Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [43]
Dorothy shook her head. “No, and you have no need to be mortified over anything.”
“I don’t?”
“No, the Dorothy Smith that you knew was the real Dorothy Smith, I’m just speaking to you in her likeness, sort of a look-alike. We always like to use a familiar form, one you would feel comfortable with: we certainly don’t want to scare anybody. You’re not scared, are you?”
“No, just a little confused. You say you look like her, but you’re not really Neighbor Dorothy?”
“That’s right, but in a way I am. There’s a little part of us in everybody.”
Elner tried her best to figure it out. “Oh dear, I think I’m still confused, who’s ‘us’? Ida told me I was going to meet my Maker, and if you’re not you, then who’s that dog over there? Is that Princess Mary Margaret, or just an imposter pretending to be her?”
Dorothy laughed. “I promise you, it’s not all that complicated. Just wait, you’ll see, the whole thing is really very simple. Come on with me, honey, I have someone I want you to meet.”
Calling Dena, Palo Alto, California
12:16 PM (10:16 AM Pacific time)
After having spent some time seeing Aunt Elner, Macky came back into the waiting room and sat with Norma. The nurse who had stayed with her had asked if there was anything else she could do, anyone she could call for them, when Norma said, “Oh, Macky, you need to go call Dena. Tell her we’ll let her know as soon as we can about when the funeral…” Then Norma burst into tears again when she heard the word funeral. The nurse put her arm around Norma’s shoulders and tried to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” said Norma. “It’s just so hard to believe…. Go on, Macky, call Dena. I’ll be all right.”
“I’ll have to call collect.”
“Just tell the operator it’s an emergency.”
Macky reluctantly got up and went down the hall again. He hated making this call, the one to Linda had been hard enough. If it had been up to him, he would have waited until they got back home, but he supposed that Norma knew best in these matters. Women seemed to know the rules and regulations about weddings and funerals, but he was not going to make it an emergency phone call. The poor woman was dead; there was no emergency about that as far as he could see. He would just make it a regular collect call. Dena Nordstrom O’Malley was Norma’s second cousin, Aunt Elner’s great-niece. Although she knew Aunt Elner had been old, she like everybody else was totally surprised when Macky told her. News like that was always the last thing in the world she expected to hear. When she put the phone down, she stood for a moment and considered calling her husband, but decided to wait and tell him in person when he came home for lunch. There was no rush; it had just happened and they didn’t even know yet when the funeral would be. She walked over and sat down in the chair by the big bay window and gazed out at the yard, and felt the tears welling up in her eyes and running down her face. The last time she had seen Aunt Elner had been at Linda’s wedding.
Ever since her husband, Gerry, had become head of the psychiatric department at Stanford University Medical Center, and she had started teaching journalism, their lives had been so busy they had not had a chance to get back and visit with Aunt Elner in person. The last time she had talked to her on the phone was just last week. Aunt Elner, who never understood the two-hour time difference between Missouri and California, had called at five AM, all excited. And when Dena picked up, she had said, “Dena, did you know that a watermelon seed can produce a watermelon two hundred thousand times its own weight? Isn’t that something?”
“Oh yes,” said Dena, half asleep.
“And here’s what I want to know. How does that little black seed know to make the outside of the watermelon green and the inside of the rind white and the rest of it red? Can you figure it? How does it know how to do that?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Elner.”
“I guess it’s just one of those mysteries of life, isn’t it?”
Dena had hung up and gone back to bed.
Now, remembering their last conversation, it suddenly hit her just