The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo Page A

are?” he asked.
    Anna shrugged. “There aren’t too many of us, but I’m telling you I’m not only going to outlive that man from China, I’m going to outlive that French woman who died at a hundred twenty-two. I got at least a decade left in me.”
    Dr. Hashmi turned over the paper with her family tree on it. He drew a bell curve and then circled the far right corner of the graph, where the line nearly touched the bottom of the paper. “You’re here. One in seven million people live to be older than a hundred ten. So right now on Earth there are probably only eight hundred and fifty people alive right now as old as you, and none of them, at least the ones I’ve met, can remember their name, let alone have enough teeth to eat crackers. So I’m giving you at least fifteen more years to live.”
    At this assurance, Anna forgot all her reservations about Dr. Hashmi and his tests. She grabbed his hand and held it tight. “I knew I liked you,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Ovuli
    A nna’s obsession with staying alive longer than any other human being didn’t begin until she celebrated her hundredth birthday. Prior to that milestone, she’d had no real interest in age and felt little of the nostalgia that infected her peers. She’d focused on what was right in front of her; however, that year the local newspaper sent a young man to Hill House during her birthday celebration to interview her about her legacy. The reporter was a small, plump adolescent with a smattering of large freckles across his cheeks. He sucked on the inside of his cheeks when he wasn’t talking. “Just pretend I’m another party guest,” he’d told them, following Anna around like Bobo did if he wanted to be fed. He was silent for long periods and then would corner someone from the family and let loose with two dozen questions. He didn’t take notes, a fact that Anna returned to time and again when the article was published.
    Near the end of the afternoon, he sat down and ate a piece of cake with Anna. “You don’t look that old,” he’d said. “I thought you’d be half blind and deaf and there’d be someone here, a nurse or an orderly, wheeling you about.”
    She did not start to lose her eyesight until ten years later, just before her hundred and tenth birthday. That day she had two pieces of cake and ignored all the boy’s questions about longevity. Instead, she told the story of when they moved the town and took a few of the treasures she’d found underneath the stores—a bit of bone from the butcher’s shop, three pearl buttons from the seamstress’s shop, and a watch fob from underneath the bank—and laid them on the table. They were trinkets her children and grandchildren had loved playing with. Erin, who was twelve years old at the time and beginning to be interested in adult stories, was more entranced than the reporter. Still, that boy had the nerve to hug her as he left (the younger generations had no proper sense of formality any longer) and told her he felt blessed to have been able to get her stories from her before—. She cut him off.
    “Before what? I die?” Anna was four inches taller than the reporter, and she’d glared down at him.
    He stammered and blushed and then apologized before turning and rushing out the front door. Her confrontation had made little impact on him. He wrote about none of that but penned an article that painted Anna as he’d expected her to be—a senile, wrinkled woman who was the town’s last remaining link to its past. “Reading this,” Anna said to Bets, “you’d think I’ll be dead before the year is out.” The article had a tone of near tragedy, and although the reporter acknowledged that Anna was in good health, he quoted a nurse as saying that the elderly often deteriorate rapidly.
    The nurse worked at Golden Sunsets, where Frank lived, and Anna made a point of ignoring the woman when she visited the home with Bets. The reporter left to work at a larger paper in Fresno,