Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [19]
“Where’s Mother?”
“Here with me. We’re at the Caraway Hospital in Kansas City.”
“Is she OK?”
“She’s OK, but she wants to know if there is any way you could get here. We have a lot of decisions to make, and your mother doesn’t want to do anything without you. I know it’s short notice, honey, but I really think your mother needs you to be here, if it’s at all possible.”
“Sure, Daddy, tell Mother to hang on and I’ll get there just as soon as I can.”
“Good, I know she’ll be happy to know you’re coming.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, honey.”
Macky hung up and felt a wave of relief. The truth was, he needed Linda there as much as Norma did. Somehow he knew that when Linda got there everything would be all right. His little girl, that sweet helpless little angel who had depended on him for everything, had now grown up to become the one he could depend on. At times he looked at the successful and assured woman she had grown into and still saw that little girl there, then there were times like today when he realized she was more capable and smarter than either he or Norma. How the two of them had managed to produce her, he didn’t know, but he was so proud of her he didn’t know what to say.
As soon as Linda hung up, all the executive training she had received on how to deal with crisis situations kicked in, and in less than eight minutes she had arranged to have the au pair pick up her daughter, Apple, at school that afternoon and take her over to her best friend’s house to spend the night. Her secretary on another line had her on a private corporate jet out of St. Louis, booked a limo to the St. Louis airport, and a pickup at the airport in Kansas City. Linda was out the door in the backseat of the car and on her way in less than fourteen minutes.
Linda had not been close with her grandmother Ida, who had moved away from Elmwood Springs when Linda was a baby to be closer to the Presbyterian church and her garden club meetings in Poplar Springs, and when your mother does not get along with your grandmother, it is hard to have a good relationship. Her grandmother told her she had been so disappointed in Norma: “I don’t understand her, she could have gone to college, and made something of herself but she just threw her life away and became a plain old housewife.” All Norma had said was, “Just be thankful she’s your grandmother and not your mother.” And so Aunt Elner had been the one she was close to growing up. As the limo rode through traffic, Linda began to think about her childhood and the many nights she’d spent up at Aunt Elner’s house.
From the time she had been a baby until long after she was far too old for it, Aunt Elner had always put her to bed with a baby bottle full of chocolate milk. In the summers she and Aunt Elner would sleep out on her big screened-in back porch, and in the winters Aunt Elner would put her in the small bed across the room from her big bed, and they would lie there, watching the orange glow of Aunt Elner’s electric heater, and talk until they fell asleep. When she had taken lessons at the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl, Aunt Elner had been at every dance recital, and she had attended every graduation, and the wedding of her one failed marriage. As she looked back on her life, it was the three of them who had always been there. Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Elner. When her daddy had not been able to convince Norma to let her train with AT&T instead of going to college, it was Aunt Elner who had talked Norma into letting Linda go. As a matter of fact, whenever there had been a problem between anybody, it had been Aunt Elner who had always been able to resolve it.
Over the years Linda had come to appreciate and to be somewhat in awe of Aunt Elner’s ability to see both sides of any argument, see exactly how to negotiate a settlement, say the right thing to make both parties feel better. Long before they were teaching the win-win solution for problem