The Northwoods Chronicles (31 page)

“You’re killing her.”

“She’s killing herself,” Margie said and swung
her legs out of bed. “She just needs a little company while she
does it.”

Jimbo turned on his side away from her.

“I’m taking your truck,” she said as she pulled
a sweater over her nightgown and stuck her feet into her
sneakers.

Sister Ruth waited in her nightgown on the
sidewalk in front of her small house. Margie pulled up in front,
set the brake, and, engine running, got out and put down the
tailgate.

“Bless you,” Sister Ruth said.

Margie watched, helpless, as Ruth maneuvered her
bulk, using two canes, down off the curb. She backed up to the
tailgate and sat down, one massive haunch at a time. The truck bed
sank and Margie wondered how long it would be before Sister Ruth’s
weight broke the tailgate or lifted the front wheels right off the
ground. When settled, Ruth wiped the perspiration from her face
with the dingy hanky she always carried and nodded,
breathlessly.

“You hold on tight,” Margie said.

Ruth nodded, and took a tentative grip on the
vinyl-covered tailgate chain with one impossibly small hand. The
other held her two canes.

Margie put the truck in gear and let it idle
down the street. The diner was only three blocks away. She pulled
around back, parked and let Sister Ruth heave herself to the ground
on tiny, tortured feet while Margie opened the delivery door to the
kitchen.

She propped the door open, turned on the lights
and brought the big bench around to the baking table.

Sister Ruth, leaning heavily on both canes, came
through the door, enormous breasts, like two small children,
swinging inside her tent of a nightgown. She sat on the bench,
wheezing, and mopped her red face, whispering, “Thank you, thank
you, God bless you,” all the while.

“This can’t go on,” Margie said as she fired up
the gas stove, grill, and started emptying the contents of the big
stainless steel refrigerator onto the table.

“I know, I know,” Sister Ruth said, her tiny
eyes critically surveying the food in front of her.

“I’m not a twenty-four-hour food service,”
Margie said.

“I know. Bless you.”

Margie saw the greed in Sister Ruth’s face as
the bounty of food appeared, and it sickened her. “Jimbo’s getting
tired of it, too.”

“They frighten me.”

“You know they’re not going to hurt you,” Margie
said as she opened a pound of butter and put it on a plate.

Sister Ruth licked her lips. “It’s stressful,”
she said.

“Eggs?” Margie asked.

