Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [115]
The Repercussions
Elner Shimfissle had been told that everything that happened, happened for a reason. Of course she couldn’t have known it at the time, but the repercussions of her having fallen out of the fig tree turned out to be many and varied.
A few years later, Polly Franks died of heart failure. After her daughter passed away, Louise Franks sold their ten-acre farm to a developer for a small fortune. Norma handled the sale. Louise sold it all, except for one small half acre of land way out in the back of the property. Norma thought it was odd, since she was not going to live there, but Louise explained, “Norma, I have an old beloved pet buried out there, and I just don’t want that land developed.” Louise moved into town and used the money she made on her property to build and staff a school for the developmentally handicapped, and named it The Elner Shimfissle Center.
After his encounter with Elner, Dr. Bob Henson changed his mind about people and became much happier in his work.
And as fate would have it, a year later the slip-and-sue ambulance-chasing lawyer, Gus Shimmer, fell over in court with a major heart attack. He had to be rushed to Caraway Hospital, and it was Dr. Bob Henson who worked on him for over three hours, literally saving his life. The same Dr. Henson he would have sued if Norma had let him.
However, when Franklin Pixton found out that Dr. Henson had saved Gus Shimmer’s life, right in the middle of a lawsuit against his hospital, he was not happy. “Where is malpractice when you really need it?” he mused. But he needn’t have worried about Gus Shimmer. After Dr. Henson saved his life, Gus made a vow to God never to sue another hospital or doctor again. Not only was Gus a changed man, his informant at Caraway Hospital was gone for good as well.
The male nurse who had been Gus’s informant, the same one who had caused Ruby’s friend Boots Carroll to be demoted, had finally called the wrong woman “bitch.” Mrs. Betty Stevens, a very wealthy and generous widow—her husband had invented Johnny Cat, one of the best kitty litters—was in for gallbladder surgery and overheard the male nurse referring to her as “that old rich bitch” behind her back. Considering she had given millions to the hospital fund and was a close friend of Mrs. Franklin Pixton’s, the nurse was fired on the spot, and Boots was back in her old job as head supervisor. It was not that Mrs. Betty Stevens objected to being called rich or a bitch. It was the “old” part she’d objected to. After all, she was still a good-looking woman of sixty-four.
From the day the lawyer Winston Sprague found the shoe on the roof, he was never quite the arrogant know-it-all, some said “snotty young man on the rise,” again. He had gone from thinking he was smarter than everyone else in the world, to someone who was now not quite so sure. To some this may have been a bad thing, however, in Winston’s case it proved to be the best thing that ever happened to him. The girl he had been in love with for so many years, the one who had assured him she wanted to get married, just not to him, happened to see him out in a crowd of friends, and noticed that there was something different about him. He sat alone and had a faraway look in his eye. When she walked over to speak to him, and asked how he was, he told her he had just quit his job, and was headed for a two-week stay at an ashram in Colorado.
“An ashram? Hmm,” she thought. “That’s interesting. This guy may not be such a jerk after all.” So instead of leaving, she sat down.
Six months later, after the