Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

Falling in Love Again

5:48 PM

Aunt Elner’s near-death experience had a profound and unexpected effect on Macky. Almost losing one person you love shines a bright spotlight on life, and suddenly strips you of everything but your real feelings. And after the close call with Aunt Elner, for the first time, Macky saw the true facts as clearly as if a fog had suddenly been lifted. He realized that what he had felt for Lois had never been real love. Not the deep-down-in-your-bones-and-marrow love he had for Norma. Lois had been an infatuation, an ego boost, a last grab at youth fantasy. Over the years Norma had become so much a part of him that he had almost forgotten that she was his whole life. What the hell had he been thinking, for one second to even seriously entertain the idea of going off with a stranger? He had come so dangerously close to wrecking his life. Some great act of fortune or luck or something had saved him. That afternoon Norma walked in the door, exactly as she had a thousand times, but this time he really saw her and she was as beautiful to him as she had been at eighteen.

“What are you looking at, Macky?” she said as she put the mail down on the hall table. “Are you sick?”

“No,” he said. “Have I told you lately that I adore you?”

She put her purse down. “What?”

“Did you know that you are more beautiful than you ever were?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

Norma looked at herself in the mirror. “Me? How could you think that, with my gray roots and wrinkles and old tired saggy body, and now these red things on my nose? I’ve just fallen into a heap.”

“Maybe so, but you’re my heap, and you don’t look old to me.”

Norma said, “Well, don’t ever get your glasses changed, because you are obviously losing your eyesight, because I look just like the wreck of the hespers.”

He laughed. “What are hespers?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what I look like.”

“Well, you look like a million bucks to me, and I just want you to know that you are and always will be the only girl for me.”

She walked over and put her hand to his forehead. “Macky, you’re not sick are you? Is something wrong and you’re not telling me?”

“No.”

“Have you been to Dr. Halling behind my back?”

“No, I’ve never felt better in my life. How about we pretend it’s Sunday?”

“Sunday? Why…” Then it dawned on her what he meant. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Macky, it’s only Tuesday.” And she looked back at him. “Do you really think I still look OK, or was that just a come-on?”

“Norma, of all the women in the world, to me you are the best-looking. And I can see fine, just like Aunt Elner says…all the way to the moon.”

Norma sat and stared at him for a moment, then said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think I just heard church bells…. Did you?”

“What?” Then it dawned on him what she meant. “Oh, yeah. I hear them.”

“Let me go and have my bath. Can you hold that thought for thirty minutes?”

“Barely, but I will.”

As he sat waiting, he thought, “Marriage. Isn’t it great? Each time you fall back in love with your wife, it gets better and better.”

As she sat in the tub, Norma was so relieved and happy. She knew Macky like the back of her hand, and she could tell by the way he looked at her that he was finally once and for all over that Lois. He thought that she hadn’t known about it, but she had.