Hieronymus Konstantinos Papadakis pushed his walker into the kitchen and up to the door leading out to the garage, wheezing and sucking hard on his oxygen. Every bone in his body hurt and every muscle felt more like fat than meat. After a minute or so, when the effort to breathe finally eased, he pulled the door open so he could see what was going on. Iris had driven the golf cart and the car out and parked them well out of the way; to the edge of the double car driveway for the car, in the grass for the cart. A delivery truck from Stefano’s Home and Appliance was parked at the bottom of the driveway where Iris was now watching two men offload a freezer, the large chest type that could hold an entire beef if one were to purchase such an animal and have it butchered. There was a day when, as a much younger man with family, Hieronymus would have done just such a thing, that is if he’d had the money and the wherewithal. One year he did manage to bag a couple of whitetail up in Maine and the family enjoyed venison on and off throughout the winter. The cost of the license, trip and butcher fees out-weighed any savings he told his wife they’d gain. And then they had to give away some of the meat because they didn’t have room in the small freezer and no money, or room for that matter, for a larger one. He remembered a damned good time, though, hiking through the mountains along game trails, full of stealth and bated breath.

Bated breath. He considered the meaning of that idiom for a few seconds; so excited and anxious that you’re almost holding your breath. How ironic. He was now at the point in his life where he, literally, had no breath to hold.

And there would never again be a freezer stocked full of venison or beef for the winter. Those days, the possibilities, were so long gone that it’d be depressing if circumstances were otherwise. The fact was there would be no more winters of any kind for Hieronymus Papadakis. If things went the way he expected there won’t even be another summer. The day was looming closer when he’d no longer wake up on the sunny side of the grass.

He maneuvered the walker then sat on the convenient built-in seat to watch the work, keeping his oxygen near and thinking about the sunny side of the grass. That was something the guys often threw around when he and they got together to play pickleball or golf or whatever.

“How you feeling today, old friend?” one would ask.

“Woke up on the sunny side of the grass, so not too bad,” the other would reply. They’d then slap each other on the back and laugh.

Now that he was starting to smell the turf himself—a mix of both sweet and sour—it was no longer quite so funny. His time was coming to slip under the grass. Soon. Very soon.

As the delivery crew started maneuvering the dolly up the driveway, Hieronymus caught sight of young Martin Perez—young because he couldn’t be more than his early sixties—standing just inside one of his garage screen doors watching the goings on with the Stefano’s Home and Appliance delivery truck. Sometimes Hieronymus wanted to march across the street and tell Martin to mind his own business, to go smoke his damned cigarettes someplace else. He was always standing outside stinking up the entire neighborhood, had no respect for his or anyone else’s lungs.

Hieronymus sucked on his oxygen, thinking about how he’d never respected his own lungs until it was too late. Someone ought to have a talk with Mr. Perez.

“Nothing for you to see, you young whippersnapper,” Hieronymus mumbled under his breath. “Get ya back into your house.” Martin’s wife did a disappearing act a year after the couple moved in. Once one met Martin Perez, they didn’t blame her at all, actually cheered her on. What most on the street wanted to know was, why didn’t she shoot him first? Hieronymus met her only once. He had to say, she wasn’t all that much better. His question was, did he turn her into a bitch or did she turn him into a bastard? Were they both such that the match was made in heaven, or more likely, hell?”

“What’re you folks going to do with this much freezer?”

The smaller and considerably younger of the two guys was pushing the loaded dolly up the slightly slanted driveway with all he was worth, while the other, much bigger, overweight guy was casually guiding it along, seeming to be sweating up a storm although he didn’t appear to be doing anything other than using the pull handle for balance. Of course it was 3:00 in the afternoon in Florida—they were supposed to be here at 1:00—but it was only the middle of May so it wasn’t all that hot. It wasn’t even breaking ninety degrees. It was the big, sweaty guy who broke into Hieronymus’ thoughts with the question. Hieronymus looked over at his wife, curious as to how she was going to handle the answer.

