and asked why I couldn’t move the appointment. “You’re retired. It’s not as if you have to be anywhere important in the morning.” He sounded irritated, not vicious. That was almost worse. He believed my empty hours belonged to them because nobody paid me for them.
“I’m leaving Tuesday morning,” I repeated. That night I wrote a sentence in my phone: “Being retired doesn’t mean being available.” I needed to see it written down because I’d spent most of the visit acting as though it did.
On Saturday, while they
