Carol is fifty-two. Her daughter is in Columbus, her son is in Charlotte, and both of them call on Sundays — the daughter around four, the son whenever he remembers, usually after eight. They are good kids. She says that twice, unprompted.
The problem wasn't the calls. The problem was the other six days.
She noticed it first in the grocery store. She was buying the small yogurt cups her son liked in high school. He is twenty-seven and lives nine hours away. She stood there with the yogurt in her hand and could not decide whether it was sweet or sad, so she bought it anyway.
What changed things was a neighbor. Not a friend — a neighbor, the kind you wave at. She asked Carol, in the driveway, completely casually: "What do you do on Wednesdays?"
"I didn't have an answer. Not a boring answer. No answer. I waited on Wednesdays. That was the activity."
Carol says the fix sounds like something off a poster, and she resents that a little, because it also happened to work. She started walking. Tuesdays and Thursdays, after four, the loop around the park near the high school. Twenty minutes the first time, and she felt ridiculous the entire time.
The second week she went three times. By October she had a route that took fifty minutes and passed a house with two enormous dogs she now considers acquaintances.
In November another woman started walking the same loop at the same time. They nodded for two weeks before either of them spoke. There are four of them now. They are not close friends, they don't have a name for the group, and two of them she would not recognize out of a coat. She says this is exactly the right amount of friendship for what she needed.
The part she wants people to hear is different, though. It isn't about walking. It's that the Sunday calls got better.
When her daughter called and asked "what's new," Carol had something to say that wasn't about the house or the weather or the daughter's own life. She told her about the dogs. Her daughter laughed and stayed on the phone another twenty minutes.
"I'd been treating those calls like an exam I had to pass," she says. "You can't pass an exam if the only thing you studied all week is the exam."
Her son still calls after eight. She has stopped keeping the evening clear for it. He leaves a voicemail if she's out, and she calls him back Monday, which is a thing she would never have allowed herself to do two years ago.
Story based on a composite, fictional character. Photos are illustrative.