In Front of God and Everybody (30 page)

You want to know something? Ole Isabel was a lot better looking after she'd gained a few pounds. And she tolerated Temple and Forest because both of them looked and smelled like they'd had a recent bath. Maybe one day she'd like them because they were nice people.

Old man Rance wasn't there, of course, because he sat in jail. It seems he not only had a wife in Texas, but one living in Colorado and another in North Carolina.

“Goodness gracious,” Grandma had said when she received that news. “With all them women, what'd he want another one for?”

“Well, since the others all had significant property, I figure he was after this farm,” Daddy said.

She snorted at that. “Reckon if I'd told him I had signed it over to you a long time ago, none of this nonsense woulda happened.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but now he won't be fooling any more nice old ladies.”

She had given me a fat kiss. “And for that, we are all eternally grateful.”

For myself, I was eternally grateful that the old goofball wasn't at the table having homemade ice cream with us that evening. I sure wouldn't miss that smell of too much Old Spice for the rest of my life.

“April Grace,” Isabel said, as I scooped out more ice cream into my bowl.

“Ma'am?”

“I just want to thank you again for your suggestion. For teaching dance at the school. I believe teaching theater and dance is my true calling.”

“Well, the younger kids might run you crazy,” I said, “but the high schoolers like my sister will enjoy it.”

“My lambkins has been a different person, you know,” Ian said, smiling at his missus. “She has a new lease on life.”

“It just came to me when I remembered the school planned to add those classes to the curriculum,” I said. “You have your degree, so it just seems logical that you'd be the one to teach them since you're a dancer and know about acting.”

“Way better than Coach Frizell,” Myra Sue put in.

“Way, way better,” I agreed.

“Just because he's athletic does
not
mean he can dance,” my sister said.

“Amen!” I added.

Coach Frizell was as mean as you expect a football coach to be. Could you see him doing a pirouette or a
petit battement
?

Now that it was autumn, work had begun on the St. Jameses' house. Daddy said that by the end of October, the St. Jameses' house ought to be finished, and they'll have something nice to move into. I think I'm gonna miss them some.

But today, I was happy as a pig in mud. I sat down and shoved a spoonful of ice cream in my mouth. Once it had slid its sweet, cold way down my guzzle and settled satisfactorily in my stomach, I grinned, looking around.

Mama and Daddy exchanged tiny bites from each other's spoons. Good grief. Well, but what do you expect from them?

Temple and Ian and Forest were deep in discussion about the rain forests.

Grandma was all dolled up because she had a date. And don't get all excited. She learned her lesson about who to get serious about and who to avoid. She said she refused to dry up on the vine, whatever that means. She and Ernie Beason from Ernie's Grocerteria were going to the movies that night. They planned to see
Karate Kid II
, which wasn't exactly the latest movie, but in Cedar Ridge, if it's been out less than two years, it's new.

I reckon Grandma didn't look so bad with her hair short and colored, and I have to admit I was getting used to her makeup. She took exercise lessons from Isabel too. She looked pretty good, if you ask me, even though she sort of looked like a dolled up version of Angela Lansbury from
Murder, She Wrote
.

Isabel drizzled a little more chocolate sauce on Myra Sue's ice cream, then added more to hers. She added a dollop of whipped topping on them both and sprinkled a few chopped pecans. Right about then she looked up and met my eyes. She gave me a wink and a smile.

You know what? When Isabel smiles, her whole face lights up.

Growing up in the Ozarks hills, I've had ample opportunity to know people from all walks of life. From the down-home country folks like Grandma in this story to less-than-kind, out-of-town newcomers like Ian and Isabel St. James. I count it a blessing from God that I've had the opportunity to know so many diverse people. They have helped lay the groundwork for building multilayered characters.

Special thanks to my wonderful agent, Jeanie Pantelakis, who saw the potential in April Grace Reilly and cheered me on when discouragement tried to set in. Heartfelt gratitude goes to editor MacKenzie Howard, who “got it” when she read this story. Editor Kristin Ostby exhibited admirable patience and understanding as we polished the final product together. I suspect she's a city girl who was somewhat bumfuzzled by the antics of the country-fried April Grace but loved that little redheaded spitfire anyway. Without people like these hardworking professionals to encourage and guide us, where would we writers be?

Isabel St. James is a recovering hypochondriac.

She once thought she had hoof and mouth disease just because she skittered through the barnyard while the cows were there waiting to be milked. Another time she swore up and down and sideways that the air in the Ozarks was full of poison and begged her husband to take her back to the city for the sake of her lungs. She was puffing on a cigarette as hard as a freight-train when she said it, too. Boy, oh boy.

On Tuesday afternoon, the first week of September, right after the first day of school, I walked with my Mama and my older sister Myra Sue along the shiny gray floors of the hospital corridor. I seriously doubted anything in ole Isabel's experience to this point had prepared her for the actual pain of a concussion, a broken nose, a broken arm, four cracked ribs, two black eyes and a purple knot on her forehead the size and color of an Easter egg. This is what her husband Ian reported to Mama this morning, after Isabel's accident. I figured Isabel probably had a good case of the whiplash as well, but I'm no doctor.

