The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [93]
It had already been harder than she’d expected to drive any real wedge between Suzi and those hapless goats she called parents. The church thing, she’d thought, would do it, but she’d underestimated the mother’s ability to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth. What a strange expression that was. Was she, Marylou, the gift horse? She imagined herself with a horse head and Caroline peering into her mouth. One chomp would do it.
And she’d also underestimated the father’s determination to focus on anything but his job and that nasty, slatternly coworker of his. Gee-gee.
She’d hoped that Suzi would embrace fundamentalist Christianity and become a zealot, but she was wrong there, too. She’d underestimated Suzi’s ability to fold religion smoothly into her already well-rounded life like eggs into a batter.
It had also been hard to derail Suzi because she, Marylou, had so much to do! She was living in a new city; and living, period, took work. When she’d first moved to Tallahassee—ah, those halcyon days!—she had only her hatred of Wilson Spriggs to focus on. She knew nobody, had no place to go except the grocery store; and, on her first few visits to Publix, she’d looked around and decided that every old man she saw pushing a cart must be Wilson Spriggs. She was in the town where he lived, and it seemed like everyone she saw must be connected to him in some way, like they were all in some unfolding drama starring the Radioactive Lady and the American Nazi.
But now the people and places she saw in Tallahassee had taken up their proper roles again. They were simply themselves, and she was forced to acknowledge them. She had to chat with the checkout girls at Publix and the woman at the hair salon (recommended by Paula Coffey) who cut her hair, and her coworkers at Florida Testing and Assessment who liked to discuss American Idol and CSI while eating their bag lunches. She had to find new doctors. Keep up with her prescriptions. Locate a reliable lawn service and discuss the state of her yard with the workers. (She actually hated yard work, and she’d put all the fake flowers around as a joke—she’d found them on sale one day at Walmart—but it was like the emperor’s new clothes. Everybody acted like they were real, so Marylou didn’t bother to explain.)
But mostly what took up her time was church. Even though it wasn’t a Baptist Church, and it was the kind of church she’d always turned her nose up at, she found she actually enjoyed going. It was her own fault, allowing Buff and Paula to pull her into their lair, but not having many other obligations she could use as excuses, it was hard to say no. So she was now going not just Sundays and Wednesday nights, but she’d joined a women’s Bible study group, which met for breakfast on Thursday mornings, and a prayer group, which met for lunch on Fridays. And her Sunday school class, the Wouldbegoods, was always doing community projects. They’d talked her into helping with the food pantry and the clothing drive, and it all took time! Marylou was busier now than she’d been in Memphis. “Busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,” Teddy used to say.
Six months after Helen died, Teddy’d left Memphis and gone away, up to Wisconsin, where his sister lived, just for a visit, he’d said, but then he kept extending his stay. Finally he told her he’d gotten a job with the City of Madison Parks and Recreation Department and eventually asked her for a divorce. A few years later he remarried and had three boys who were now grown. She knew this because for years they’d exchanged cards at Christmas and the occasional letter, until one letter from Teddy, coming right after what would’ve been Helen’s twenty-first