When the old horse ‘n hay barn came down off 450 South, smoke rose for days, carried for miles. A great gray cloud come to overtake. No one thought Old Man Neeri was tethered up inside. Days later, after the coals had quit their smoldering, the authorities picked through to find the cause of the burn. They trampled their Wellingtons through the dust of his old bones as they questioned where it was he’d gone. No one asked after the disappeared Ms. Mullin, the caregiver Neeri himself had hired and only ever called “economical” when asked those few times about her services.

Ms. Mullin had avoided the town gaze long since taking up Neeri as a customer. The rumors, the looks. Sometimes, the food that was thrown. And once, the strike of a flat-soled shoe against her shoulder. All these things she had not expected after taking up one last patient for end-of-life care. Most of the time, she was commended for her service, revered by the families of the deceased as a lifeline.

But in this town, a jealousy had sprouted. A town-wide, nasty penchant for stoking the fire of town gossip had existed since the town was born. Outsiders seldom stayed long. But Ms. Mullin did. Less than two weeks after her arrival, shortly after the first morning her car had been spotted parked at Old Man Neeri’s, filthy lies spread about the pair. They passed through the walls of those who shared what they’d heard in the supermarket a little too loudly from mouths hungry for a new scandal. The chance to share something a listener hadn’t heard yet. The townspeople had bored of young Desmond’s proclivity for vegetarianism or Mayor Branson’s latest infidelity with yet another fresh-faced stable boy.

Ms. Mullin had never intended to remain in this town longer than a pit stop to restock her  traveling provisions with a few weeks of pay from washing dishes at a diner or sweeping floors in a storefront. There was a quiet pattern she liked to follow on her quest east. Her decision to stay was as surprising to herself as it was to the rest of them. As quickly as she decided to stay, she learned to keep to herself. It was the only way to avoid the hostility of the rest of the town and the drama they insisted on painting her into. She was no stranger to loneliness, and in truth, she preferred the quiet company of the stars or a novel while dozing off in the backseat of her Volkswagen.

By the time the barn had come down and burned up the bones of her last patient, Ms. Mullin was halfway across an ocean and an entirely different person than she had been in the years preceding her most recent months. For the time they’d known one another, Old Neeri had lived stubbornly with his claws dug into the soft flesh of the undersides of Ms. Mullin’s arms. She had had no choice but to stick around until the claws retracted slowly from her flesh. But the scars remained. It was with a fondness she looked on them and a gratitude that she considered the changes that had blossomed inside of her since meeting Old Neeri.

When they met, Old Man Neeri was a withered, shriveled, teetering lump of person. No matter how high he lifted his brows, the flesh of his head insisted on gathering in the pits of his deep-set, jaundiced eyes. Ms. Mullin had pitied the fleshy blob of the man when she first passed him by on the street. He was sequestered in the darkness of his own shadow. A generous shadow that pooled around his ankles. But he leaned out of it to pursue her down the sidewalks of Main Street, and when he caught her, he leaned even further forward to make his offer.

Ms. Mullin had not anticipated caring for another shrunken and puckered, leaking and dying body before making her escape. She had already saved more than enough to cover the down payment on the modest land waiting overseas she had in mind to purchase. Even the one-way ticket to get there. It had come down to the time of gathering supplies. Only a few thousand left to cover the last of it, most of which was rolled up in a ball of cash underneath the floor runner in the back of her Volkswagen. Ms. Mullin had a taste for change as she made her way across the cracked Main Street sidewalks on her way north. She’d heard talk of a downtown diner in search of an extra set of hands that didn’t mind dunking into a filthy sink of leftovers and soap scum. One she never made it to after passing Neeri where he stood on the sidewalk outside of the post office. In her hurry, the eye contact they made was brief. The man’s cataracted eyes widened as he took her in. She quickly flitted away.

A few blocks before he caught her, she noticed the old man lumbering after her at a panting, feverish pace. He staggered over the sidewalk, leaning more and more on the walnut-stained cane at his side. It was not fear, but first anger that flared up inside the woman. She had no doubt Old Man Neeri would fall into a pattern she’d observed throughout many of the towns she had stopped in on her way across the country. Particularly since she’d made her way into the lower half of the Midwest. Elderly, cis-het men in these towns scrutinized her with a deep-seated insecurity that invalidated her existence with every syllable they slew at her. The anger quaking their voices betrayed the fear that lived inside them. Ms. Mullin knew most people who looked closely enough saw her as the man she had been born as. A peculiar, effeminate man, but a man, nonetheless. She had an appearance that troubled most people she met.

