Can't Wait to Get to Heaven Read Free Page A

friend of Macky’s or she might have wound up in jail for life. She knew she had to be careful not to get another ticket: she was obeying the speed limit, but as she drove, her thoughts were racing a hundred miles a minute. The more Norma thought about the events of the past six months, the madder she got and the more she began to blame Macky for Aunt Elner’s present situation. If they had stayed in Florida instead of coming back home, this would not have happened. When Norma reached the intersection out on the interstate and had to wait for the longest red light in the history of man to change to green, her mind flashed back to that fateful day just six months ago….
             
    It had been a Tuesday afternoon and Aunt Elner had been at her bingo game over at the community center. Norma had just come home from her Weight Watchers meeting, and had been in such a good mood because she had lost another two pounds and received a happy-face sticker from the leader, when Macky had dropped the bomb. When she opened the front door, he was in the living room waiting for her, and had that funny look on his face, the one he always had when he had made up his mind about something, and sure enough, he told her to sit down; he wanted to tell her something. “Oh God, what now?” she thought, and when he told her, Norma could hardly believe her ears. After Macky had gone through what she had dubbed his “middle age crazy period, ten years too late” and they had already sold the hardware store, their house, and most of their furniture, and had all moved, including Aunt Elner and her cat, Sonny, lock, stock, and barrel, all the way down to Vero Beach, Florida, he was now sitting there telling her that he wanted to move back home again! After only two years of living in their mint green concrete-block three-bedroom citrus view patio home in “Leisure Village Central,” he now said that he had had it with Florida—with the hurricanes and the traffic and the old people who drove thirty miles an hour. She had looked at him in total disbelief. “Are you going to sit there and tell me that after we have sold practically everything we own and spent the last two years fixing this place up, now you want to move back home?”
    “Yes.”
    “When for years all I heard out of you was, ‘I can’t wait until we move to Florida.’”
    “I know that, but—”
    She cut him off again. “Before we moved, I asked you, ‘Are you sure you want to do this now?’ ‘Oh yes,’ you said. ‘Why wait, let’s go early and beat the baby boomers.’”
    “I know I did, but—”
    “Do you also recall that it was at your behest that I gave away all our winter clothes to the Goodwill? ‘Why take all those old coats and sweaters to Florida,’ you said. ‘I’ll never have to rake another leaf or shovel another sidewalk of snow, who needs heavy coats?’ you said.”
    Macky squirmed a little in his chair as she continued. “But beside the fact that we now have no home, and no winter clothes, we can’t go back.”
    “Why not?”
    “Why not? What will people think?”
    “About what?”
    “About what? They will think we are a bunch of flibbertigibbets, that’s what, moving here and there, like a caravan of gypsies.”
    “Norma, we’ve moved once in forty years. I don’t think that qualifies us as flibbertigibbets or gypsies.”
    “What will Linda think?”
    “She doesn’t care, it’s perfectly normal for people our age to want to be around familiar settings and old friends.”
    “Then, Macky, why in God’s name did we leave in the first place?”
    This was an answer he had thought about and rehearsed. “I think that it was a good learning experience,” he said.
    “A good learning experience? I see. We now have no home, no winter clothes, no furniture, but it’s been a good learning experience. Macky, if you weren’t going to be happy here, why did we come?”
    “I didn’t know I wouldn’t like it, and tell the truth,