Can't Wait to Get to Heaven (34 page)

As Elner’s husband, Will, always used to say, “Think what you want, but some days luck is just on your side.” Being so far out in the country, nobody heard the shot out at the Franks farm, except a few men shooting quail in a field about two miles away, and they figured it was just other hunters. Nor did anyone ever ask about the hired hand, whose fatal mistake had been trying to drag Polly to the bedroom. Polly may have been retarded, but that day all she knew was that her mother had told her not to leave the kitchen under any circumstances, and she hadn’t. No matter how hard that man had tried to drag her out, she was not going. It had been sheer plain old good luck that in the struggle in the pantry the gun had landed next to her. Poor Polly didn’t know the difference between a Roy Rogers cap pistol and a real gun, and pulled the trigger. Another piece of good luck: she had shot somebody who was not well liked, or even missed, for that matter.

The night of the shooting, after she’d helped Louise clean up the mess, Elner had taken the gun home and had hidden it in the henhouse. She figured if someone ever did find the body, she would call the police and confess that she had done it and show them the murder weapon. She didn’t want to go to jail, but if it would keep poor little Polly at home with her mother, she’d do it. Now that she was a widow, all she had was a cat, and she figured Sonny could do without her a lot easier than Polly could do without her mother. A few years later, when Elner sold the farm, she stuck the gun in her purse and brought it to town with her, just in case.

The Repercussions

E
lner Shimfissle had been told that everything that happened, happened for a reason. Of course she couldn’t have known it at the time, but the repercussions of her having fallen out of the fig tree turned out to be many and varied.

A few years later, Polly Franks died of heart failure. After her daughter passed away, Louise Franks sold their ten-acre farm to a developer for a small fortune. Norma handled the sale. Louise sold it all, except for one small half acre of land way out in the back of the property. Norma thought it was odd, since she was not going to live there, but Louise explained, “Norma, I have an old beloved pet buried out there, and I just don’t want that land developed.” Louise moved into town and used the money she made on her property to build and staff a school for the developmentally handicapped, and named it The Elner Shimfissle Center.

After his encounter with Elner, Dr. Bob Henson changed his mind about people and became much happier in his work.

And as fate would have it, a year later the slip-and-sue ambulance-chasing lawyer, Gus Shimmer, fell over in court with a major heart attack. He had to be rushed to Caraway Hospital, and it was Dr. Bob Henson who worked on him for over three hours, literally saving his life. The same Dr. Henson he would have sued if Norma had let him.

However, when Franklin Pixton found out that Dr. Henson had saved Gus Shimmer’s life, right in the middle of a lawsuit against his hospital, he was not happy. “Where is malpractice when you really need it?” he mused. But he needn’t have worried about Gus Shimmer. After Dr. Henson saved his life, Gus made a vow to God never to sue another hospital or doctor again. Not only was Gus a changed man, his informant at Caraway Hospital was gone for good as well.

The male nurse who had been Gus’s informant, the same one who had caused Ruby’s friend Boots Carroll to be demoted, had finally called the wrong woman “bitch.” Mrs. Betty Stevens, a very wealthy and generous widow—her husband had invented Johnny Cat, one of the best kitty litters—was in for gallbladder surgery and overheard the male nurse referring to her as “that old rich bitch” behind her back. Considering she had given millions to the hospital fund and was a close friend of Mrs. Franklin Pixton’s, the nurse was fired on the spot, and Boots was back in her old job as head supervisor. It was not that Mrs. Betty Stevens objected to being called rich or a bitch. It was the “old” part she’d objected to. After all, she was still a good-looking woman of sixty-four.

From the day the lawyer Winston Sprague found the shoe on the roof, he was never quite the arrogant know-it-all, some said “snotty young man on the rise,” again. He had gone from thinking he was smarter than everyone else in the world, to someone who was now not quite so sure. To some this may have been a bad thing, however, in Winston’s case it proved to be the best thing that ever happened to him. The girl he had been in love with for so many years, the one who had assured him she wanted to get married, just not to him, happened to see him out in a crowd of friends, and noticed that there was something different about him. He sat alone and had a faraway look in his eye. When she walked over to speak to him, and asked how he was, he told her he had just quit his job, and was headed for a two-week stay at an ashram in Colorado.

“An ashram? Hmm,” she thought. “That’s interesting. This guy may not be such a jerk after all.” So instead of leaving, she sat down.

Six months later, after the girl had agreed to marry him, she said, “Winston, I don’t know what happened to you, it’s almost like you’re not the same person anymore.” And she meant that as a compliment.

Winston did not tell her about finding the shoe, the event that had changed him, but a few days later, after his yoga class, he drove across town to the trophy shop and walked in with a brown paper bag under his arm and said to the man behind the counter, “I’d like to have something bronzed, do you bronze shoes?”

“Yes,” the man said. “We do baby shoes.”

Winston opened the bag, pulled out the golf shoe, and put it on the counter. “Can you do this?”

The man looked at it. “This? You want this bronzed? Just one shoe?”

“That’s right, can you do it?”

“Well, I guess so, do you want a plaque on it or anything?”

Winston thought for a moment. “Yes. Just put ‘The Shoe on the Roof.’”

“The shoe on the roof?”

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “It’s sort of an inside joke.”

But Winston’s was not the only romance that resulted in marriage. On June 22 at the Unity Church in Elmwood Springs, Reverend Susie Hill pronounced Dr. Brian Lang and Linda Warren man and wife. And although Verbena Wheeler swore she would
never
set foot in one of those “new age do-it-yourself” churches, she did.

But best of all, Linda Warren’s corporate community project, Adopt a Cat Month, had been so successful that the idea had spread to other corporations, and thousands of cats all across the country were being taken home every day, and they didn’t even know it was all because Elner Shimfissle fell out of her fig tree one April morning.

Another Easter

8:28
AM

A
s for Norma, her attention to detail served her well, and soon Cortwright Realty became Cortwright-Warren Realty and she was very happy about that. But as far as the other part of her life, sadly she never did receive a sign, a wonder, or a miracle, and she had pretty much given up even looking for one, until another Easter four years later.

Norma was out at the cemetery leaving the lilies on her parents’ graves like she always did, trying not to let the plastic flowers that were now on almost every grave make her insane. But as she was leaving, she happened to walk by the old Smith plot on the south side of the cemetery where Neighbor Dorothy was buried, and for some unknown reason she stopped and read the two names on the large tombstone in the middle and was stunned when she saw what was written.

DOROTHY ANNE SMITH

Beloved Mother

1894–1976

ROBERT RAYMOND SMITH

Beloved Father

1892–1977

Norma’s mouth flew open.
Raymond?
She never knew Neighbor Dorothy’s husband was named
Raymond
! Suddenly that tiny little flicker of hope that had almost burned out started up again, and she smiled and stood there looking up at the blue sky. And it was such a pretty day too.

The following Sunday, also for some unknown reason, Macky got up and said to Norma, “I think I’ll go to church with you today and see what it’s all about.” Norma didn’t know what had brought this on, but she was so glad he picked that day to go, because the text of Susie’s sermon that Sunday was:

There Lives More Faith in Honest Doubt, Believe Me, Than Half the Creeds.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

And everyone said it was the best one she had ever given.