Excerpt:

St. Mary's Hospice, located in the loft space above East Texas Burger (Home of the Big Mouth Burger -- Bet your bass you'll love our burgers!) holds the venerable position of being the place where most of our citizens will go to die. The restaurant is locked up tight by this time of night, but the smell of grilling meat permeates the airy hospice rooms. JD McCaffey is there now, breathing his last few pneumonia soaked breaths, surrounded by his middle son Mike's family and a few of the volunteers from St. Mary's church who sit with the dying. His younger son, Paul, is standing in the dark stairwell that leads down to the street smoking a cigarette.
"Let's pray," says Jeanie, taking her father-in-law's limp hand. The catholic ladies politely decline to join the prayer circle. JD's people have always been Baptists.
Somewhere between Paul peeking his head in and Mike's choked "Amen" JD passes away.

Across town, Mike's neighbor Charlotte Myer feels her husband nudging her awake. Charles has been dead these five years, but he still talks to her sometimes -- if he thinks it's important.
"What?" she says to his side of the bed.
'You need to get up and call the hospice,' he says, 'JD just passed.'
JD and Charles had used to stand on either side of the barb-wire fence and talk for a while anytime Charlotte mowed. JD said she was the mowin-est woman he'd ever seen.
Charlotte gets up and verifies the news.
"No, I don't need to talk to the family, Rosalee," she tells the lady who'd answered the phone. "Just give them my condolences."
As she gets back in bed she's thinking of the fruit tray she'll take across the street in a few days after things get less hectic.
"Nite, Charles."