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By Root 900 0

in a good mood, but she had never had children. Tot’s children had been nothing but trouble from the beginning, even more so after they hit puberty. If there was a fool within fifty miles, they had either married it or had numerous offspring with it. Tot had begged her children to please stop breeding. “There’s a serious genetic flaw on the Whooten side, not one of them has a lick of sense. Just because I married beneath my station is no reason you have to,” she had said to her children on many occasions, but her warning had done no good. Darlene, at thirty-two, had five children and more ex-husbands than Elizabeth Taylor, and not a cent of alimony from a one of them. And God knows how many children Dwayne Jr. had roaming around out there. Six that she knew of, and with the women he had picked, it was no telling how those kids would turn out. Whenever he had said of his girlfriends “We think alike, Mama,” she knew she was in big trouble. Her hopes of one of her kids bettering themselves by meeting someone a step above had been dashed time and time again. And now, her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Faye Dawn, was already pregnant by some fifteen-year-old who wore a dog chain around his neck, black fingernail polish, a nose ring, and had no chin. “Why do birds of a feather have to flock together?” she wondered. “Water seeks its own level” was not a good thing in their case. She was already attending a bipolar prayer group, and Al-Anon meetings twice a week. “What next?” she wondered. What fresh hell was in store for her down the line?

Last year when Dwayne Jr. had asked her what he could get her for Christmas, she had requested “a vasectomy” and told him that she would even pay for it, but he had taken the money and bought himself an off-road vehicle instead. He was a lost cause. She was now working on Darlene to have her tubes tied, but that was going nowhere, because she said she was scared of anesthesia. When Linda Warren had adopted that little Chinese girl, Norma had come into the beauty shop wearing a sweatshirt with the girl’s picture on it, and under the picture it said “Someone Wonderful Calls Me Grandma.” Tot figured she would wind up wearing one that said “A Lot of Potential Criminals and Misfits Call Me Grandma,” and she was supporting almost every one of them. Tot got in her bed and pulled the covers over her head and cried about Elner, and herself as well, while she was at it.

A Surprise

11:59 AM

After Tot had gone home, Ruby stayed at Elner’s house to answer the phone in case anyone called. While she waited, she decided to just go ahead and wash the sheets and towels and all the dirty clothes in Elner’s dirty-clothes basket, so Norma wouldn’t have to be bothered, and it was when she opened it and started pulling all the clothes out that she made a startling discovery.

Hidden at the very bottom of the clothes basket was a .38 revolver handgun, large enough to blow someone’s head off. Ruby stood there with her arms full of clothes, staring at it and wondering why in the blazes Elner Shimfissle would be hiding a gun at the bottom of her clothes basket. Ruby assumed there was probably a perfectly good explanation for its being there, but on the other hand, she also was aware that even though you may think you know someone, you can never really be sure about people, it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. They can surprise you.

This unexpected and sudden discovery of a handgun in Elner Shimfissle’s dirty-clothes basket presented a major dilemma for Ruby. What should she do? After running the thing around in her mind for a few minutes and considering the situation from every angle, she made a decision. “Oh well,” she thought. A neighbor is a neighbor, and Ruby would have wanted Elner to do the same for her if the situation were reversed. So she reached down and picked the gun up, and wiped it off with one of Elner’s nightgowns, in case there were incriminating prints. She then wrapped it up in a pillowcase, took it into the kitchen and looked under the sink for a paper bag, carried it