Ms. Mullin could not deny that she appeared different from most women, but a woman she was. She preferred the response of the majority: an uncomfortable silence. The sliding away of eyes as soon as they landed on her. A wordless sneer, even. Disregard she, over the years, had made a home inside of. But for some—usually the old, cis-het men like the one barreling after her—her very existence was not something to ignore, but police. The anger that flared inside the woman had pursued her throughout the years of her life that she had lived as her true self, three times as many years as the painful childhood she’d spent confused and unable to comprehend her place in.

Ms. Mullin picked up her walking pace. She wove her way through the crowd that steadily dispersed from the market’s exit. She ignored the slurs a few bold onlookers hissed at her as she blazed away from Neeri. The words rolled down her back. At a crosswalk, she dared a glance over her shoulder. The potato-shaped man persistent in his pursuit, despite his huffing, had slowly gained on her. To her surprise, the crowds she fought to get through parted for him. Hot air streamed from the woman’s nostrils as she watched him hobble closer. Heat crept up the small of her back.

Ms. Mullin stopped where she was. She would not cower in fear of some old bigot. She would wait here on the corner of Main and Franklin until the man bowled up to her to spew whatever hate he would. She would allow him to spew, defend any physical advances, and dodge any strikes of the cane he burdened with his weight. When he had spit all he had to spit and exhausted himself from the effort, she would carry on her way. Decades of caregiving had well thickened her skin. Her indifference would snake its way inside him, accompanying him wherever he went. This, she knew. It was a power she would never tire of wielding. It was too easy.

But Old Man Neeri was nothing that Ms. Mullin had expected. From the start, it was a straightforward manner he engaged her with. That, Ms. Mullin appreciated. He had not regarded her as anything but a woman, it seemed. Nothing like the others before him. Neeri spoke to her plainly in his light voice. Not a drop of venom to underlie his words. It was a freedom Ms. Mullin had not often tasted, and it sat sweetly upon her tongue. She could be a full person around this man, perhaps, instead of seen as a parody of herself or an identity to abhor. In moments she was convinced, and not long after, she accepted his offer. She would fulfill another role as caregiver.

The people of the town resented newcomers and quickly settled into their rumor-passing, making accusations about Ms. Mullin and her strange, ancient car that crackled down the gravel roads, so often pulled into the overgrown weeds of what had once been the Neeri family farm yard. A farm that had once upon a time birthed the town, fertilizing its growth as it came up all around to border the Neeri fences and fields, a result of the old man’s great grandparent’s success at cultivating the land. The old man was the last of the Neeri’s. In the last decades of his life, he had grown disdainful of the town and its people surrounding him, nosing into his fields and business all the time. Their lack of gratitude for his family’s hard work and generosity offended him. He kept his distance from his neighbors and spoke most often to himself. He knew the townspeople circled, not as friends, but as vultures, awaiting his fall to nature’s call. They perked their ears up to listen for the availability of his land each time his name passed from one frowning mouth to another.

Old Man Neeri feared that nature’s call would take him soon, a cold dead wind that sometimes slipped under his door and into his chest on his most lonesome nights. He hated those nights, when the fire burned bright but still, he felt no warmth and could not hope to until it decided on its own to return. Nights when he opened his mouth like a gorge and let the great accumulated pains of his life creak out in painful, wracking sobs that sent ripples through his loose skin. His grief was a current he was as helpless amidst as a fallen bough floating along, subject to the river’s direction.

Neeri desperately missed his beloved Eugene more with each passing autumn. Those long, reedy arms he once twined around Neeri’s middle like layers of yarn. It was not so once upon the many decades before when he and Eugene had taken over the Neeri Family Farm, but now, when it came to Ms. Mullin, (or much of anything for that matter), Old Man Neeri was not interested in anything the townspeople spoke of in their sneering circles or thought of in their fat, empty heads. Once, he and his husband had been the talk of the town. It had more than enraged him to hear the lies they spun. But his husband had passed away seventeen years ago. It had become much too difficult for Neeri to carry on in his ways on his own. Let alone care for the nonsense his neighbors invented.

After their brief encounter on the corner of Main and Franklin, wavering beneath the changing of the crosswalk light, Old Man Neeri and Ms. Mullin took tea that first evening of their meeting at a small outdoor stand. Ms. Mullin followed as Neeri led her away from the bustle of Main Street. They wandered a few blocks south to the historical district. Neeri said the best tea around was peddled on the older, brick streets. Ms. Mullin noticed the old man glance about, a nervous glint in his eye. With no one nearby but the tea stand they’d left a block behind, he seemed satisfied.