Now for a girl of my age (which is eleven) and education (I am in the sixth grade at Cedar Ridge Junior High), I've always been pretty good around blood and scrapes and runny noses. I'm no sissy like Myra Sue who is fourteen and in high school. But that day was my first experience in the hospital. I have to tell you, I felt downright woozy. Even Mama looked queasy. Maybe it was because of all the busyness and the noise: phones ringing and people talking and nurses scurrying up and down the hallway with clipboards. I guess it made us both want to lose our lunches, but if Mama could buck up and face it down, so could I. We redheads are pretty tough.

Those nurses didn't bother to make eye contact with anyone. I wondered if they ever looked at the people they took care of, or if all they did was scribble on those clipboards and read what other people wrote.

In one room we passed, the door stood wide open and a blonde-haired lady was barfing right over the edge of her bed and onto the floor. And in the hallway, a gray-faced old man was lying on a hospital bed right out in the open so everyone had to step around him. He kept raising one thin white hand every time a nurse passed. None of them bothered to say to him “good morning” or “excuse me” or, “Are you having a heart attack?”

I smiled at him, hoping to make him feel less invisible, but he just looked at me as if he was on his way out of this world. He'd probably be dead a week and half before anyone from that hospital noticed.

I looked around and saw a chubby nurse with short frizzy brown hair and great big pink-framed glasses. She was just standing there staring at nothing on the wall.

I walked right up to her and said, “That old man over there needs some help. I think he's dying.”

She looked at me over the top of those glasses.

“I hardly think you qualify as an expert.”

“But—”

“Children have no business on this floor.” She moved away from me, and her pale blue-green scrub pants made
shish-shish
noises as she walked toward the desk where two nurses were sipping coffee. “Charlene, I keep telling them that kids don't need to be up here; they're always underfoot. Has the office changed the minimum age?”

Well, as I said, I'm just a little bit under the age of twelve, which is the minimum age to be a visitor on the floor, so I hurried to catch up with Mama and my sister before I could be thrown out for trying to save that old man's life.

I felt downright sorry for ole Isabel if she needed anything because I don't believe anyone in those aqua outfits had time or interest enough to actually take care of the sick and injured.

Right then I promised myself to never, in a million years, go to the hospital in Blue Reed, Arkansas unless I was in a big hurry to be ushered out of this world and in to the next.

“There's Isabel's room,” Mama said as quietly as if we were in church. “Room 316.”

“I hope she isn't asleep,” Myra Sue whispered, her eyes big and scared. She dearly loved and adored Isabel St. James.

Somebody, somewhere, dropped something loud and metallic and it clattered a good ten seconds before it finally collapsed.

“How could she sleep in all this racket?” I asked in a perfectly reasonable volume given all that was going on around us.

“Shh,” Mama cautioned. “We're in the hospital.”

“Yes, you dork,” Myra Sue added. “Speak appropriately.”

I hardly saw the point, especially when about ten feet behind us that frizzy-haired nurse yelled for Kelly, who hollered back at her from the far end of the corridor. Apparently Nurse Frizzy had wanted Diet Dr. Pepper,
not
Diet Coke, and in case you're wondering, the vending machine on the third floor of that hospital has never,
ever
sold Fanta Orange, and probably never will. Kelly said so. In fact, she yelled it right down that big shiny hall so all of us could hear.

Mama tapped on the door which, unlike most of the doors we'd passed, was half-closed.

“Entrez-vous
,” came the unmistakably miserable and somewhat nasally voice of Isabel St. James.

With her shiny blond curls flying, Myra Sue left us in the dust as she rushed into the room.

“Isabel!” she shrieked in the most un-hospital-appropriate and unladylike manner you can imagine.

“Dearest girl!” Isabel did not shriek, but her whimper was not exactly genteel, either.

Isabel looked like she'd been beaten with an ugly stick. She lay black and blue and purple against the white pillow and sheets. Both eyes were black. Her nose was all bandaged and her lips were twice their normal size. Her left arm was in a sling, and I don't think she or any of the busy nurses had bothered to comb her short, dark hair since her car wreck and it stood out all over her head. I have to say, I've seen ole Isabel St. James look much better, and that's saying something, because believe me, even on her very best day, she's no prize in the looks department.

For a minute, you would have thought Myra Sue was going to jump right up on the bed with Isabel, but she stopped herself and tenderly hugged the woman. Isabel attempted to kiss her cheek with those big, ole swole-up lips, then looked past her at Mama and me. She reached out her bruised right hand.

“Lily! April!” she said with a little more spirit than you might have thought. “Oh, it's so good to see you both. I thought I might never see another living soul.”

We hugged her as gently as possible. She moaned but she didn't scream, for which I was grateful. Isabel can put on the dog pretty good when it comes to High Drama, and that's the honest truth.

She looked past us. “Didn't Grace come with you?”