volunteering at the elementary school library. There were six of us sitting in folding chairs, all of us wearing sensible shoes that we peeled off with varying degrees of struggle, our bare feet looking pale and forgotten against the gray linoleum floor.

On Thursday, a young woman named Priscilla pressed her thumb into my ankle; the dent just stayed there. It did not bounce back like normal flesh does. It left a neat, white thumbprint right in the puffy skin above my sock line, looking like someone had pushed their finger into a mound of bread dough before it goes in the oven.

I remember looking down at her fingernails, which were trimmed short and clean withoutany polish