“I’m figuring I’ll hide my husband’s body in it after he kicks the bucket. I can keep collecting his Social Security and pension that way.”

The guy glanced over to where Hieronymus and his walker filled the doorway. When Hieronymus’ reaction to Iris’ answer was no more than a smile and hunched shoulders, the guy laughed. “Now that’s a great idea.”

Hieronymus wasn’t taken back by his wife’s witty comment. There was a time when she would unnerve him, especially in front of his friends, but not much anymore. Most of the friends he thought he had seemed to have forgotten about him. Golf was gone. Tennis was gone. Pickleball was gone. Lawn bowling was gone. Even billiards was gone. Everything that involved being on his feet and moving about was on his never-to-do-again-in-this-lifetime list. The only activities he was able to participate in were bingo and an occasional pool-deck party during which time Iris had to do all the fetching of bingo cards or food. He had all he could do to get from the car to the chair or deck lounger without expiring en route after sucking down a half bottle of oxygen.

He pulled his thoughts back to her comment. He’d gotten used to her remarks to the point that he kind of enjoyed them. She was always quick with her tongue in a humorous sort of way. If the guy only knew. Still, it’d have been smarter to keep her mouth shut. He hoped the comment didn’t come back to bite her. Too late to take it back now.

The smaller guy stopped pushing and looked up at his partner. “You gonna help out here, Jake? If I pass out you’re gonna have to chase the thing back down the driveway after it runs me over.”

“Oh! Sorry.” Jake applied a bit of his flabby muscle to the handle and pulled the freezer fully into the garage. “Where to, ma’am?”

Hieronymus wondered why Jake thought it necessary to ask where it should go. Was he blind? Iris had spent half the morning clearing a place for the freezer, again while he watched from the kitchen. She was a small woman and at seventy-eight found it a bit of a challenge manhandling heavy objects. One tall cabinet had to be unloaded, item by item, pushed four feet and then reloaded. In the process she swept, cleaned and reorganized, selecting a few things for donation to Save A Horse, a thrift store over in Sun City Center, one of several community donation and resale operations. Not once did she complain. Iris never complained about anything, which often irritated him. There were some things that were worth complaining about and what they had planned for the freezer should have been one of them.

Okay, maybe she did complain. Truth be told, she complained a lot. As a matter of fact she practically fought him from the beginning. He was determined, though, that he’d not go out of this world leaving her destitute. No way in hell. He’d vowed to take care of her and he’d damned well do so even if it had to be from the great beyond.

Iris pointed to the only bare stretch of wall in the garage. “Right there.”

“Are you sure it’ll fit?”

“It’ll fit just fine unless the sales guy at the store gave me the wrong dimensions. My husband taught me how to use a tape measure about fifty years ago so I measured it very carefully. Do you boys need some assistance slipping it in there? I could get him out here if you need more help. One of you would have to hold his oxygen bottle though, and his walker and help him down the step into the garage.”

Hieronymus wanted to laugh but it’d have caused him to have to suck on his oxygen again, maybe expire right on the spot. He could hear the irritation in Iris’ voice, even around the humor. That was as close to complaining to a stranger as she was going to get. She did plenty of complaining to Hieronymus during this entire project, the idea for which originated on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary only two months back, two weeks after he turned eighty years old. They’d lay in bed many a late night since, talking about it. It was initially just a humorous comment of his own which then turned into a serious idea, one that took the better part of two months to convince her to come fully onboard.

