Free Can't Wait to Get to Heaven by Fannie Flagg Page A

put on weight when she got older.”
    Elner looked around at the white marble hall and said, “Ida, I’m not clear about what’s going on. If you’re not dead, why didn’t you just come on back home?”
    “Oh, I am dead. This is my home now,” she said, fingering her pearls.
    “Where is this anyway?” asked Elner, looking around again. “And what am I doing here? I’m supposed to be in the hospital, you’ve got me all confused.”
    Ida looked at her, with that maddening little know-it-all look of hers. “Well, Elner, if I’m dead, and you can see me, what do you suppose that must mean?”
    Now Elner was starting to get upset. “How should I know, Ida? I just fell off a ladder, I’m so addlebrained at this point, I thought I just saw Ginger Rogers go by…and now you’re telling me that you’re dead, when I can see you plain as day. I must have knocked my brain out of whack because none of this is making any sense to me.”
    “Think, Elner,” Ida said. “Me? Ginger Rogers?”
    Elner thought for a second; then it dawned on her. Ginger Rogers had been dead for years, so had Ida; not only that, she suddenly realized that she could hear every word Ida was saying without her hearing aid! There was definitely something odd and peculiar going on. Then it hit her.
    “Wait a minute, Ida,” Elner said. “Don’t tell me I’m dead too?”
    “Bingo!”
    “I’m dead?”
    “You certainly are, my dear, just as dead as you can be.”
    “Oh no!…Am I dead and buried?”
    “No, not yet, you just died a few minutes ago.”
    “Well, for heaven’s sake. You don’t mean it?”
    “I do. In fact, you just missed seeing Ernest Koonitz, he just came in yesterday.”
    “Ernest Koonitz? The one who used to play the tuba on the Neighbor Dorothy Show ?”
    “Yes.”
    Elner felt a little light-headed. “I need to sit down a minute and think this over.” She went and sat in the red leather chair by the door.
    Ida looked concerned all of a sudden and asked, “Are you terribly upset, dear?”
    Elner looked at her and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so, I would say surprised more than anything.”
    “That’s to be expected, we are all surprised. You know it’s going to happen but somehow you just don’t believe it’s going to happen to you.”
    “Oh, I never doubted it would happen,” Elner said. “I just wish that I’d had a little more warning. I just hope I turned off my stove and coffeepot.”
    “Yes…well, we all have our regrets, don’t we?” Ida said pointedly.
    In a moment, after gaining her composure and coming to terms with what must be true, Elner looked at her sister. “Oh, poor Norma, first you and now me.”
    Ida nodded. “Into each life a little rain must fall, as they say.”
    “Yes, I guess so, but I hope it won’t hit her too hard, and I am pretty old, so I guess it could not have been too unexpected, could it?”
    “No…not like it was when I died, I was just fifty-nine. Now that was entirely unexpected, I was still in very good shape, if I do say so myself.”
    Elner sighed. “Now that I’m dead and gone, I just hope Sonny will be all right, Macky said he would take care of him if anything ever happened to me but I don’t think cats miss you much anyway, as long as they get fed.” Elner looked down at her hands and said, “You know, Ida, it’s a funny thing, but I just don’t feel a bit dead, do you?”
    “No, not like I thought I would feel. One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead, not much difference. It’s a lot less painful than childbirth, I can tell you that.”
    “No, no pain at all. As a matter of fact I feel better than I have for years, my right knee had been giving me some trouble but I didn’t tell Norma, or else she would have jerked me in for a knee replacement, but it feels just fine now,” she said, lifting it up and down. “So what’s going to happen next? Am I going to see everybody else?”
    “I don’t know all the details, I was