Can't Wait to Get to Heaven (26 page)

Going Home

A
fter the nurse had checked and rechecked Elner, Dr. Henson, her emergency room doctor, was handed the report. He had come to visit with Elner several times a day since she had been there, and the more he got to know her, the better he started feeling about the human race. All findings had cleared him of any negligence, he was not being fired, and evidently the hospital was not being sued and his patient was doing great, and he was in a great mood.

He opened the door and walked into her room with a big smile. “Good morning, Sunshine.”

“Well, hey,” she said, happy to see him.

“I hate to tell you this, because we wish we could keep you, but I’m sending you home today, young lady!”

“You are? Is my niece coming to get me?”

“Nope. We just called her and told her not to come, because there is someone here who wants to escort you home in style.”

After the nurses packed her up, they put her in a wheelchair and Nurse Boots Carroll and Dr. Henson rolled her to the elevator and downstairs, through the lobby, and then through the big double glass doors. And parked right out in front was a long shiny black limousine. When Franklin Pixton had reported to Mr. Thomas York, the head of the hospital board, about the old lady who fell out of her tree, Mr. York had been fascinated and had replied, “Now, there is someone I’d like to meet.” And so when the chauffeur opened the back door, a distinguished-looking older man stepped out of the back and said, taking off his hat, “Mrs. Shimfissle, I’m Thomas York. I wonder if you might allow me the privilege of accompanying you home?”

“Well, sure,” she said.

Elner and Mr. York chatted away as they drove toward Elmwood Springs, and she found out that even though he was a retired CEO of a bank, he had a fondness for chickens as well. His grandfather had been a chicken farmer. They had a grand time all the way home discussing the superior qualities of the Rhode Island Red versus the blue speckled hen. As they neared Elmwood Springs, she looked out the window. “I just hope Merle’s out in his yard to see me come driving up in a limousine. I don’t remember the trip to the hospital, but I sure am enjoying the trip home. I never dreamed I’d ever get to ride in the back of one of these things.”

When they drove down her street, she asked if the driver could slow down so maybe some of her other neighbors would see her. When they pulled up to her house, Norma and most of her neighbors were waiting for her, and she was so happy to see that Louise Franks and her daughter, Polly, had come to town to welcome her home as well.

After Mr. York had come up on the porch and eaten a piece of welcome home Bundt cake and visited for a while, and before he left, Cathy Calvert took a picture of him and Elner standing by the limo to put in the newspaper. When the limo drove off, Elner turned around and said to Norma, “Where’s old Sonny? I can’t wait to see that old fool.”

“He’s inside,” Norma said. “I locked him in, I knew you’d want to see him the minute you got home.”

Elner walked in and Sonny was in his spot on the back of the couch. She went over and picked him up, and sat down and petted him. “Hey, Sonny, did you miss me?” But Sonny acted as though he didn’t even know she had been gone, and after allowing himself to be petted a short while, he jumped out of her lap and headed to his dish for a snack. Elner laughed. “Cats, they don’t want you to know they care a thing in the world about you, but they do.”

That first night home all the members of the Sunset Club gathered in her side yard with their chairs, and it was a particularly beautiful sunset that evening. Verbena remarked, “Elner, I think that’s the good Lord’s way of saying welcome home!” And Elner was glad to be back home again, until the next morning when she opened up her dirty-clothes basket and looked in.

“Uh-oh.” Never in a million years did she figure someone would go rooting around in there. “Now what?”

Elner walked over to Ruby’s house and knocked on the door. “Yoo hoo.”

“Come on in, Elner,” Ruby said from the kitchen. “I’m still doing my dishes.”

Elner walked back and said, “I just came over to thank you again for feeding Sonny and the birds and straightening the house and all.”

“Oh, you’re more than welcome, honey. Glad to do it.”

Elner nodded, then as casually as she could, she inquired, “You didn’t happen to find something in my dirty-clothes basket, did you?”

“Like what?” asked Ruby.

“Oh, nothing…just something.”

“No, I didn’t find anything but clothes. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“Oh.”

“Well, OK, then.”

