The dealer doesn’t have a girlfriend, no kids, divorced once with a restraining order stapled to it. He lives alone in Nana’s pink stucco house and mostly watches a lot of TV. Paint peels from the orange walls in long fine stripes; when he walks through the house he’s reminded of candy canes. Over the past decade his habit has enlarged to a pack and a half a day. Among his problems he counts his back as his worst. A dull pain radiates in waves down his lower lumbar and into his legs. Several times a week, the dealer spreads a Penthouse across the kitchen counter, flips to the stories in the Forum section, and jerks off into a waist-level, flip-top-lid Rubbermaid trash can. Nights, he’s often kept awake by thoughts of unpronounceable, German-sounding diseases that attack without warning. This he dismisses as a consequence of work. A few close friends, he’s tight with Ralph. They have beers. He finds that too many words in a big situation are a great deal useless. They have the habit of sitting in his stomach like hard little pebbles, grinding his troubles together. This year, as an early birthday present to himself, the dealer is considering buying a Kawasaki two-stroke, two-cylinder Jet Ski. Overall he is, he supposes, satisfied.

So inside of an hour the dealer finds himself discussing odds of this season’s Diamondbacks, boots up on Mr. Epstein’s La-Z-Boy, to then later kneeling over the toilet in the old man’s bathroom, vomiting. A wad of toilet paper ends up looking like a dead corsage in his hand. It melts to pulp under the faucet. The dealer wipes his mouth and glances at the mirror—tired eyes, his breathing even. Boots still firmly on the ground.
    “My Spanish is leaky,” the dealer says, clicking the bathroom door shut. “And airport customs. I don’t know. That worries me.”
    “I don’t blame you,” Mr. Epstein says from the kitchenette. “But you’re resourceful down to your fingertips. Look at the business you created. And out of thin air.”
    When Mr. Epstein speaks, his dentures come together violently, a wet clacking the dealer has always found irritating. “You’ll find a way,” Epstein continues. “It’s not a big load.”
    The dealer swirls these last words over with his tongue as Mr. Epstein fills the electric kettle and turns it on. Not a big load.
    Shrunken by age, bald except for Velcro strips on the sides, the old man says, “Here. Grab a stool. Peppermint tea will help settle your stomach.”
    Mr. Epstein’s apartment is a one-bedroom efficiency designed for seniors on the verge: handrails lining the walls, emergency call button, safety-trip electric burners. Mr. Epstein has ordered every available option; he leaves nothing to chance. The whole setup is ripe with anticipation, a preventative terror bubble. There’s a phone to the security desk next to the bed, large red arrows high on the walls marking the exit.
    The walls are flat cream and lined with scuffed rubber baseboards. The dealer takes note. He is standing on wall-to-wall, industrial-grade gray carpet, a tight-woven synthetic with a plastic base, for spills. He knows things. He once worked roofs on tract homes before starting in this business.
    “I understand it’s a significant errand,” Mr. Epstein says. “Ultimately it’s your decision. But I have no one else to ask.”
    It’s not the asking that angers the dealer; it’s the nature of the question, the responsibility attached to it.
    Earlier, Epstein paced nervously around the small apartment as he outlined his tragedy and lobbed morbid percentages about tumors this size, this grade, this late in the game. Fidgeting with an emerald ring on his pinkie, he linked one ugly symptom to the next, unrolling a long chain of medical facts as invisible bombshells dropped all around the dealer. Never once did the old man look him in the eye, and when Epstein finally finished, he collapsed into a pile of embroidered pillows on the couch, released a muted fart, and seemed to wander off into space, considering his awards which hung like ornaments along the wall, honorary-this, distinctions-with-that, a man of achievement and renown.
    The pair sat quiet. From the glowing eye of the TV screen, Carlos Quentin tripled; the scoreboard ticked another RBI. Slowly, a switch turned to “on” inside the dealer’s stomach, stiffening it into a fist. Breathlessly he ran to the bathroom, closed the door, and locked himself in—his decision, resentfully, made.
    Monthly, the dealer drives over the border to Nogales, never once with a problem. What Mr. Epstein wants, he’s tried before for different reasons altogether, but his pharmacist in Nogales couldn’t deliver. Mr. Epstein tells him, yeah yeah, whatever, he came across an article in the “Science” section in the New York Times. “The situation is becoming increasingly relaxed in barrios outside Mexico City.”
    But the dealer was hearing whispers about it, too.
    From the kitchenette the electric tea kettle spits its whistle. Mr. Epstein, with a hiccup of shakes, lifts the lid of a ceramic jar with thin pink fingers. He says to the dealer, “Macaroon?”

A few years now, he’s been dealing at Sage Gardens Royal Commons Senior Living Community, Tucson’s largest tiered residential village and, according to the brochure, “Our desert town’s warmest.” With corporate headquarters based in Chicago, and fourteen other locations across the country, it’s a publicly traded company with an average growth rate of 15 percent per year and grounds modeled after small college campuses. The logo is a saguaro cactus (all shadow and pitchfork) with a sun downing behind it. Recently, the dealer has begun giving the idea of investing serious thought.
        For sixty thousand dollars up front, Nana entered the Yucca Senior Independent Living building when she was eighty-one. When a fatty deposit dislodged from an arterial wall in her heart, wandering like a nomad to her brain, it cut her oxygen supply off. She lost sight in both eyes and partial hearing in her left ear. They moved her to Cactus Grove, the assisted living quarter.
        “Consequently,” the social worker tells the dealer, handing him an informational pamphlet, “when the time comes, if the time comes, your grandmother will graduate to Memory Meadow.”
    He shares responsibilities with his sister, Eileen. Tuesdays and Thursdays, Eileen wheels Nana through the central square, where they feed imported ducks in the newly dredged pond. Mondays and Wednesdays, he accompanies Nana to “Creativity with Gina” or “Sing-along with Patrick,” usually some activity that lets him escape two or three times to grab a smoke.
    Nowadays he’s accustomed to platoons of soft yellowing bodies moving in slow motion across wide lawns. Each visit is a humorous lesson in fashion, bright examples of how bodies can turn on themselves. All-around flab hangs from underarms like plastic grocery bags full of water.
    Nana’s supplemental insurance couldn’t cover costs for her twelve different medications; expenses spilled over. He and Eileen were flooded with notices. Monthly payments climbed into the hundreds, accompanied by phone calls at night from collectors.
    The dealer began hearing little murmurs, and so did Eileen. One afternoon he packed a ham and jalapeño sandwich and took a trip over the border. In one expedition to Nogales, they saved three hundred dollars in blood thinners, calcium supplements, and antianxiety meds.
    Nana was always overtalkative, more now that she’s blind; so, shelved between stories of lacing pasta with ketchup during the Depression and praise for her grandkids, she spread word of his trips. He reminded her to keep everything quiet while he figured out the legal issues, like him sitting in jail. Nevertheless, orders came in. Nana’s neighbors with absentee sons and daughters summoned him to their efficiency apartments. His trips to Nogales increased. He bought a pager and quit the roofing business altogether.
    A Marlboro red stitched between lips, undershirts stained from years of hard work under desert sun, and Wranglers cut-to-fit boots he once kicked a man in the neck with, he became the dealer.

Don Waters was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, and now lives in Berkeley, California. He's received honors including fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Jentel Foundation, as well as the McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review. His stories have been published in Epoch, StoryQuarterly, the Kenyon Review, the Southwest Review, the Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA, the Cimarron Review, and Grain.