Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [7]
“Oh no!” she thought. “Poor Aunt Elner will be miserable not being able to move around.” Hopefully, they would be able to get her one of those new motorized chairs, and of course, this would have to happen now, when they had just moved into a house with stairs with no wheelchair access. Well, she guessed Macky was just going to have to build a ramp, because the three of them could not possibly live in Aunt Elner’s small one-bathroom house, not with Linda and the baby coming to visit all the time.
“I hope you’re happy now, Macky!” she said. “If you had listened to me, this would never have happened!”
The three people in the car that waited next to her at the red light looked over at Norma, who was now talking out loud to herself, and wondered if she was a crazy person. By the time she reached the next red light, and as her mind continued to race, Norma wondered if maybe Macky was not entirely to blame. Maybe this whole thing could have been avoided if she had just put her foot down and had not agreed to move to Florida in the first place. At the time she had told Macky that she’d had a bad omen about them moving, but then, she had bad omens about so many things, she couldn’t be sure if it was really a bad omen, or just another symptom of her anxiety disorder. It was very frustrating, to not know when she should put her foot down and when she should not. The result was that she never really put her foot down about anything. By the time Norma was a block away from Aunt Elner’s house, Macky was completely off the hook, and now she was blaming herself entirely for Aunt Elner’s fall. “It’s all my fault,” she wailed. “I should never have let her move back into that old house!”
Just then, Norma happened to look over and see the same three people in the car who had been at the last stoplight staring at her. She put the window down and said, “My aunt fell out of her fig tree” just as the light changed and they took off as fast as they could.
Verbena Gets the News
8:41 AM
Verbena Wheeler was already at work down at the Blue Ribbon Cleaners and Fluff and Fold Laundromat when her husband, Merle, called and told her that Elner had fallen off the ladder again and this time had knocked herself out cold.
“They are waiting on the ambulance right this very minute,” he said.
“Ohhhh, Norma is going to have a fit, you know how she worries about Elner. Call me back and tell me as soon as you know something.”
Verbena, a tight-lipped woman with a tight little gray permanent, was a Church of God, no-nonsense, strict Pentecostal, “I’m a Bible-beater and proud of it” kind of person who could quote from Scripture to fit any occasion. She had also been very worried about her neighbor, not only about her falling off a ladder, but about her rapidly changing belief systems as well. In her opinion, Elner Shimfissle had gone quite radical as of late, and Verbena was convinced she could trace the changes right back to the day Elner had gotten cable television, and had started watching the Discovery Channel. Verbena, who only watched TBS and religious channels, had been extremely concerned. “Too much science, too little religion,” if you asked her. To prove her point, only about a week after it had been hooked up, she had received an alarming phone call from Elner.
“Verbena,” Elner said, “I’m just not so sure about the Adam and Eve story anymore.”
Verbena had been stunned upon hearing such a thing coming from a lifelong Methodist in good standing.
“Oh, Elner,” Verbena said, while holding on to the counter for support, “that’s a terrible thing to