Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [78]
“All I can tell you is what I remember, and I’m under oath.” Elner looked at Miss Packer.
“Are you a candy striper?”
“No, ma’am, I’m a paralegal.”
“My late husband Will’s cousin in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, was a candy striper, worked her way up the ranks until she was running the hospital gift shop. From bedpans to gift shop manager in less than two years, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Miss Packer.
“Then what happened?” Sprague shot an impatient look at the paralegal.
Miss Packer asked, “What happened next, Mrs. Shimfissle?”
Elner had been hoping Miss Packer wouldn’t ask that. She was now in a real dilemma. She had to make a decision whether to lie under oath and break the law, or break her promise to Norma.
And so she decided to apply the “What they don’t know won’t hurt them rule,” and left out the part about visiting with everybody and skipped on to the end and said, “Well, I remember just floating around in the air above the hospital.”
Kate looked up from her pad, not quite sure what she had just heard. “Above the hospital?”
“Yes, and I just kind of hovered up there in the air for a few minutes, kind of like a hummingbird.”
Kate looked over at Sprague, her eyes wide. “Should I write this down?”
“Keep going,” he said, nodding, as Elner continued.
“Then I remember looking down and wondering who lost their shoe up on the roof.”
“Could you describe it?” asked Kate.
“Just an ordinary roof, with a ledge around it, and the flat part was gray, with what looked like some sort of gravel and some black tarlike stuff in a few places.”
“No, the shoe, Mrs. Shimfissle.”
“Oh, it was just a plain old brown leather shoe, lying over in the corner by one of those square chimneys.”
“Was it a man’s shoe or a woman’s shoe?” Kate asked.
“A man’s, unless some woman has mighty big feet. Will’s other niece, Mary Grace, wore a size nine narrow, they had to special order her shoes all the way from St. Louis. She could be standing in one room with her toes sticking out the other, that’s how long they were.”
“Anything else?” asked Kate.
“Humm, well, I didn’t pay all that much attention, I was too busy wondering what I was doing floating around up in the air, but I do remember the shoe had some kind of spiky things sticking out of the bottom of it. Little nail-like things.”
Miss Packer was now fascinated. “Like cleats? Like what you might find on a baseball shoe or a golf shoe?”
“Forget the shoe,” Sprague said. “What happened next?”
Miss Packer repeated the question. “What happened next?”
“Right after that, I was back in my room, and Norma and them were standing right beside me, and I thought, ‘Norma is going to be mad at me for getting up in that tree,’ and I was right, she was. She’s like her mother in that respect. She doesn’t let go of a thing. Not that I’m saying she isn’t right. I should have listened to her. Hey. I just thought of something you might want to write down, honey.”
Kate looked up. “Yes?”
“I had a cat that lived to be twenty-five years old.”
Later as they walked down the hall, Miss Packer, a rabid Star Trek fan, said, “Don’t you wonder if she entered another astral plane, and went into another dimension?”
Winston Sprague looked at her as though she were insane. “All I wonder is, was she nuts before she came to the hospital, or after?”
Oh Dear…
11:30 AM
As she left the office, Norma was a little confused. Mr. Pixton was very nice, of course, but she wondered why he had wanted to show her all those blueprints of the new buildings they were going to build in 2012. When she got back down to the room, Aunt Elner was sitting there with the remote in her hand, busy flipping back and forth from channel to channel on the television set up above her head. “Hey, Norma,” she said, “I don’t think they get cable here. I was hoping they got the Discovery Channel, but I can’t find it.”
Norma sat with Elner while she ate her lunch, and Elner was as happy as a lark.