Eric tossed the bag in the wheelbarrow as if it was just a second thought, a whim, instead of what it really was — a sixty-pound bag of cement — and it hit the metal wheelbarrow with a thud. Even the wheelbarrow shuttered from the impact but Eric didn’t seem to be affected by the task. He picked up his shovel and pierced the sharp end into the bag — which was disappointing because that was becoming my favorite part — then we pulled out the pieces of bag and I added in water from the hose.

“You two are a mess.” We were caked with mud and sweat when Debbie’s phone made that shutter sound as she snapped a picture.

“The word you’re looking for,“ I corrected her, through heavy breaths. “Is macho.”

“That’s right.” Eric agreed, stirring the cement with his shovel.

“Macho,” I repeated. “And Eric.”

“Hey!”

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Debbie placed the phone back in her pocket because Debbie only takes one picture of anything. Just one. In a world of digital photography, when you could take dozens of shots, increasing the odds of capturing a few treasures, she makes just one single pass at it.

Debbie could stumble across Elvis coming out of a spaceship shaking hands with Jimmy Hoffa and Bigfoot, and she would excitedly pull out her phone and take one single photograph. Click. Then, hours later when she was trying to post that picture— of the spaceship stairs because that’s all she caught — she would actually have the nerve to be disappointed. And this is the reason that the one and only photograph of Eric and I pouring the footers for our new deck, are of both of our backs.

“They’ll be more,” she said.

And there would be. Once the footers were dry, Eric and I would start on the frame and there would be additional pictures — of our eyes closed, our feet and a few of the dog — there is always need for new pictures of the dog. And since pictures of Eric are no longer at a premium — since he’s not dead — there would be time for these new pictures. And since it looks like Eric will remain not-dead for a long time, there would be additional time for other photographs.

Because Eric is not supposed to be just dead, he’s supposed to be long dead. By almost a year. In fact, that’s why he came here and that’s why he ended up living two houses from us. He came here to die.

The details of Eric’s life before we met him, aren’t important — and I don’t know all that much anyway. Only that when he arrived he had made some bad decisions and he was diagnosed as terminal. When the doctors said there was no hope he called his family to say goodbye and this was when his sister Dianne, moved him up from Florida to spend his last few weeks with her and her family.

“I didn’t want my brother to die alone”, Dianne would smile, through tired eyes.

But Eric in those early days is not the Eric of today. He was a skeleton in a red bathrobe that would walk in his front yard to smoke a cigarette and would nod if cornered, but nothing else. He was gaunt, beaten, broken and sleeping in a borrowed bed while the life he was lent was about to come due.

When the doctors said it was time, hospice came. They made him comfortable. They said Eric would be gone in a week. The next week they said it would be the following week. Then they said a month. Then they stopped coming and told Dianne to call them as soon as Eric was dead.

She said she would.

More months went by and Eric’s travels from the house became longer. He took short walks. Then he took longer ones. Then he bought a used bicycle and could be seen peddling through back streets. Even his conversations became longer — on his front lawn, always in that red bathrobe — and any topic was fascinating and new.

I didn’t know Eric before he came here, so I don’t know if that childlike excitement he has now is the real him or the reaction of a man who has been given a second chance and doesn’t want to waste a single moment of it. But the him, now, is easy going and inquisitive and if you just moved into our neighborhood, you would swear that Eric had lived with Dianne and Dan for decades — or even that it was the family home and it was Dan that had moved in with them after he and Dianne got married. He just — belongs here.

“Looks like rain,” Eric covered the two footers with a tarp and we tipped the wheelbarrows over them for additional protection. Then we walked the tools to his truck.

“This is a great truck,” I shut the tailgate.

“I know,” Eric beamed. “Did I tell you I got it for fifteen hundred?”

“No,” I lied.

And I got to hear the story again.