Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

Macky Goes to See Elner

11:15 AM

When they went through the double doors, the doctor turned Macky over to a young nurse to take him the rest of the way. As Macky walked through the hospital hall down to the room where they had Aunt Elner, he felt as if someone had kicked him in the stomach. Although he had tried to keep it together for Norma, when he had first heard the news from the doctor, he had been devastated. For the past forty years, rain or shine, he had gone over and had coffee with her before he went to work. And even when they had moved to Florida, she had come with them. The truth was, she was his best friend and had helped him through many a crisis, some things that Norma knew nothing about and, hopefully, would never know about.

One thing in particular had only been between the two of them. He had not meant for it to happen. Lois Tatum, a nice-looking girl with brown hair that she wore in a ponytail, had been a waitress at the Tip-Top café downtown, across the street from the hardware store. At the time, Linda had just gotten married, and Norma had been suffering terribly from empty nest syndrome. She had volunteered for a hundred different projects just to keep herself from, as she put it, “going stark raving mad.” Norma had thrown herself into community service and had kept herself so busy with one committee meeting after another that he hardly ever saw her. So when Lois had always seemed happy to see him come in at lunchtime, and had always laughed at his jokes, Macky had been secretly flattered.

She was about fifteen years younger than he was, divorced with a little girl, and when she needed something fixed in the small duplex she rented, he had been happy to do it. He had helped out a lot of people in town; as far as he had been concerned they were just good friends. Then one afternoon she had come over to the hardware store and tearfully confessed, “Macky, I’m so in love with you, I don’t know what to do.” He had been caught completely off guard. In all the years he had been married he had never looked at another woman, never even entertained the idea. Maybe it had been the timing. After Linda had left home, although he had not talked about it, he too had felt lost, and with Norma being so busy, maybe he had been vulnerable. He didn’t know the reason, but after Lois left, and he thought about it, he realized that he was attracted to her as well. Not that he ever did anything other than think about it. But he did think about it night and day until it had become an obsession, and the more he thought about it, the fantasy of being young again, running away somewhere with Lois, starting all over, began to appeal to him, until he could not get the idea out of his mind.

He didn’t know if he was really in love with Lois, or just flattered, or whether he should take a chance or not. Elner had noticed that something was wrong and had asked. Elner had always been a good sounding board, and had talked him through a lot of problems before, but this was different. Norma was her niece, and he felt very conflicted about discussing something like this with her, but Aunt Elner knew him like a book, and there was no way he could hide it from her, and so finally he broke down and told her what was bothering him, admitted that he had been seriously considering asking Norma for a divorce. After he finished telling her everything, she had thought for a moment and then said, “Macky, this is very hard for me, you know I love both you and Norma like my own children and it would break my heart, but I want you both to be happy. I can’t tell you what to do, honey, all I can do is hope before you make any decisions, that you will really take the time to think on down the line, because once you leave, if for some reason it shouldn’t work out with this girl, you can never go back to what you had before. I’m not saying Norma wouldn’t take you back, she might, but once you’ve done something like this, you chip away a good part of the trust, and when that’s gone, you can never get it back.”

She had not said not to go, or asked him to stay, but Macky went home that night, and had thought about it some more. Something she had said made him realize that as much as he was tempted, as much as he wondered what it would be like to start over, he was not willing to throw away all the years he and Norma had had together, upset Linda, and maybe risk ruining all of their lives. Lois’s as well. When he told Elner of his decision, she had smiled and said, “I’m awful glad, Macky, I don’t know what I would do without my buddy coming to see me every day,” and they had never spoken of it again.

Norma had not known it at the time, but that was the reason he had sold the hardware store and had moved them all to Florida, to get away from Lois, not that he had stopped thinking about her, he hadn’t. Even after she married someone else and had moved to another state, he still wondered about her, had a sad deep pain when he remembered her face, or a woman passed by wearing the same perfume, but as the song says, “Time Heals Everything.” And time and distance had faded her memory to a point that when he did think of her, the old longings were not as painful and he hardly ever thought of her anymore.

Aunt Elner had not only saved his marriage, strangely enough, she had also been the one responsible for him and Norma getting married in the first place. They had only been eighteen and terribly in love, but Norma’s mother, Ida, a holy terror, had declared that if Norma married Macky, it would have to be over her dead body. She had much higher aspirations for her only daughter than to marry a mere hardware store owner’s son. Norma had been a week away from being sent off to college, when after a phone call from her older sister Elner, Ida had suddenly relented and consented to their marriage. They never did find out what Elner had said to Ida to get her to change her mind, but whatever it was, he couldn’t begin to imagine what his life would have been without Norma or Linda and now his granddaughter, Apple. He also knew how hard life was going to be without Aunt Elner. He already missed her and knew his world was never going to be quite the same without her.

The young nurse the doctor had turned him over to led him down to the room at the end of the hall and quietly opened the door. When she turned on the light, he looked over and saw Aunt Elner lying there, still wearing the old brown robe Norma hated so. He walked over, sat in the chair beside her, and reached over and took her hand. Someone had smoothed her white hair back off her face, and she looked so peaceful, as if she had just fallen asleep.

The nurse said softly, “Stay as long as you like, Mr. Warren, I’ll be right down the hall if you need me.”

After she left, and he heard the door close, he put his head down on the side of the bed, still holding her hand, and sobbed like a baby. He looked over at her and wondered where she had gone. Where had that sweet woman gone?