They sat on an iron bench dusted with leaf litter while sipping at their jasmine tea. As they slumped on the bench and steam rose from their cups, Neeri and Ms. Mullin watched the clouds and birds and light—all that and more—pass by. Ms. Mullin waited for Neeri to explain their tryst and his interest in her. His lips quivered as he sipped his scalding tea. Before long, their company turned to conversation. Well, Old Man Neeri talked. Ms. Mullin mostly listened. Neeri started with a history, river-like in length and meandering path, of his and his husband’s lives until Eugene had passed. It was then Neeri had taken to braving the chill of life’s waters in his body, instead of his beloved he’d conceived of as his boat, for the rest of the lonely way.

In Ms. Mullin, Old Neeri shared, he’d recognized a familiar attitude. She carried herself the way he and his husband once did, and their few queer friends of all different genders had as well. Neeri guessed Ms. Mullin had spent some time living in opposition to the assumptions and expectations others burdened her with. She agreed: she had decided long ago she would not be swayed by the sneers and slurs others sent her way. The old man and she were alike in this way.

Old Man Neeri took his chance, confiding in Ms. Mullin of a similar life experience to her own. Eugene had supported him through all the changes he’d once needed to make. It was Eugene Old Man Neeri had originally trusted to carry out what he would come to ask Ms. Mullin to do. By the time the pair had finished their second and third cups of jasmine tea, Neeri confided in Ms. Mullin of his need. The old man trembled as he spoke the words that he’d kept coiled inside for so long and often had feared he would never achieve: his need of someone to help him carry out his final task before he could go. In their meeting on the rusted iron bench, watching leaves skitter past along the brick road, Neeri whispered to Ms. Mullin what she was to do if she agreed. He spoke in an urgent but kind voice, promising great opportunity in return.

The old man would make Ms. Mullin the beneficiary of his insurance policy and his will, if only she helped him complete what would be his final task. Something he’d been scheming in his bald head under the folds of his leathery, farmer’s skin for years and years, since before his husband had gone. Old Man Neeri had been devastated when Eugene went before him and would not be able to carry out this task for him. But as he came to know Ms. Mullin, Neeri was glad to have it be her.

Ms. Mullin listened intently to Old Man Neeri’s tale of his life, his and Eugene’s years together, and eventually, the whisper of his request. Ms. Mullin had made up her mind somewhere in the first ten minutes to take Neeri on as a new client. She reasoned with herself as she listened. She’d make up the last of the money she needed for her travels by the time he would pass. His yellowing eyes and skin, the tremor of his left limbs. Her experience told her it would not be more than a year, likely less, that she would be committed to his service. This was longer than she had intended to remain in the States, but the old man had dug his way under her skin. Ms. Mullin did not mind waiting around for a bit longer if it meant helping this man live comfortably for the last of his days. He had a light, sweet voice that reminded her of the older brother she’d once had, a voice her brother had possessed before he had gotten older and meaner and lost to her. Kindness that had been calcified through years of mistreatment still lived vibrantly in Old Man Neeri’s milky green eyes. Ms. Mullin, comfortable in her solitude for decades now, could not explain how quickly the kinship she felt with him had blossomed. A motherly, protective instinct had risen in her.

By the time Old Man Neeri had gotten around to making his request and presenting her with his deal, Ms. Mullin had made up her mind to do what he needed to have done. It was nothing to her to agree. In the end, what convinced her was not the insurance money or the land she could sell once it was left to her. It was not the promise Neeri’s offer made to her of the escape from the States she had been working toward so long. Instead, it was the desperation clawing its way out as he gently asked her to help him die as himself. To protect his identity as a man. To be remembered on his own terms.

And more than that, it was a deep-seated hunger for community Ms. Mullin hadn’t realized was hunkered down inside of her like a beast huddled inside a cave it had been forced into. Old Man Neeri was the first person in her life to understand her position as much as he did. This elderly trans man, living stealth in his community for his whole life, feared more than anything being outed in death. Misgendered and invalidated by his town after only ever being known as the old man he’d aged into. It was an injustice Ms. Mullin would spend the next year of her life preventing. Old Man Neeri would burn up to an unrecognizable pile of ash. She would see to it. No one would look at his remains and invalidate him in any way. She’d make damn sure.