When the Music Stops
Social Security
The community room at Willowbrook Senior Living smelled of daffodils and anxiety. Marcus arrived early, as he always did for the Tuesday morning current events discussion, and found Sarah already seated at their usual table by the window, her tablet propped against a vase of plastic flowers.
“You see the news?” Sarah asked without looking up. At eighty-six, she had the bearing of someone who had stopped being surprised by the world decades ago. “Ramirez is up three points in Pennsylvania.”
Marcus lowered himself into the chair across from her, his knees protesting the movement. “I saw.” He was sixty-eight, young enough to remember when that number would have meant something different to him. “You decided yet?”
Sarah finally met his eyes. They had known each other for four years now, ever since Marcus moved into Willowbrook after his wife passed. Both of them had voted Republican in every election since Nixon. Both of them had watched their party transform into something they barely recognized. But that was where their agreement ended.
“I’m voting for Patterson,” Sarah said. “Same as always.”
Marcus felt the familiar tightness in his chest. “Sarah. You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?” She turned her tablet toward him. The screen showed a campaign ad: Senator James Patterson standing before an American flag, his silver hair immaculate, his smile practiced. The tagline read: Protecting What You’ve Earned.
“Because it’s nonsense,” Marcus said, keeping his voice low. The room was filling up now, other residents shuffling toward their seats, but he didn’t want to make a scene. “You’ve read his platform. Transmuting lead into gold? That’s not policy, that’s alchemy. It’s a fantasy.”
“It’s innovation,” Sarah countered. “American ingenuity.”
“It’s physically impossible. The energy required would cost more than the gold would be worth. Any physicist could tell you that.”
Sarah waved her hand dismissively. “They said we couldn’t go to the moon, and we did.”
“We did go to the moon. And there’s nothing there worth mining, Sarah. No rare earth minerals that would solve anything. Patterson’s people know that. They’re counting on voters not knowing it.”
The morning light caught the lines of Sarah’s face, the accumulated weight of eighty-six years. She had been beautiful once; Marcus had seen the photographs in her room. Now she was something else: formidable, certain, unmovable.
“What do you want me to say, Marcus? That I should vote for Ramirez? For tax increases?”
“For solvency. For the fund to actually survive.”
“I’ve been collecting my full benefits for twenty years.” Sarah’s voice was calm, almost gentle. “Twenty years, Marcus. Whatever happens now, I’ve gotten what I paid in. More than what I paid in, probably.”
Marcus stared at her. “And what about me?”
The question hung between them. Sarah had retired at sixty-six, in 2012, when the system was still flush. She had watched her monthly deposits arrive like clockwork through two decades of political chaos, through pandemics and recessions and wars. Marcus had retired three years ago. He had maybe five years of full benefits left before the trust fund emptied and payments dropped to seventy-eight cents on the dollar.
“You’ll be fine,” Sarah said. “You have savings.”
“I have some savings. Not twenty-two percent of my income in savings. Not for the rest of my life.”
“Then Patterson’s plan—”
“There is no plan!” Marcus’s voice rose despite himself. A few heads turned. He forced himself to breathe. “There’s no plan, Sarah. There’s theater. There’s scapegoats. Did you see what he said last week about immigrants draining the system? About, about trans people somehow being responsible for the deficit?”
“I don’t pay attention to all that.”
“You should. Because that’s all there is. Hate and fantasy. That’s the whole platform.”
Sarah closed her tablet with a soft click. For a long moment she said nothing, just watched the other residents settling into their chairs, greeting each other with the careful cheerfulness of people who had learned not to discuss politics before noon.
“I’ve voted Republican for sixty-four years,” she finally said. “My father voted Republican. His father voted Republican.”
“So did mine. So did I.” Marcus leaned forward. “But this isn’t that party anymore. You know it isn’t.”
Sarah gathered her things and stood. The discussion group was starting; someone at the front of the room was fiddling with a microphone. She paused, looking down at Marcus with an expression he couldn’t quite read.
“I’ll see you at lunch,” she said, and walked away.
Marcus sat alone at the table for a long time after that, watching the November light fade through the window, thinking about the ballot that waited in his room. When he finally filled it in that evening, his hand was steady.
He marked the box for Ramirez, and the world didn’t end.