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

and every Christmas, Anna sent him a card that she signed, “still here.” As awful as the story had been, it awakened her to the realization that everyone expected her to die, and soon.
    Those around Anna had died because of illness or war. She didn’t know of anyone who’d died of old age—just diseases and infections related to aging. What a load of crap that phrase was—“related to.” She read the obituaries and kept a tally of the causes of death. By her hundred and first birthday, she had categorized nearly one hundred and fifty deaths from heart attacks, cancer, strokes, falls, drowning, suicide, and snake bites. Not one mention of old age. That year she went skydiving and was given a ten-year renewal on her driver’s license. Neither event merited another story in the Kidron Observer .
    She asked Louise Bells, who had gone to school with Bets and now volunteered at the library three days a week, to find the person who’d lived the longest. “You mean besides Methuselah?” Louise asked. The woman Louise found was French and was one hundred and twenty. Jeanne Louise Calment lived on her own until she was one hundred and sixteen and claimed her longevity could be traced to chocolate, Bordeaux, and olive oil, which she poured over all her food and rubbed into her face every night. Anna felt that this was a quip designed to put off reporters and other intrusives, but Callie took it as gospel truth and photocopied the news accounts of Mme. Calment to hang in the Pit Stop. She wrote to the French woman to request an autographed photo, which was framed and hung next to the tin cartons of imported olive oil. Callie liked to have visitors guess the woman’s age—they always picked a number between eighty-five and ninety-eight.
    Callie took this as proof that olive oil was a cure for old age, but Anna thought the more likely story was that people couldn’t conceive of anyone living longer than a century. She kept this thought to herself and let her granddaughter believe in the miracle of the oil, although she couldn’t help but point out that she herself had far fewer wrinkles than Mme. Calment and had never once put olive oil on her face.
    “You should start,” Callie had said one night at dinner. “Then in twenty years we can put your picture up and claim it works wonders.”
    They’d laughed, and Erin, who’d grown up around wrinkled women, took to stealing olives from the refrigerator and rubbing them across her cheeks. There’d been an argument about the child’s behavior. Anna and Bets thought the act was frivolous and wasteful. Callie, who’d been overruled about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, threatened to move out and take the child with her. The courts had made her the legal guardian of Erin, and although they’d all agreed to raise her together, if she decided to leave, Anna and Bets couldn’t stop her.
    “The child has nothing to believe in,” Callie had said. “What’s wrong with letting her believe in the olives? Neither of you can say that the olives had nothing to do with your remarkable health. You don’t believe that they’ve kept you younger than your years, but that’s not to say that they haven’t.”
    It disappointed Anna when Bets took Callie’s side. “Let her believe in this,” she said.
    Anna understood how Callie might see the orchard, the olives, as having magical properties, but Bets knew better. There had been so much work when Anna was a child helping her father and even more during the years Anna raised Bets. Children were let out of school during harvest, and they worked as hard as the adults picking olives from the trees. The cheap labor came not from Mexico, but from the households of Kidron. When Anna thought of the orchard, she recalled blisters, splinters, arms that ached during harvest. Her memories of the trees were of sweat. Bets had the same childhood, and then they’d had to work together to keep the business alive during the years when the men