Ruby hated to lie, but she and Macky had made a pact. And as a registered nurse and a good neighbor, she knew it was for the best. Old people and firearms do not mix. Old Man Henderson who used to live up the street shot half his lip off fooling around with a loaded weapon.

As she walked back home, Elner was worried. If Norma had found it, she was in big trouble again.

Luther Comes Home

5:03
PM

T
hat afternoon when Luther Griggs drove back into town after his Seattle run, he wondered if anybody had missed him at the funeral. He had felt terrible about not being able to go, but there had been nothing he could do about it. He thought about driving past Elner’s house before he went home, but changed his mind. It would be too sad not to see her out there on the front porch. He would go home, and after he had a nap and a bath, he would go over to Mrs. Warren’s house and tell them why he had not been at the service, and find out where she was buried. He knew where to get some nice flowers for her grave. He had seen a bunch of different arrangements the last time Bobbie Jo had dragged him through Tuesday Morning right next to the picture frames. He would get some as pretty as the ones he put on his own mother’s grave, nicer even, he thought. After all, she had been nicer to him than his own mother. But as he turned off the interstate and approached Elmwood Springs, he changed his mind and decided he would drive by her house. He realized that as fast as they were tearing down all the older houses in town, he better go by before it might be too late. As he came down First Avenue, he was relieved to see the house was still standing. He was thinking that he might try to buy the old house himself; he had saved some money over the past couple of years. He was thinking this when Elner Shimfissle walked out onto her porch with a watering can, and waved at him.

“Goddamn it, Luther!” yelled Merle. Luther had just run his eighteen-wheeler truck up over the curb, had almost run Merle over, and had taken out almost all of Merle’s prize hydrangea bushes. Merle ran up to the truck and banged it with his green and white plastic lawn chair, but Luther was so badly shaken up by seeing Elner on her porch that he wouldn’t get out of the truck. By this time Elner had walked across the street, and she stood looking up at him in the cab of his truck, which had landed in a ditch in Irene Goodnight’s yard.

“Hey, Luther,” she said. “What are you doing?”

Macky had just walked in from work when Norma met him at the door, with her car keys in her hand. “You are not going to believe what just happened. I was just getting ready to call you.”

“What?”

“That crazy Luther Griggs didn’t know Aunt Elner was still alive and ran his truck up in Merle’s yard and took out all his shrubs, and half of Irene Goodnight’s. They just called Triple A to come over and pull him out of the ditch.”

“Good God, was anybody hurt?”

“No, evidently just the shrubs. He was just scared to death I guess but we better go over there and make sure everything else is all right. What else is going to happen?”

They drove up in time to see the truck being lifted and pulled across Irene’s yard, taking out most of her rosebushes.

Irene was standing beside Cathy Calvert, who had walked down with her camera. “Dammit,” said Irene. “Why couldn’t they have pulled that truck back across Merle’s yard? His yard was already ruined. He isn’t even a Triple A member! I’m the one who called, and they take out my yard!”

Poor Luther was still shaken up pretty badly and was over at Ruby’s porch. Ruby had just brought him a shot of whisky. Elner sat with him and said, “I’m sorry to have given you such a fright, honey.”

He shook his head, almost in tears. “Whew. I had you dead and buried, and then to see you come out of your house like that…Man…it almost scared me to death.”

After Macky had walked over and surveyed the damage to both yards, he told Merle and Irene to come out to The Home Depot garden shop in the morning and he would make sure to replace what he could. Then he walked back over to Elner’s and sat on the porch.

After a while, when Luther had pulled himself together and was able to talk without bursting into tears, Macky said, “Luther, let’s take a little walk, OK?”

“Sure, Mr. Warren.”

“Excuse us, ladies,” he said. As he walked Luther around to the side of the house, Macky said quietly, “Let me ask you something, Luther. Did you leave a gun at Elner’s house?”

Luther seemed surprised. “A gun?”

“Yeah, a gun. I’m not going to turn you in or anything. Just tell me if you left a loaded .38 at her house.”

“No, sir. I’d tell you. I’m on probation. I can’t have a gun. I took a shotgun from Daddy’s trailer but they got that back.”

