Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [6]
“Norma, we’ve moved once in forty years. I don’t think that qualifies us as flibbertigibbets or gypsies.”
“What will Linda think?”
“She doesn’t care, it’s perfectly normal for people our age to want to be around familiar settings and old friends.”
“Then, Macky, why in God’s name did we leave in the first place?”
This was an answer he had thought about and rehearsed. “I think that it was a good learning experience,” he said.
“A good learning experience? I see. We now have no home, no winter clothes, no furniture, but it’s been a good learning experience. Macky, if you weren’t going to be happy here, why did we come?”
“I didn’t know I wouldn’t like it, and tell the truth, Norma, you don’t like it here any more than I do.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t, but unlike you, Macky, I’ve worked very hard trying to adjust, and I would hate to think I wasted two years of my life adjusting for nothing.”
Macky sighed. “OK, OK, we won’t go, I don’t want to do anything to make you unhappy.”
Then Norma sighed and looked at him. “Macky, you know I love you…and I’ll do what you want, but my God, I just wish you had thought this thing through. After they gave us that big going away party and all, then to crawl back home and say, ‘Surprise, we’re back.’ It will just be so embarrassing.”
Macky leaned over and took her hand. “Sweetheart, nobody cares. A lot of people have moved somewhere and then moved back again.”
“Well, I haven’t! And what does Aunt Elner think, I’m sure you two have discussed it.”
“She said she’s happy to go back home, but that it’s up to you, she’ll do whatever you want.”
“Oh great, as usual it’s two against one, and if I don’t say yes, I’m the dirty shirt.”
She sat and stared at him, blinked her eyes a few times, then said, “All right, Macky, we’ll go, but promise me that a couple of years from now, you won’t get another wild hair and move us again. I can’t take another move.”
“I promise,” said Macky.
“What a mess. Now you’ve got me so upset I’m going to have to have some ice cream.”
Macky jumped up, happy the thing was settled. “Don’t get up, honey,” he said. “I’ll get it. Two scoops or three?”
She opened her purse and felt around for a Kleenex. “Oh…make it three, I guess, there’s no point in me going back to Weight Watchers if we are leaving.”
Thankfully they sold the citrus view patio home in three days, with a thirty-day escrow. But still, it had been very upsetting to move again, and thank God she had not sold all of her knickknacks. She had kept her ceramic dancing storks music box, and her milk-glass top hat. They had been such a comfort to her in her time of need.
Driving back home to Missouri, with Sonny the cat yowling all the way, she’d tried not to continue to complain like her mother used to do, but when Aunt Elner quipped from the backseat, “Norma, look at the bright side, at least you didn’t sell off your cemetery lots,” it set her off again. “Just when I was starting a new life, here we are going back home to die, like a bunch of old elephants headed back to the burial grounds,” she’d said. And to make matters worse, in the two years they had been in Florida, with the new software companies opening up and all the new people moving in, the price of real estate in Elmwood Springs had almost doubled. What had once been a small town, with only two blocks of downtown, was now experiencing suburban sprawl. And with another huge shopping center opening up out on the four lane, most of the town had moved to the outskirts, and their pretty four-bedroom brick house that had sat on an acre had been torn down to make room for an apartment complex.
Elner had been the smart one. She had not sold her house but had rented it to friends of Ruby’s, who were gone now, so she could go back to her old house. But when they got back, all Norma and Macky could afford to buy was a two-bedroom two-story town home in a new development called Arbor Springs, and even then, Macky had to go to work at The Home Depot to help pay for that. At the time, Norma