Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [106]
“I’m not going to be rude to her, for God’s sake.”
“That’s not being rude.”
“You can’t just say no, until you let them go through their sales things. You don’t know why that poor woman is having to work . . . she might have children to support. You might be able to break her heart but I can’t—”
“Norma, you are not going to break her heart. She’s an insurance salesman.”
“She’s probably married to some alcoholic and . . . shhh.” There was a knock at the front door. “Oh my God, she’s here . . . be quiet!” She pulled the phone into the pantry and hid.
“Norma, just go to the door and tell her thank you very much but we don’t need any insurance. If you don’t go now, she’ll just come back. You don’t want to get her hopes up . . . that’s even worse. You have to learn to say no. You don’t have to be rude. Go on now, get it over with.”
The woman at the door continued to knock. She was not going away.
“Oh, Macky, I could just kill you.”
Norma put the phone down, stood there for a moment, screwed her courage to the wall, took a deep breath, and headed for the door.
About forty-five minutes later the bell over the hardware store door rang and a lady of about forty, wearing a green suit and carrying a brown attaché case walked in. She approached Macky with a pleasant smile. “Mr. Warren?”
Macky said, “Yes, ma’am, what can I do for you?”
“Mr. Warren, I’m June Garza from Aetna Insurance and your wife said that you might be interested in hearing about our new three-and-one policy . . . and I wondered if now might be a convenient time?” The phone rang. “I can come back after lunch if you like. . . .”
Macky was caught. “Uh, well . . . excuse me, Mrs. Garza . . . let me get that.” He picked up the phone. Norma was on the other end.
“Macky, is she there yet?”
Macky smiled back at Mrs. Garza. “That’s right.”
“Now, before you get mad at me, I just wanted you to know her husband is a diabetic and lost his left leg and is probably going to lose the other one somewhere down the line.”
“Yes, well, thank you very much.”
Norma continued. “And her mother-in-law has had three strokes and is on very expensive high-blood-pressure medicine. And one of the reasons she has to work today is because they didn’t have insurance.”
“All righty, anything else?” He pretended to be writing down a list of things.
“I know you’re mad at me . . . but—”
Macky tried to sound pleasant. “That’s correct.”
“Don’t take it out on her. Just come on home and take a gun and kill me, shoot me in the head, put me out of my misery.”
“Thank you, I’ll be sure and do that. Good-bye, Mrs. Mud.”
Macky wound up buying two home-owner policies, one for them and one for Aunt Elner.
Small-Town Living, February 1953
If a stranger walked down the street past the barbershop in Elmwood Springs on Saturday afternoon and glanced in, he would see a group of middle-aged, gray-haired men sitting around chewing the fat. But if you were one of the men inside you would see six friends you had grown up with, not old men. Doc didn’t see the wrinkles on Glenn Warren’s face or notice that his neck had turned red and sagged with age or the wide girth straining his suspenders to the breaking point. He saw a skinny boy of seven with lively eyes. They were fixed in one another’s eyes as the boys they used to be. When Doc looked at sixty-eight-year-old Merle he saw the blond boy of ten he used to go swimming with. And to all of them, the balding man in the short sleeves with the little potbelly was still the boy who scored the winning touchdown that won the county championship. There wasn’t a secret among them. They knew one another’s families as well as they knew one another. Their wives, now plump gray matrons in comfortable shoes, they still saw as the pretty dimpled girls of eight or twelve that they had once had crushes on. Since they’d all grown up together, they’d never had to wonder who they were; it was clearly reflected in one another’s eyes. They never questioned friendship; it was just there, like it had been when they were