The little paper cups filled with samples of fresh peach pie dolloped with ice cream were appearing on the tray too slowly for my taste.

The person before me got one and stepped away. Now I was next. There was an older man behind me, and I thought, well, he’s old, has less time to live, maybe I’ll let him go first. In my mind I was graciously offering  “Please,  you go ahead,”  with a lovely smile, something to make his day.  

When the next cup was put onto the counter,  he shoved, Trump-like, ahead of me and grabbed it. I glared at him, and, seeming surprised, he said “Oh, did you want this?” while scooping a spoonful into his mouth. 

The person handing out the samples shrugged. ”I’m sorry. That’s all we have for today!”

When I rolled my cart into the steep and poorly laid out parking lot, I barely avoided being hit by a car moving quite erratically, possibly  because the driver appeared to be berating someone in the passenger seat.  

The car had a license plate from North Carolina, quite common in Staten Island. People go to great lengths to avoid paying the cost of insuring their vehicles in high-cost New York. I had just paid my annual car insurance bill, at the full non-evading-the-cost rate, and that license plate made the $4,000 rankle.  Worst of all, it was a vanity plate:  “HighCsDrifter.” 

And I recognized the man who had snatched the last peach pie sample from under my nose.  

I looked up the license plate when I got home; it was registered to a Mary Gaswell of Asheville, NC. Who just happened to have parents, Harry and Doris, living on Staten Island.

The mailbox rasping open startled Harry up from his nap. Why his useless wife hadn’t oiled it as he’d told her to, he didn’t know. And, as he decided after a few croaking calls to her, she wasn’t even home. He’d have to get the mail himself.  He stuck his feet into slippers with the backs beaten down and shuffled to the front door. The screen door, drooping unevenly from its top hinges, screeched along the concrete front stoop like fingernails on a blackboard. He’d have to speak to the wife about that, too. He felt a tightening in his chest and found he couldn’t seem to  get air into his lungs. 

“Doris should have been here,” he thought, as his mind closed for the last time.

By the time Doris returned, he was long past revival.

The Staten Island Advance newspaper reported that “Widow Donates Boat to Young Neighbors.” 

“Recently widowed Great Kills resident Doris Gaswell has given her family’s boat to a couple who had been their neighbors for several years, only asking for them to pay her the cost of renting its slip in Great Kills  marina, which her husband had paid in advance. “I know it was Harry’s love, and I knew he’d be happy to help a young couple begin the boating life, instead of me just getting unhappy whenever I see it, because of the memories.”

It need not be said how thrilled the Hansons are at this gift. They plan to continue  keeping it at the local marina, where it will berth in the same spot it has for the last 30 years.’”

Doris had spent years wishing for that boat to be at the bottom of the ocean, preferably with Harry in it. They had been a happy, romantic couple  before he bought it, but afterward, he spent his weekends painting it, scraping barnacles from it and then rewarding himself with drinking with his oldest friends around the tiny table in its galley, becoming more and more encrusted in his antediluvian mind, as she housewived and reared their daughter.

Doris had not mentioned to the Advance reporter that the young couple made a habit of parking their car in front of Doris’s driveway, blocking it, on the assumption that an older couple like her and Harry were wouldn’t be driving around much. 

She hoped for as much happiness for the young neighbors as she had gotten from it. 

Doris took the life insurance settlement she had been carefully paying into for as long as Harry had had the boat, and bought a large home near her daughter in North Carolina, out of sight of any water.