The Present—Striking Elvira
The square jewel, encased in white gold, strangely glittered in three different pastel colors: pale pink, lime green, and aqua blue.
“What is it?” Augusta whispered.
“It’s a tricolor tourmaline,” Elvira said, clutching the stone. “So don’t go thinking that it’s worth a fortune, because it’s not. It’s just very pretty. That’s all.”
“Are you going to keep it, Grandma?”
“It’s mine.”
Augusta shook her head doubtfully, and her grandmother caught it right away.
“Listen, honey child, it’s not as if anyone even knows about this stone. It was buried in this jacket.”
“How do you think it got there?”
“That’s not important. Father O’Toole said I can have something, and I’m taking the jacket. If the jacket happens to have a brooch in it, so what? I’m entitled. For nearly forty years, I have cooked and I have cleaned and I have scrubbed floors for the priests. I’ve kept the rectory immaculate and the church sparkling, and now I don’t have a job, do I? They say this church is dangerous. Flapdoodle! Just because a few bricks have loosened and now and then plaster falls and wakes someone napping during one of Father Preston’s rather dry sermons....” Elvira sighed. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Augusta wasn’t about to say that her grandmother was seventy-seven and she probably shouldn’t have had a job for the past ten years anyway.
“Does anyone care about my retirement? Of course not. I’m not getting a penny, am I? Not like Gertrude Googlemeyer. When she retired from the laundry, they gave her a farewell party and a cake in the shape of a dryer.”
“Grandma, Gertrude Googlemeyer has been dead for ten years.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Elvira snarled. “That’s not the point! Come on now, we’re finished here.” She gave Augusta a slight shove.
Augusta wanted to ask her grandmother if she should leave the trunk open like that and what about the light she left on and the mess she had created? But Elvira was already huffing and puffing up the stairs.
Quickly Augusta threw the tablecloths and the vestments and the rosary beads and the holy pictures back in the truck and slammed it shut. There was no need for anyone to know that her grandmother was a thief.
Well, maybe she wasn’t a thief. Maybe all those coats she took from the senior center were just mistakes. And maybe now and then she did live in the past, but really was that so unusual? For her grandmother the past had become her future.
And who would miss the stone anyway?
“Come along, honey child,” Elvira called to her granddaughter in the same high-pitched voice she often used to call her cat, Cinnamon. “We’ll go home now and have a nice cup of tea. Would you like a little scone and strawberry jam? Oh, I forgot you don’t like scones.”
See it’s okay, Augusta thought. She’s not forgetting everything.
The moment Augusta threw open the heavy wooden doors of the church, it seemed to her that Elvira’s step was a little lighter. She chatted cheerfully about which television programs she was going to watch that night.
And while Elvira was babbling away, she never noticed the navy blue car that had turned a sharp corner and was now hurling toward her.
Augusta saw the driver, a haggard-looking young woman, who seemed horrified and powerless as her SUV came crashing toward Elvira.
Elvira flew several feet in the air and, then with a huge clatter, and with the sound of breaking bones, landed smack at Lindsay’s feet. Lindsay had just exited the I Scream for Ice Cream Shop and was sucking on an ice cream cone. So astonished was she by this sudden turn of events that she dropped her cone and shrieked as though she were the one who had been hit.
“Grandma!” Augusta cried as she leaned over Elvira. She watched, terrified, as her grandmother lay still and silent on the pavement, her scapular wound round and round around her neck, almost choking her. “She’s dead!” she screamed. There was no way her grandmother could have survived the accident. Augusta couldn’t stop sobbing. She didn’t care who saw. Even Lindsay.
Someone must have called for an ambulance because suddenly Augusta heard the sirens in the distance. She wanted to pick up her grandmother and hold Elvira in her arms, but you weren’t supposed to move injured people. Anyway, Augusta was weeping so hard she could barely see through her tear-stained glasses. She did, however, see Lindsay clear enough, Lindsay, who was staring transfixed at Elvira.
Elvira’s eyes snapped open.
“Grandma!” Augusta screamed. “Are you all right?”
“I think I’m paralyzed,” Elvira whispered. “I can’t feel anything from the neck down.” And then Elvira did the most extraordinary thing: she swiveled her face around. Augusta spotted the driver of the car. The woman was in the middle of the street, wailing hysterically that it wasn’t her fault, that the old woman had practically stepped in front of her car, almost on purpose.
“What are you doing here?” Elvira had seen Lindsay, and she asked the question in a nasty tone.
“I–I….” Lindsay blustered. Maybe when Jordan wasn’t around, she didn’t speak.
Elvira sprang up, and the stunned crowd that had formed around her released a unified gasp. “I think you pushed me,” she accused Lindsay.
“Did you push my grandmother?” Augusta insisted in anger, first because she had been so traumatized by the accident and second because Jordan was nowhere in sight and maybe the two girls needed one another. Alone they didn’t seem quite so intimidating.
“I didn’t.”
“She didn’t.” A pimply-faced teenage boy, about the same age as Augusta and Lindsay, stepped forward, swinging his backpack and missing poor Elvira by mere inches. “I saw the whole thing. The old woman just stepped off the curb. She wasn’t paying attention.”
“That’s right!” The driver was nodding her head, the burned-orange beret shaking up and down. “She just appeared from nowhere!”
“Let me get your belongings.” A young mother, who had been wheeling a carriage with a sleeping baby, bent down. She managed to gather all that Elvira had dropped. Augusta watched as the woman jammed Elvira’s rather ratty-looking wallet with two wrinkled dollar bills sticking out, a large assortment of keys, a lipstick tube, several used tissues, a half a stick of gum, a chewed up pencil, and a bright red postcard announcing a Labor Day sale at J.C. Penney into Elvira’s well-worn tote bag.
“Thank you.” Elvira leaped up.
“Is this yours?” the woman asked as she held the brightly colored jacket by the collar, as though it were a dead chicken.
“It’s mine.” Her grandmother snatched it away.
Augusta noticed that, in spite of the horrid accident, Elvira was still clutching her tote bag to her chest and somehow had managed not to let it go. When she did release it, to cram in the rest of the jacket, the pretty tricolor stone rolled on the sidewalk, headed for the sewer.
Everyone, mesmerized, gawked at it, and finally Miss Finkle, a teacher at Infant of Prague, quickly scooped it up and handed it to Elvira, who rammed the brooch back into her tote bag.
“The ambulance is on its way,” a man carrying a plastic bag full of starched shirts said. “In the meantime, just try to keep calm, ma’am.”
Natasha Durkee from the Butternut Bakery stood beside Miss Finkle, as both ladies shook their heads in sympathy and shock.
“Just relax, Elvira,” she said gently. “You’re going to be just fine.”
“I wish everyone would stop telling me that,” Elvira said irritably. “I am perfectly calm.” And it was true. Augusta had never seen her grandmother quite so relaxed. Had the accident done something to her head? Had it turned her into a completely different person?
An ambulance pulled up, and two men heaved Elvira onto a stretcher.
“She’s my grandmother,” Augusta said to the attendant. “Can I go with her?”
“No.” He slammed the double doors and headed for the driver’s seat.
“But she’s my grandmother,” Augusta protested.
“We’re taking her to the Nightingale Hospital two streets away. A big girl like you surely will be able to walk there. Right?”
He didn’t give Augusta a chance to answer. With a jerky crawl, the ambulance advanced down the street.
“I can give you a ride in the bakery truck,” Mrs. Durkee offered.
Augusta shook her head. She wasn’t in the mood for small talk, although she would love to have one of Mrs. Durkee’s black and white cookies right now.
Instead she hurried to the hospital.