Old Lady 31

Abe and Angie Rose, once pillars of modest prosperity, watch their twilight dissolve into a smear of worthless share certificates; the mine that promised ore delivers only dust, and the couple’s joint horizon collapses into two institutional walls—the Old Ladies’ Home for her, the granite poorhouse for him. At the wrought-iron gate of the Home, a single hundred-dollar bill performs the last rite of their togetherness, yet the farewell tableau is so raw with unspent years that the grey sorority inside, wizened custodians of their own discarded futures, vote to smuggle Abe across the threshold as the thirty-first “old lady.” Rechristened, housed in lace and whalebone, Abe becomes the reluctant pet of a matriarchal microcosm: tonics forced like communion, shawls draped like judicial robes, bedtime stories recited over his coughing lungs. When Blossy, the most incandescent inmate, weds Captain Darby—a breeze of masculine oxygen in this lavender-scented sarcophagus—Darby dangles the key to escape. Abe bolts, but the outer night tastes of ash; guilt, a more relentless jailer than iron, herds him back to find that the supposedly barren stock has quietly flowered into the exact sum needed to repurchase the weather-salted cottage where two rocking chairs still wait on the porch, as though the house itself had never believed in parting.