SYNOPSIS:

: SANDI sits in her backyard, late at night, roasting marshmallows and hot dogs over her Home Depot backyard fire pit. Her elderly neighbor, BILL, a tough old coot, brings her over a homemade dinner and wonders that a professional chef like Sandi is eating roasted hot dogs. She explains that she’s depressed over her breakup with Darby. Bill regrets having encouraged the two to date, but Sandi reminds him that Darby is a kind, compassionate man who volunteers at a local nursing home, having been particularly helpful with Bill’s ailing wife, JANET. Bill admits that Darby has his good points – as long as you’re not dating him, Sandi adds. The next morning, DARBY, casually handsome, awakes butt naked in his bed, a pair of panties laid carefully over his genitals. He goes to scratch down there, feels the underwear and examines them, seeing the name “Debbie” stitched on them. He smiles. Bill, dressed in an inexpensive but impeccably neat suit, his policeman’s formal “dress blues” lying on the bed, talks to his sleeping wife Janet, then takes a call from his son, promising to go in for yet another round of chemo. He then takes a gun out of a safe, obviously about to commit suicide, but is interrupted by a call from Sandi, thanking him for the dinner he brought her the night before, and apologizing for being so maudlin about Darby. Bill hangs up and leaves the house. DARBY runs a one-person travel office in a mall. He comes in hung over –as usual, but tells one of the other shopkeepers that if he can get through the first hour he’ll be fine. “It’s the first hour that kills you, right?” he asks. Bill enters Darby’s store and pulls a gun, shocking Darby who has always known Bill to be a mature, gentle old man. Bill reveals that he's dying of esophageal cancer, and that if Darby doesn't do exactly what he orders, he'll kill him. Bill tells Darby to get the next female client that walks through his door to marry him or else Bill will kill them both. Needless to say the day doesn't go well after that. The first woman to come through the door is a feisty 80-year-old who tells Darby to fuck off when he tries to come on to her. Bill forgives that one, too busy laughing at Darby to pull the trigger. The next woman to come through is Sandi. Darby considers the possibility of talking her into marrying him but then Sandi gets up and leaves, angry as she usually is with Darby, especially since discovering that Darby slept with her sister Debbie after Sandi and Darby broke up. Darby turns to Bill who cocks his pistol and says simply: "You'd better hope she comes back, Darby." Then comes Debbie, who happens to be both Sandi’s slutty sister and the owner of the silky pink panties Darby found on his groin that morning. Sandi does come back and so, eventually do the cops, and the four of them are trapped in the store while snipers set up in the mall outside the shop. Somehow Sandi and Darby get Debbie to leave, realizing with Bill’s crazy help that they actually care about each other. Then one of the cops returns, revealing that the police have been to Bill’s house and found Janet lying peacefully on their bed… dead, suffocated. Before Bill can respond, the cop rushes him, Bill’s gun goes off in the struggle and the cop falls to the ground, wounded. Bill tells Darby and Sandi to leave the store, asking that they tell the cops outside not to shoot Bill when he emerges behind them. As Sandi and Darby leave the shop, Sandi asks: "Isn't esophageal cancer the really painful kind?" A gunshot rings out and Bill is dead by his own hand. Sandi breaks down, and Darby comforts her. "It's okay, it's okay, he did it for us."

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