Sister Ruth nodded.

~~~

Margie had never seen Sister Ruth eat. This
night, as in past nights, she prepared a meal suitable for at least
six and put it before the six-hundred-pound woman who looked at her
with apology in her eyes and made no move toward her fork until
Margie left the room. She left twenty-four scrambled eggs on a
platter, a pound of cooked bacon, a leftover pot roast, a dozen
bagels, strawberry jam, a gallon of milk, the leftover fried
chicken, a cherry pie and a half gallon of rocky road ice cream,
all within reach, and went into the diner to refill salt shakers
and dust window sills while Sister Ruth quelled her stress.

No one Margie knew had ever seen Sister Ruth
eat, and Jimbo was the only one who knew about these late night
trips to the diner.

A half hour later, Margie, bleary-eyed and out
of patience, went back into the kitchen to find all the food gone,
every bite, chicken bones picked clean and piled neatly, and dishes
stacked.

Ruth’s tiny little eyes were glazed over and her
thin reddish hair bounced as she jerked herself awake over and over
again.

Margie piled the dishes in the big sink for
Babcock to do in the morning, wiped down the table, wiped Sister
Ruth’s chin, made out the bill, then sat down for a heart to
heart.

“Ruth.”

Ruth’s eyes snapped open and blinked as she
tried to focus.

“Tell me about Micah.”

Ruth gasped with either the memory or the lie,
Margie couldn’t tell which. “He was with them this time,” she said.
“They were singing as they moved through the house.”

“They walked through the house?”

“No, not walked. I feel them first, then I hear
them, then I smell something like hot electrical wires, then I see
them. It’s like moving a projector. The picture of them moves
through the house and they don’t seem to know it. They don’t see
me.”

“Then why does it scare you so much?”

Sister Ruth’s little piggy eyes filled with
tears and her face scrunched up into a horrible mask of itself.
“You try living with it,” she choked out, then started to
hiccup.

Margie put a hand on the woman’s arm, felt its
dampness, thought she could feel the bacon grease oozing from her
pores.

“You can’t keep calling me like this,” Margie
said. Sister Ruth began to wail. Margie moved her chair closer and
tried to put her arm around the woman, but her back and shoulders
were so massive that Margie’s hand only reached to the back of her
neck. Sister Ruth hadn’t bathed in a while. Margie quelled her
repulsion and stuck to her message. “You’re eating yourself to
death, Ruth,” Margie said, “and I can’t continue to be a party to
it.”

“You have a diner,” Ruth said, then blew her
nose into her napkin. She wiped her eyes. “I pay you for what I
eat.”

“You need to come during business hours and eat
in the dining room,” Margie said.

Sister Ruth started to cry all over again.

“Now tell me about Micah,” Margie insisted.

Sister Ruth’s eyes widened and the tear tracks
on her greasy face were left forgotten as was the moisture in the
corner of her nostril. “He was singing,” she said. “They were all
singing, like at camp, only—only it wasn’t very happy.”

“Was he okay? Was he hurt?” Margie felt as if
she was selling out her belief in Jesus by asking another person,
almost as if she were asking a gypsy psychic, about the fate of her
lost son.

“He looked the same, Margie. Not a day older.
All the children were there, ghosting through my living room.
Right through the walls in my house.
” She gasped again with
a memory. “That nice boy Kevin was there.”

“Kevin Leppens?”

Sister Ruth nodded, then hid a massive belch
inside her hanky.

Margie took a long moment and looked at this
gigantic caricature of a woman and her heart was flooded with
compassion. “Maybe they pick your house, Ruth, because you’ve
always loved them.”

Sister Ruth looked up at Margie with a faint
hope in her face. “I always have. I always have, you know. I taught
kindergarten all those years.”

“I know,” Margie said. “They come to you now
because they feel safe around you.”

“Think so?”

Margie thought this might be a transformational
moment. Sister Ruth clung to this shred of hope with a terrible
desperation. “Absolutely. Don’t be afraid of them. Welcome
them.”

“Oh, Margie, you could be right. Of course
you’re right. Bless you. Bless you.”

Margie stood up. “C’mon. I can still get an
hour’s sleep before I have to come back here for the breakfast
shift.”

While Sister Ruth unloaded herself from Jimbo’s
pickup, Margie made bold. “You need some help, Ruth. You need to
see someone about your eating disorder and your weight. One of
these days you won’t be able to go out at all anymore. You’re not
young.”

Margie slammed the tailgate as the enormously
obese woman negotiated the curb. “Don’t call me anymore at
night.”

“I won’t,” Ruth said, gasping for air.

Margie wondered all the way home if she’d spoken
too harshly. Just before she stepped into her house, she paused for
a moment to smell the predawn summer air in the northwoods. Home.
Son and husband sleeping inside. She looked at her pudgy thighs and
considered a diet, but then maybe not. Pudgy was as far as she’d
ever get.

Then she heard them, like someone gently turning
up the speakers, and she smelled it, just like Sister Ruth had
said, and the air thinned out, turned a little blue, and a laughing
bunch of children appeared in midair and moved down the street.

“Micah?” Margie asked, breathlessly, and stepped
off the porch to follow.

She saw her son, laughing, happy, clapping his
little hands with the others, a hundred or more kids, singing,
joyfully singing.

A tear squeezed out of Margie and she looked for
the familiar grief that had been her constant companion since Micah
had gone, but it wasn’t there anymore. He was still gone, of
course, and he wasn’t coming back, but now that she’d seen him, she
was settled in her soul.

After the strange apparition disappeared,
Margie, contemplating the strangeness of life, climbed into bed
with Jimbo and snuggled up to his warmth. As she listened to him
snore, thinking about waking him, another tear squeezed out with
gratitude, because in that weird place Micah and the other kids had
been taken, they were strangely safe. They had a new nanny. In the
middle of the joyous, laughing, singing children, Sister Ruth,
weightless and eternal, was clapping and laughing along with
them.

Margie felt honored to have served Sister Ruth
her last meal.

She placed her hand over her belly that was just
beginning to swell with new life.

It was time for hope to thrive.

~End~

Elizabeth Engstrom is the
author of thirteen books and well over 250 short stories, articles
and essays. Her most recent novel is
York’s Moon
, a
critically-acclaimed mystery, and her most recent nonfiction book
is Crimescape’s
Something Happened to Grandma
. Engstrom is
an author, teacher, editor and former publisher who is a
sought-after panelist, keynote speaker and instructor at writing
conferences and conventions around the world. She is on faculty at
the University of Phoenix.

You can email the
author or find out more about her through IFD or her website:

http://www.elizabethengstrom.com

http://www.ifdpublishing.com

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IFD uses the services
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Novels:

Siren Promised
,
by Alan M. Clark and Jeremy Robert
Johnson

Beyond the Serpent’s Heart
, by Eric M. Witchey

Lizzie Borden
, by
Elizabeth Engstrom

To
Kill a Common Loon
,
by Mitch Luckett

Novelettes:

The
Tao of Flynn
, by Eric M.
Witchey

To
Build a Boat, Listen to Trees
,
by Eric M. Witchey

Short Stories:

“Apple Sniper
,” by Eric
M. Witchey

“Brittle Bones and Old Rope
,” by Alan M. Clark

“Crosley
,” by Elizabeth
Engstrom

Children’s Illustrated:

The Christmas Thingy
, by
F. Paul Wilson. Illustrated by Alan M. Clark