Their lives together began March 23, 1963 up in Niagara Falls when gas was only thirty cents a gallon and it cost a mere nickel to mail a letter. Where the hell did those days go? Everything’s gone up a thousand percent. Now it takes a damned half buck to mail the same letter except no one sends letters because they have thousand dollar computers so they can send an email; then they don’t or if they do the receiver reads little more than the subject line before hitting the trash button. The only real mail nowadays is junk which also winds up in the trash. How many trees does this country throw in the trash every day? And what’s with smart phones? One dumb phone on a very long cord in an entire household was just fine fifty-five years ago. Now they do texts on thousand dollar pocket gadgets, or it’s Facebook which never made sense to him. Sending a picture to his daughter doesn’t mean it should also be for her friends and his friends and all the friends of friends that live in India or China or Mexico or California or South Africa. Of course back in the day of the nickel letter, minimum wage was barely over a buck an hour and the average annual income wasn’t much more than five-thousand dollars.

But we all got along just fine, he concluded, back before the world started going to crap, back before he and Iris lost their children. Jacob and Rebecca.

He closed his eyes at that memory and sucked on his oxygen.

They moved around a lot over the years, from one big city to another—Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia—while raising two kids, settling the last dozen years of their working life in Syracuse in upper New York where they still kept their northern home, the cost of which, that and medical bills, has been sucking them dry. In ’88 they lost their son to a construction accident on Long Island and two years later they lost their daughter to a guy who married her and took her to South Africa where they spawned two grandchildren, one each boy and girl. Hieronymus and Iris have seen them only once. That was in ’95 when the grandchildren were only toddlers, the only time Rebecca had come back to the states. The granddaughter eventually grew up and married a South African of French blood and recently spawned a great-granddaughter. Iris went into the computer lab in the clubhouse to print off pictures from Facebook. She’d learned of it only because one of Iris’ friends in Syracuse, Isabella, had spotted it and told her about it. What has happened to the world that family connections have turned into Wi-Fi and social media connections, or even worse, no connections at all?

At least they all appeared to be doing well in the down under side of the earth.

Now, barely more than a decade and a half into retirement, Hieronymus and Iris have had all they can do to survive day-to-day, able to keep the Syracuse home only because of his pension. The taxes and upkeep on two homes were starting to kill them, figuratively, and the trips back and forth were starting to kill him, literally. They were counting every damned penny while hoping that they both woke up in the morning on the sunny side of the grass. At least that was the situation for him. Iris had twenty years of decent health ahead of her or at least ten years and then another five or ten in an assisted living environment; however, there had recently been times when he wondered if he had twenty days or even twenty more minutes.

Just a few more nights was all he needed.

The only thing left to do was talk Iris into selling the Syracuse home. She could easily get three-hundred grand for it. After realtor’s fees and paying off the mortgage she might clear a hundred and fifty. His biggest regret now was that he’d lived too long. He’d passed his eightieth birthday two and a half months ago at which time his term life insurance ran out, the reason the current plan was starting to look more attractive.

Why didn’t he think of sliding under the grass last fall when he could have done it by accidently overdosing on something?

“Don’t wait until the bottom falls out of the real estate market,” he’d told Iris numerous times in the last few weeks. “It looks good right now, will probably be fine to the end of the year but I don’t trust anything about the economy beyond that. Take the summer to make it ready then put it on the market before you return to Florida. Better yet, get it sold before you return. You don’t want it in your hair to have to deal with from afar.”

He took another hard pull on his oxygen and watched as the two men lifted the freezer from its dolly, maneuvered it into place and plugged it in. They observed it for a few minutes to be sure it was operating then handed a clipboard and pen to Iris.

“Give it a couple of hours to fully come down to temperature,” Jake advised, separated a copy from the clipboard and handed it to her along with a plastic bag containing what appeared to be the owner’s manual and keys to the lock on the freezer. “Thank you for your purchase.” He pointed to something on the paper. “If you have any problems just call that number.” He then gave Hieronymus a wink and a salute and then followed after his partner.

Hieronymus watched them load their dolly into the truck then pull away while Iris returned the car to its place in the garage. As she walked out to the golf cart he looked over at the freezer where it hummed, as though trying to soothe his doubts. Then the air conditioner kicked on and he could no longer hear it.

“Don’t chicken out now you old fart,” he muttered to himself. “Don’t chicken out now.”