She poured out her coffee in two cups, and filled both of them with hot milk from the stove making sure two, three times that the burner was off. She brought one cup at a time to the table and set them on the plastic-coated Christmas placemat. It was uneven from all the little bits of paper she stored underneath it. She moved the cups and fumbled with the papers, smoothing them out before putting her cups back on Santa’s beard. She pressed the remote carefully, sometimes she turned everything off and had to call for her son to turn it back on.
That video was on again. They kept showing it over and over again of the man dying with another man’s knee on his neck. It was not a TV show, it was real. She didn’t understand it. Policemen? And everyone watching it, filming it, unable to stop it?
She pressed a button and another show came on with two policemen pushing a man up against a car. She pressed the button again and again until a well-dressed and made-up woman was trying to sell fake pearls. “This silicon-based compound has the sheen and polish of real cultured pearls. Look at this setting. Only 19.99.”
She put down the remote and pulled out a piece of paper from under the placemat. She called this table her desk and these were her important papers.
The paper had been torn off the end of an envelope. It read, 2020-1922 = 98. 98? 1922 was right. That was the year she was born. Was it 2020? But she was 88, wasn’t she? Not 98? That’s almost a hundred? She looked at the paper again. She erased the 98 and wrote in 88. That was it. She’d subtracted wrong the first time.