“Do you swear to God?”

“Yes, sir. I wouldn’t ever do that to Miss Elner, not in a hundred years. I was going to marry Bobbie Jo Newberry because Miss Elner wanted me to. I think the world of that lady, I’d never give her no loaded gun!”

Macky believed him, and if it wasn’t Luther’s, then whose gun was it?

The Nose Has It!

8:03
AM

T
he next morning when Norma woke up, Macky had already left for work. She yawned and went to the bathroom and was reading her “Good morning, this is God” message when she happened to glance at herself in the mirror. “MY GOD!” There were bright red spots all over her nose! Oh God. Well, here it was. The day had finally come, she had nose cancer. She immediately sat down on the floor of the bathroom, so she wouldn’t faint and hit her head. Oh no, they would probably have to remove her entire nose. She was going to be disfigured. “Why me, dear God? Why my face?” Norma thought. In high school Norma had never had a hint of acne, not one bump. Now she was being punished for it. She pulled herself up and looked again. They were still there! Not only was she going to lose her nose, it probably meant chemotherapy. There went all her hair! Oh God. “Be brave,” she thought. In times like this she tried to remember little Frieda Pushnik, who had been born with no arms and legs and had been carried around all her life on a pillow, but it did not help. She was terrified as she called the dermatologist, made an appointment, got dressed, and drove over to the beauty parlor and ran in. “Tot, give me one of those Xanax. I may have to have my nose removed!”

Later, as Dr. Steward the dermatologist stared at her nose with a magnifying glass, Norma felt as if she were going to throw up. As she continued to look, the doctor asked, “Tell me, Mrs. Warren, do you blush easily?”

“What? Oh, yes.”

“Uh-huh,” said the doctor as Norma’s heart pounded away. “And do you have any allergies that you know of?”

“No, other than maybe Chinese food…. My face gets sort of hot and red, but…”

The doctor turned around to wash her hands, and Norma heard herself ask in a raspy voice, “Is it cancer, Doctor?”

The doctor looked at her. “No, what you have is rosacea.”

“What?”

“Rosacea. It’s very common with English and Irish or other light-skinned people. Blushing easily is one of the symptoms.”

“It is? I thought I was always just embarrassed or shy. But what are these bumps?”

“You’re having a break-out.”

“But why?”

“It could have been triggered by a number of things…heat, sun, or stress. Have you been under any unusual stress lately?”

Norma said, “Yes, I have. My aunt just fell out of a tree and…well, I won’t go into detail, but, yes.”

As Norma drove to the drugstore, she realized that her entire image of herself had been wrong. Whenever someone told a dirty joke or she had been embarrassed, she had always thought it was because she was shy, but it had just been a skin condition all along.

Norma stood at the counter waiting for her prescription for Finacea, and was convinced that the stress of worrying about her aunt had caused her nose to break out. It was no telling what would be happening to her next. She looked over at the blood pressure machine in the corner of the drugstore and she thought about going over and seeing if hers had rocketed sky-high in the last week, but decided against it. If it had, she didn’t want to know. Hopefully she would just drop dead in her tracks, without having to be scared to death by all kinds of tests, and maybe before she had to undergo a complete heart transplant and wind up in a power chair herself. This was all the more reason why Elner should go to Happy Acres, where professionals could keep an eye on her, and Norma wouldn’t have to worry herself into the grave about her. Norma would wait until after Easter and then have a serious talk with Elner.

“Here you go, Norma,” said Hattie Smith, a cousin of Dorothy Smith’s late husband, Robert Smith. But of course, according to Aunt Elner, Dorothy was now married to a man named Raymond. “Rub a thin layer on your nose, twice a day, and that should do it.”

As Norma walked out with her ointment, Irene Goodnight walked in, and said to Hattie, as she held out her hands, “Hattie, look, are these freckles or old-age spots.”

Hattie looked at the seventy-three-year-old woman’s hands and lied.

“Honey, those are freckles.”

“Well, good,” said Irene. She turned around and left, happier than when she came in.

Hattie had knocked herself out of a sale, but “What the heck,” she thought, “old age is hard enough. What Irene doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”