When she looked over the questionnaire that day, she found herself holding back laughter. Laughter or rage—the two at that moment were interchangeable. She stared at the supervisor and handed back the form.

“No. I won’t be filling this out,” she said, and the woman, to her credit, did not push.

A soft answer turneth away wrath, Chiyo thought at the time. She had not forgotten the proverb, learned one summer during her teens, when her mother had insisted that Chiyo accompany her to a Bible study group held in the basement of the Anglican church they attended. Chiyo didn’t want to be in the study group, but her mother overruled.

What would the supervisor standing in her kitchen have done, in any case, with the high-ranking score Chiyo would certainly have totalled up? Anger, stress, frustration. Her score would have revealed outrageous and even dangerous limits. Was anyone prepared to help Chiyo in her caregiving role? No one on the horizon that she could see. Everyone was too busy filling out forms, going from one house to another, complaining about having to keep track of heavy caseloads. The supervisors and coordinators who arrived to do assessments were weary and overworked. Not one of these women—all were women—returned a second time. Burnout must have been high. They were reassigned at a rapid rate, becoming faceless as they replaced one another. Each handed Chiyo a business card for contact information. Chiyo stacked the cards in a teacup. Meanwhile, the caregivers themselves—a more stable group than the supervisors they reported to—carried on with varying degrees of efficiency and self-preservation. One excellent caregiver to whom Chiyo’s mother had taken a liking took three weeks off to return to the Congo, where she was born, but she disappeared inside her homeland and never showed up again on anyone’s radar. The agency was at a loss to explain what had happened to the missing employee.

Of course, the physical care had been focused on Chiyo’s mother. As it should have been. Chiyo was a casualty of a different kind.

She looked at the faces around the table; everyone seemed to be waiting for more. Her thoughts were tangling. She was the youngest—she could see that. Would the others understand? Could she even articulate how complicated her relationship with her mother had been? Aware of her vulnerabilities, she decided she’d said enough.

“Thank you, Chiyo,” said Hazzley. “At forty you’re half my age, more or less. Well, not quite. I’m seventy-seven. And not in any rush to meet my next birthday, coming up in November.”

“Likewise,” said Tom, who knew the feeling. “I just turned seventy-nine. I’ll be eighty next year. If I can hold off the celebrations—if there are any—I will definitely try.”

The woman beside Chiyo began to speak softly but did not offer up her age. She was tall and thin, wore no makeup, had ginger tints through the natural grey in her hair. Hazzley thought she might be in her early sixties. Attractive as she was, she wore drab browns and beiges, no jewellery, no other colour. Her back was hunched; she looked down at the table, glanced up and then down again.