“And what sort of seniors’ discount do you offer?” She figured the older you got the better discounts you should get, now that the word senior was applied to just about anyone with high blood pressure. The week before, she had informed Pharmaphuk’s checkout clerk, “There’s no such thing as a Junior Senior. Why should fifty-year-olds get a senior’s discount just because some forty-nine-year-old marketing executive wants a cut?”  Junior Seniors! From sixty to sixty-nine, she could have been a bonafide Senior and not have known it, and at seventy, a Senior Senior. What would they call Violet at eighty? Were ninety-year-olds More-Dead-Than-Alive-Seniors?  And what of the 100-year-olds?  Taking her grocery bag from the clerk, Zophia warned, “Just wait till I’m a hundred and I’m a card-carrying God-Must-Have-Forgotten-Me Senior. By then this stuff oughta be free!”

She had asked God to give her great-grandfather cancer, like he gave her daddy, like he gave her. Of all the diseases God could have given her great-grandpa, she wanted it to be cancer because cancer wasn’t like the other diseases that took you away in a hurry. You could live with cancer when it was in remission. It wasn’t like a car accident that took you right away, before you had a chance to say goodbye, before anyone could say goodbye to you. But she must have done something to upset God because he broke his end of the bargain.

“You haven’t been with a man before, have you, young lady?” he teased. She raised her hips as an unaccounted-for hand explored. 

“No, not one with purple toenails,” she confessed. What if she had forgotten how it works? Sex was like golf, Zophia once explained. There was a ball and a hole, and the ball would always find the hole, no matter how long it took or how long you had to play in the rough. It was the best way for Zophia, a non-golfer, to explain why men and women took different approaches to sex and golf. Men, she advised, dreamed of the elusive hole-in-one. They wanted the fewest strokes possible to sink the ball. Women on the other hand liked the extra strokes on the fairway; they needed the detailed attention on the green.

His fingers were inside her. God, she hoped he wasn’t a golfer.

The elevator door caught his rain jacket as he slipped past the sensor. In the corner, an elderly woman lay with her skirt up around her waist, her left arm cradling her head, her right hand at her side. His loafer slid in something sticky as he knelt beside her. Leaning in to listen to her flattened chest, he tried to avoid the sight of her naked breast. A tear caught on his chin as he reached to take her pulse on her neck. Nothing. “Who would … who could …” he couldn’t say the words. He thought to redress the body, cover her breasts, pull her skirt down, but would that bugger up an investigation when the cops eventually arrived? The doors opened behind him.

“So you took off your jacket to cool down, eh?” There was no other way to confirm if he was the naked man in question.

“Yes. And my tie.”

“And your tie.” Then your undershirt that every old man wears, then your knee socks, then your boxers that meet the top of the socks. She stopped, startled to realize she knew so much about old men’s undergarments.

“And my pants. It’s just me in my thong but if you’ve ever worn a thong while gardening, you know it creeps like clematis.”

“Kermit, I need to let you know that someone saw you working naked and she’s filing a complaint.” Though she didn’t have a standard complaint form for Naked Man on the Roof, she suspected Rita would arrive armed with one.

Now propped up on a telephone book, elbows on the table, poking at what was left of his gooey marshmallows, he was supposed to be acting like a kid – Violet’s little boy. And he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. He was supposed to be wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve and swinging his feet under the table, pulling the saucer up to his mouth to lick the remaining cookie crumbs and burping without covering his mouth. He feigned a burp. It wasn’t convincing. Somehow it didn’t seem right to burp in front of Ms. Violet. He wouldn’t chance a fart.