Lilac Avenue Read Free Page B

and then fluttered again. She put her left hand on the receiver of the phone and then stopped. Whom would she call?
    Emergency services would take her straight to a hospital, and ultimately they would send her to a nursing home. If she called Knox or Trick, her nephews would call Doc Machalvie, who would skip the hospital and send her straight to a nursing home, and probably not a good one. They’d waste no time, would immediately wrest control of her finances and sell everything, take everything. She’d never sleep another night in this house.
    In the nursing home s he believed she’d be at the mercy of strangers, lower-class peasants being paid pennies per hour to change adult diapers. They’d steal anything they could get their hands on. If she fussed they’d drug her into a stupor.
    She might call Jeanette at the bookstore, or Claire at the Bee Hive. They were kind, foolish people who would be willing to help her. Unfortunately , that would only prolong the inevitable; neither of those women would take care of her long term. No one would, unless she could afford to pay.
    She thought of all the staff members she had employed over the years; every single one had left on bad terms. She had never cared; there were always more where they came from. Always so polite and solicitous when they started, but she soon taught them to cower and slink. She secretly liked the mouthy back-talkers the best. At least with them she could enjoy the frisson of antagonism and a good fight. Mamie won, of course, as the one with the most money always does. But she had a thimbleful of grudging respect for the ones who would not put up with her abuse, who left her before she could fire them.
    She turned toward her wall shelves filled wi th her books, the only things that she had been able to count upon to soothe her anxieties, to look forward to with pleasure. They were useless to her now. What would she do with her time? The television was fine when her eyes needed a rest, and she had a radio here somewhere. But what good was surviving without the escape into her book world?
    Her stomach rumbled , but she was damned if she was going to take a morsel of that charity meal Phyllis had sent. She could survive on her own for a few days if she didn’t eat much. There were still canned goods in the larder. She understood from hearing her servants talk that by using the telephone, one could order unhealthy food to be delivered for cash payment. She could sleep here in her chair and use the downstairs half bath for her toilette. She could crawl if she had to get to the lavatory.
    How long before someone even noticed she was missing?
    The house was so quiet; she could hear the steady click of the pendulum in the grandfather clock in the central hallway. It took six men to carry that clock out of the big house down by the factory, a cart with two horses to bring it up to Morning Glory Circle, and the same six men to carry it into the hallway of the new house. Her father set his pocket watch by it every morning when he wound it. Years later he had paid a man to come all the way from Germany to modernize it, so it did not need to be wound.
    She could hear the hum of the refrigerator all the way down the hall in the kitchen. When she was a child they had an ice house out back of the big house. Using his pocket knife, her brother would shave off slivers from the big blocks of ice, and then they would sit on the front porch in the summer and lick them.
    S he could hear a bird outside, singing, “Bob White.”
    ‘ Terrible pests, birds,’ she thought. ‘Probably nesting in the gutter, damaging the house.’
    Some children were playing in the park across the street; she could hear them calling, “Red rover, red rover, send Destiny over.” Destiny was a name for a heroine in a romance novel, not for what was no doubt some wild little beastie with sticky hands and a belly fat from all the candy and fluorescent-colored soda pop her parents fed her.
    Mamie