Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

Making Arrangements with Neva

11:38 AM

When Tot Whooten got back home from Elner’s house, she picked up the phone and called the Rest Assured Funeral Home, and her friend Neva picked up.

“Neva? I just wanted to alert you that you’re going to get a call from Norma Warren, probably later on today, we just got the word a little while ago, Elner Shimfissle just died at the hospital.”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“Stung to death by wasps.”

“Oh no…poor old thing.”

“Yes, she hit a nest in her tree and fell clear off the ladder. She was out cold by the time Ruby and I went over. The nurse at the hospital said she never regained consciousness, probably didn’t know what hit her.”

“Oh no,” said Neva again. “But I guess if you have to go, that’s the best way…fast.”

“I suppose so…if you have to go.”

“Yes, well, thanks for the heads-up, Tot. I’ll go ahead and get her file out, but as I recall I think it’s pretty much ready to go, Norma did everything in advance.”

“I’m sure she did, you have to admire her for that, she’s always ahead of the game. I guess with everybody dropping like flies, I better get my own file in order. God knows what will happen to me if I leave my funeral details up to Darlene and Dwayne Junior.”

After she hung up, Tot thought about just how much she was going to miss her neighbor. Elner had always seemed happy, always in a good mood, but she had never had children. Tot’s children had been nothing but trouble from the beginning, even more so after they hit puberty. If there was a fool within fifty miles, they had either married it or had numerous offspring with it. Tot had begged her children to please stop breeding. “There’s a serious genetic flaw on the Whooten side, not one of them has a lick of sense. Just because I married beneath my station is no reason you have to,” she had said to her children on many occasions, but her warning had done no good. Darlene, at thirty-two, had five children and more ex-husbands than Elizabeth Taylor, and not a cent of alimony from a one of them. And God knows how many children Dwayne Jr. had roaming around out there. Six that she knew of, and with the women he had picked, it was no telling how those kids would turn out. Whenever he had said of his girlfriends “We think alike, Mama,” she knew she was in big trouble. Her hopes of one of her kids bettering themselves by meeting someone a step above had been dashed time and time again. And now, her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Faye Dawn, was already pregnant by some fifteen-year-old who wore a dog chain around his neck, black fingernail polish, a nose ring, and had no chin. “Why do birds of a feather have to flock together?” she wondered. “Water seeks its own level” was not a good thing in their case. She was already attending a bipolar prayer group, and Al-Anon meetings twice a week. “What next?” she wondered. What fresh hell was in store for her down the line?

Last year when Dwayne Jr. had asked her what he could get her for Christmas, she had requested “a vasectomy” and told him that she would even pay for it, but he had taken the money and bought himself an off-road vehicle instead. He was a lost cause. She was now working on Darlene to have her tubes tied, but that was going nowhere, because she said she was scared of anesthesia. When Linda Warren had adopted that little Chinese girl, Norma had come into the beauty shop wearing a sweatshirt with the girl’s picture on it, and under the picture it said “Someone Wonderful Calls Me Grandma.” Tot figured she would wind up wearing one that said “A Lot of Potential Criminals and Misfits Call Me Grandma,” and she was supporting almost every one of them. Tot got in her bed and pulled the covers over her head and cried about Elner, and herself as well, while she was at it.